Human rights? 1140 people were killed by Indian railway in 15 months in Chennai ONLY

The list of people run over by trains in Chennai had crossed 1140 in the last 15 months.

According to official data, more than 275 people were killed on Chennai Beach-Mount section, the highest in EMU sector, followed by 204 accidents between Pazhavanthangal and Maraimalai Nagar, falling under Tambaram Railway Police Station during the period of January 2009 and March 2010.


Source.

Superpower? 300m Indians go hungry everyday! Worse than Zimbabwe

According to the Global Hunger Index, India ranks 65th out of 88 countries, with a hunger rate of 23.9.

India, which was largely unaffected by the recent global economic slowdown, however, appears to have made little progress in tackling hunger and malnutrition. The situation remains 'alarming' in the country on this front.

Countries like Uganda (38th); Mauritania (40th); Zimbabwe (58th) and many others have a better record than India on this front. Even war-torn nations have managed to combat the scourge of hunger quite well, while India -- even though it boasts of being the second fastest growing economy in the world -- languishes far behind and millions in the country go hungry.

21 per cent of the Indian population was undernourished (between 2003 and 2005), 43.5per cent Indian children under the age of five were underweight (between 2002 and 2007) and the under five-years age infant mortality rate in 2007 was 7.2 per cent.

In September 2009, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh projected a food stock of 50 million tonne. Yet, close to 300 million Indians go without food every day!

According to the World Bank, 46 per cent of Indian children below the age of five are underweight, and the World Food Program says that close to 30 per cent of the world's hungry live in India.

According to the 2008 Global Hunger Index, which is calculated by the International Food Policy Research Institute, India has close to 350 million people who are food insecure -- in other words, who are not sure where their next meal will come from.

To put that into context, that is the same as the entire populations of Germany, France and the United Kingdom all going hungry.


Source

Man Booker Prize winner Aravind Adiga lays bare the truth of India's poverty

　　India, which for decades after independence was shackled in the Western imagination to images of grinding poverty, is suddenly seen through the equally distorting lens of Bollywood glitz and Bangalore call centres; headline-grabbing corporate takeovers and endless seminars discussing when (not if) India will become the next global superpower.

　　In the space of a decade, the poor of India - who today still account for as many as 800 million of the country's 1.1 billion population - have been virtually erased from our perception of the world's largest democracy.

　　But enter now, centre-stage, after winning the Man Booker prize, 33-year-old Aravind Adiga and his novel The White Tiger.

　　A book which, if the critics are to be believed, lays bare the troubled reality of modern India to a world that has become so entranced by the mantra of its economic ''miracle" that it has forgotten the grinding reality of life for most Indians.

　　The novel certainly affected the chairman of the judges, Michael Portillo, who said that the book about a poor, rural rickshawallah being corrupted by his move to the big city, had challenged his own assumptions about India and poverty itself.

　　"It changed my view of certain things," he said, explaining why Adiga's book had won, "like what is the real India and what is the nature of poverty."

　　Stories have always trumped statistics when it comes to getting a message across, and Adiga's novel, which his publishers reckon could sell 500,000 copies in Britain alone, has the power to encourage the world to take a more realistic view of modern India in all its corrupt complexity.

　　But while facts and figures might be dry compared with Adiga's narrative, they are also worth repeating because they reveal how India's economic success has failed to deliver enough to the country's poor.

　　Despite the much-vaunted decades of seven per cent economic growth, and the rise of a middle class, the ''dark side", (Mr Portillo's phrase) of India remains.

　　In modern, nuclear-capable India, 63 infants die per 1,000 live births. In war-torn Eritrea the figure is 45. In India, 400 out of 100,000 women die in childbirth. In Botswana, the figure is 100.

　　And despite a decade of economic expansion, a staggering 47 per cent of India's under-threes remain malnourished.

　　Only on Wednesday, an international study found that the level of hunger in the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh is comparable with that of war-ravaged Ethiopia. Punjab, the best-placed in the survey of 17 Indian states, still ranks below Gabon, Honduras and Vietnam.

　　It is this kind of poverty that forces millions of poor Indians to migrate every year to the slums of cities such as Mumbai, India's commercial and entertainment capital, where nearly half the population live in stinking, narrow-alleyed shanties.

　　It isn't just the smell of human faeces that makes the outsider dizzy, but the jarring proximity of those rich and poor worlds which, thanks to the prevalence of television and migration to the cities, are now starting to collide in India.

　　One encounter during my four years in India as The Daily Telegraph's correspondent illustrates the widening gulf.

　　I spent a day interviewing a young man and his wife, Subir and Shenaz, who made their living sorting rubbish in a Mumbai slum near the city's airport.

　　For 12, sometimes 16 hours a day, they sifted Mumbai's household waste for metal scraps - a bed spring, the aluminium collar of a light bulb, a copper solenoid from an old transistor radio - anything that might be worth a few rupees from a scrap dealer.

　　They lived in conditions in which Europeans are not allowed to keep animals. Their ''house" was a wooden box no more than 10ft square, perched on the edge of an open sewer.

　　Here they sat sifting hour after hour, Shenaz, herself running a fever in the Mumbai summer heat, nursing a sickly baby as she worked, actually and metaphorically at the bottom of India's billion-man economic dust-heap.

　　Surely village life was preferable to this, I wondered? Shenaz smiled. "Here we eat every night," she said, "and, until I fell sick, we even saved some money." She hadn't come to Mumbai for pity or charity - there was none on offer if she'd wanted it - but for opportunities that her rural village could never give her or her child.

　　Subir explained that they had hoped Mumbai was going to provide them with a better life, but that he'd spent all his money paying bribes at the local state hospital to get treatment which, legally, he should have had for free.

　　It was a story typical of the petty corruption that blights the lives of India's impoverished masses. One day, the couple said, they wanted their child to go to school and learn to read and write - something they had never been given the chance to do.

　　The couple were angry. Looming over their hovel on the gantry of a nearby flyover was the grinning face of India's playboy billionaire, Vijay Mallya, owner of the Kingfisher beer brand and often described as "India's Richard Branson".

　　From a giant billboard Mr Mallya could be seen exhorting Mumbai's upper classes to "Fly the Good Times" on his recently launched airline, itself a beacon of the new, booming India.

　　So what, I wondered, did Subir think of that poster? Did he find it an inspiring emblem of a new, prosperous India or a galling, taunting reminder of the fact that there was absolutely no chance that he'd ever be ''flying the good times" in one of the planes that came thundering over the tin roof of his shack every five minutes.

　　He didn't take long to give his answer. "I don't want to go flying in a plane," he said, "I just want enough money to eat and to buy medicine for my wife. One day I want my son to go to school. Today I cannot even afford to give her a sweet for the Eid festival. There is no honour in this life."

　　None of this is to understate the undoubted progress India has made over the past two decades, but merely to temper the notion that India is on the cusp of becoming a developed nation, where poverty will be eradicated and everyone has a mobile phone.

　　The fact is that hundreds of millions of Indians live, like Subir and Shenaz, a barely sustainable existence. Amid all the celebration of India's progress, Adiga's novel will perhaps provide a reminder to the wider world of how far India still has to come.




Source.

Nearly 80 pct of India lives on half dollar a day

Seventy-seven percent of Indians -- about 836 million people -- live on less than half a dollar a day in one of the world's hottest economies, a government report said.

The state-run National Commission for Enterprises in the Unorganised Sector (NCEUS) said most of those living on below 20 rupees (50 US cents) per day were from the informal labour sector with no job or social security, living in abject poverty.

"For most of them, conditions of work are utterly deplorable and livelihood options extremely few," said the report, entitled "Conditions of Work and Promotion of Livelihoods in the Unorganised Sector", seen by Reuters on Friday.

"Such a sordid picture co-exists uneasily with a shining India that has successfully confronted the challenge of globalisation powered by economic competition both within the country and across the world."

Around 26 percent of India's population lives below the poverty line, which is defined as 12 rupees per day, said officials.

Economic liberalisation since the early 1990s has created a 300 million-strong middle class and led to an average annual economic growth of 8.6 percent over the last four years, but millions of the country's poor remain untouched by the boom.

According to the report, based on data from 2004-2005, 92 percent of India's total workforce of 457 million were employed as agricultural labourers and farmers, or in jobs such as working in quarries, brick kilns or as street vendors.

The report said the majority of those working and living under "miserable conditions" were lower castes, tribal people and Muslims and the most disadvantaged of these were women, migrant workers and children.

"This is the other world which can be characterised as the India of the Common People, constituting more than three-fourths of the population and consisting of all those whom the growth has, by and large, bypassed," said the report.

The NCEUS report, which was presented to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on Wednesday, recommends the government provide social security benefits such as maternity and medical expenses as well as pensions to people working in the unorganised sector.

Source:
http://www.reuters.com/article/latestCrisis/idUSDEL218894

20000 Were Killed by Trains in Mumbai in 5 Years

Indian media often shout the human rights and democracy in India. But so what? A recent report shows that more than 20,000 people were killed by trains in Mumbai alone in 5 years.

Yes, I am not wrong. It is astonishing 20,000 ceased lives in India's finnacial captial and most rich city in a short 5 years. More ridiculously, If I am not wrong, the public transportation system in this "shining" city should be in the hands of an elected government.

India's Central and Western Railway was forced this week to release the harrowing data, showing at least 20,706 people have died over the past five years, after a Mumbai activist, Chetan Kothari, filed a request under the country's Right to Information Act.

The maximum deaths are due to people falling off crowded trains and electrocution of people sitting on the top of the train," Sharma said. He said many others were hit by trains when they tried to run across the tracks instead of using bridges.
. Source.

India, Please Take Care of Human Lives Before Talking Any Other Rights.

Economic and Social Development of China in 2007

By National Bureau of Statistics of China

February 28, 2008

Source: http://www.stats.gov.cn

I. General Outlook

In 2007, the gross domestic product (GDP) of the year was 24,661.9 billion yuan, up by 11.4 percent over the previous year. Analyzed by different industries, the value added of the primary industry was 2,891.0 billion yuan, up by 3.7 percent, that of the secondary industry was 12,138.1 billion yuan, up by 13.4 percent and the tertiary industry was 9,632.8 billion yuan, up by 11.4 percent. The value added of the primary industry accounted for 11.7 percent of the GDP, maintaining the same level of the pervious year, that of the secondary industry accounted for 49.2 percent, up by 0.3 percentage point, and that of the tertiary industry accounted for 39.1 percent, down by 0.3 percentage point. Quarterly data showed that the GDP growth in the first quarter of the year was 11.1 percent; second quarter 11.9 percent, third quarter 11.5 percent and 11.2 percent growth for the fourth quarter.

Figure 1: Gross Domestic Product and its Growth, 2003-2007


The general level of consumer prices in China was up by 4.8 percent over the previous year. Of this total, the prices for food went up by 12.3 percent. The retail prices for commodities were up by 3.8 percent. The prices for investment in fixed assets were up by 3.9 percent. The producer prices for manufactured goods increased by 3.1 percent, of which, the prices for means of production increased by 3.2 percent, and for means of subsistence grew by 2.8 percent. The purchasing prices for raw materials, fuels and power went up by 4.4 percent. The producer prices for farm products were up by 18.5 percent. The sales prices for housing in 70 large and medium-sized cities were up by 7.6 percent, of which, that for new residential buildings went up by 8.2 percent, for second hand housing grew by 7.4 percent, and the prices for rental and leasing were up by 2.6 percent.

Figure 2: Changes in Consumer Prices, 2003-2007




At the end of 2007, the total of employed people in China numbered 769.90 million, 5.90 million more than that of 2006. Of this total, 293.50 million were employed in urban areas, a net increase of 10.40 million, a newly increase of 12.04 million. The urban unemployment rate through unemployment registration was 4.0 percent at the end of 2007, a drop of 0.1 percentage point over that of 2006.

At the end of 2007, China’s foreign exchange reserves reached 1,528.2 billion US dollars, an increase of 461.9 billion US dollars as compared with that at the end of the pervious year. At the end of the year, the exchange rate was 7.3046 RMB to 1 USD, an appreciation by 6.9 percent over that at the end of 2006.

Figure 3: Year-end Foreign Exchange Reserves, 2003-2007


The taxes collected in the whole year reached 4,944.9 billion yuan (excluding tariffs, farm land taxes and deed taxes), up by 31.4 percent or an increase of 1,181.3 billion yuan over 2006.

Figure 4: Tax Revenue and its Growth, 2003-2007



II. Agriculture

In 2007, the sown area of grain was 105.53 million hectares, an increase of 700 thousand hectares as compared with that in the previous year; the sown area of cotton was 5.59 million hectares, an increase of 70 thousand hectares; the sown area of oil-bearing crops was 10.94 million hectares, a decline of 600 thousand hectares; the sown area of sugar crops was 1.67 million hectares, an increase of 100 thousand hectares.

The total output of grain in 2007 was 501.50 million tons, an increase of 3.50 million tons or up by 0.7 percent over the previous year. Of this total, the output of summer crops was 115.34 million tons, up by 1.3 percent, and that of the early rice was 31.96 million tons, up by 0.3 percent. The output of autumn grain was 354.20 million tons, an increase of 0.6 percent.

Figure 5: Output of Grain and its Growth, 2003-2007


In 2007, the output of cotton was 7.60 million tons, a growth of 1.3 percent over the previous year, that of oil-bearing crops was 24.61 million tons, down by 4.2 percent and that of sugar crops was 111.10 million tons, an increase of 11.4 percent, that of tobacco was 2.39 million tons, down by 3.9 percent, and that of tea was 1.14 million tons, up by 10.9 percent.

The total output of meat for the year reached 68.00 million tons, down by 3.5 percent. Of this total, the output of pork was down by 9.2 percent, and that of beef and mutton went up by 6.1 percent and 5.8 percent respectively. The total output of aquatic products was 47.37 million tons, up by 3.3 percent. The total production of timber for the year 2007 reached 69.74 million cubic meters, an increase of 5.5 percent.

Over 1.07 million hectares of farmland was increased with effective irrigation systems and another additional 1.36 million hectares of farmland was guaranteed by water-saving irrigation systems.

III. Industry and Construction

In 2007, the total value added of the industrial sector was 10,736.7 billion yuan, up by 13.5 percent over the previous year. The value added of industrial enterprises above the designated size was up by 18.5 percent. of this total, that of the state-owned and state-holding enterprises grew by 13.8 percent, that of the collective enterprises went up by 11.5 percent, that of the share-holding enterprises increased by 20.6 percent, that of the enterprises by foreign investors and investors from Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan soared by 17.5 percent and 26.7 percent growth for private enterprises. Analyzed by light and heavy industries, the growth of the light industry was 16.3 percent and that of the heavy industry was 19.6 percent.

Figure 6: Industrial Value Added and its Growth, 2003-2007


In 2007, of the industrial enterprises above designated size, the growth of value added for the mining and washing of coal industry was18.1 percent over the previous year, for the extraction of petroleum and natural gas was 3.9 percent, for textile industry 16.2 percent, for processing of food from agricultural product 16.9 percent, for manufacture of general machinery 24.2 percent, for manufacture of transport equipment 26.2 percent, for manufacture of communication equipment, computers and other electronic equipment 18.0 percent and for manufacture of electrical machinery and equipment 21.5 percent. the growth of the value added for the major six high energy consuming industries were 18.9 percent, of which, that of the manufacture of non-metallic mineral products was 24.7 percent, smelting and pressing of ferrous metals 21.4 percent, manufacture of raw chemical materials and chemical products 21.0 percent, smelting and pressing of non-ferrous metals 17.8 percent, production and supply of electric power and heat power 13.8 percent and 13.4 percent for processing of petroleum, coking, processing of nuclear fuel. The value added growth for the high-tech industry was 17.8 percent over the previous year.



The profits made by the industrial enterprises above the designated size in the first 11 months of 2007 were 2,295.1 billion yuan, an increase of 36.7 percent over the same period of last year.




In 2007, the value added of construction enterprises in China was 1,401.4 billion yuan, up by 12.6 percent over the previous year. The profits made by construction enterprises qualified for general contracts and specialized contracts reached 147.0 billion yuan, up by 23.2 percent, with their paid taxes of 166.1 billion yuan, up by 18.5 percent.


IV. Investment in Fixed Assets

The completed investment in fixed assets of the country in 2007 was 13,723.9 billion yuan, up by 24.8 percent over the previous year. of the total investment, that in urban areas was 11,741.4 billon yuan, up by 25.8 percent; and that in rural areas reached 1,982.5 billion yuan, up by 19.2 percent. An analysis by regions showed that the investment in east areas was 7,231.4 billion yuan, up by 19.9 percent over the previous year, in central areas was 3,428.3 billion yuan, a growth of 33.3 percent, and in western areas 2,819.4 billion yuan, a growth of 28.2 percent.

Figure 7: Investment in Fixed Assets and its Growth, 2003-2007


In the urban areas, the investment in the primary industry was 146.6 billion yuan, up by 31.1 percent; that in the secondary industry was 5,102.0 billion yuan, up by 29.0 percent; and that in the tertiary industry was 6,492.8 billion yuan, up by 23.2 percent.

Table 4: Fixed Assets Investment in Urban Areas and its Growth by Sector in 2007


In 2007, the investment in real estate development was 2,528.0 billion yuan, up by 30.2 percent. Of this total, the investment in commercial residential buildings reached 1,801.0 billion yuan, an increase of 32.1 percent. The completed floor space of commercial buildings reached 582.36 million square meters, up by 4.3 percent. The total sales of commercial buildings reached 761.93million square meters, up by 23.2 percent, of which, that of the commercial residential building were 691.04 million square meters, up by 24.7 percent.



V. Domestic Trade

In 2007, the total retail sales of consumer goods reached 8,921.0 billion yuan, up by 16.8 percent over the previous year. An analysis on different areas showed that the retail sales of consumer goods in cities reached 6,041.1 billion yuan, up by 17.2 percent and the retail sales of consumer goods at and below county level was 2,879.9 billion yuan, up by 15.8 percent. Analyzed by different sectors, the sales of the wholesales and retail trade reached 7,504.0 billion yuan, up 16.7 percent; the sales of the lodging and catering industry was 1,235.2 billion yuan, up 19.4 percent, and the sales of the other industries was 181.8 billion yuan, up 4.5 percent.

Of the total retail sales by wholesale and retail enterprises above designated size, the sales of grain and oil was up by 38.3 percent, meat and eggs up by 40.9 percent, clothing up by 28.7 percent, motor vehicles up by 36.9 percent, petroleum and related products up by 20.5 percent, daily necessities up by 26.5 percent, cultural and office goods up by 22.6 percent, telecommunication equipment up by 8.8 percent, electric and electronic appliances for household use and audio-video equipment up by 23.4 percent, building and decoration materials up by 43.6 percent, furniture up 43.2 percent, cosmetics up by 26.3 percent, gold, silver and jewelry up by 41.7 percent and traditional Chinese drugs and western drugs up by 25.1 percent.

Figure 8: Total Retail Sales of Consumer Goods and its Growth, 2003-2007


VI. Foreign Economic Relations

The total value of imports and exports in 2007 reached 2,173.8 billion US dollars, up 23.5 percent over the previous year. Of this total, the value of exports was 1,218.0 billion US dollars, up 25.7 percent, and the value of imports was 955.8 billion US dollars, up 20.8 percent. China had a trade surplus of 262.2 billion US dollars, an increase of 84.7 billion US dollars over the previous year.





Figure 9: Imports and Exports and the Growth Rates, 2003-2007



The year 2007 witnessed the establishment of 37,871 enterprises with foreign direct investment in non-financial sectors, down by 8.7 percent; and the foreign capital actually utilized was 74.8 billion US dollars, up by 13.6 percent. Of the total foreign direct investment actually utilized, the share of investment in manufacturing was 54.7 percent over the pervious year, the real estate 22.9 percent, leasing and business service 5.4 percent, wholesales and retail trade 3.6 percent and transportation, storage and post service 2.7 percent.



In 2007, the overseas direct investment (non-financial sectors) by Chinese investors was 18.7 billion US dollars, up by 6.2 percent over the previous year.

In 2007, the accomplished business revenue through contracted overseas engineering projects was 40.6 billion US dollars, up by 35.3 percent, and the business revenue through overseas labor contracts was 6.8 billion US dollars, up by 26.0 percent over the previous year.

VII. Transportation, Post, Telecommunications and Tourism

The value added of the transportation, storage, post and telecommunication sectors reached 1,364.9 billion yuan in 2007, up 9.7 percent over the previous year.



The volume of freight handled by ports above the designated size throughout the year totaled 5.21 billion tons, up 13.4 percent over the previous year, of which freight for foreign trade was 1.78 billion tons, up 12.6 percent. Container shipping handled 111.79 million standard containers, up by 21.5 percent.

The total number of motor vehicles for civilian use reached 56.97 million (including 14.68 million tri-wheel motor vehicles and low-speed trucks) by the end of 2007, up 14.3 percent, of which private-owned vehicles numbered 35.34 million, up 20.8 percent. The total number of cars for civilian use stood at 19.58 million, up by 26.7 percent, of which private-owned cars numbered 15.22 million, up by 32.5 percent.

The turnover of post and telecommunication services totaled 1,936.1 billion yuan, up 26.4 percent over the previous year. Of this total, post services accounted for 81.5 billion yuan, up 11.8 percent, and telecommunication services 1,854.5 billion yuan, up 27.1 percent. By the end of 2007, with 8.36 million newly installed lines of office switchboards, the total capacity reached 510 million lines. The year also saw 365.45 million fixed telephone subscribers. This included 248.59 million urban subscribers and 116.86 million rural subscribers. Mobile phone users numbered 547.29 million by the end of 2007, with 86.23 million new subscribers in the year. In total, the number of fixed and mobile phone users reached 912.73 million, an increase of 83.89 million as compared with at the end of 2006. Phone coverage is 69 sets per 100 persons. The number of Internet users was 210 million and wide-band users reached 163 million.

Figure 10: Number of Phone Subscribers, 2003 - 2007


In 2007, the number of inbound visitors to China totaled 131.87 million, a year-on-year rise of 5.5 percent. Of this total, 26.11 million were foreigners, up 17.6 percent; and 105.76 million were Chinese compatriots from Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan, up 2.9 percent. Of all the inbound tourists, overnight visitors counted 54.72 million, up 9.6 percent. Foreign exchange earnings from international tourism topped 41.9 billion US dollars, up 23.5 percent. The number of China’s outbound visitors totaled 40.95 million, up 18.6 percent. Of this total, 34.92 million were on private visits, a year-on-year rise of 21.3 percent, or 85.3 percent of all outgoing visitors. The year 2007 saw 1.61 billion domestic tourists, up 15.5 percent. The revenue from domestic tourism totaled 777.1 billion yuan, up 24.7 percent.

VIII. Banking, Securities and Insurance
By the end of 2007, money supply of broad sense (M2) was 40.3 trillion yuan, reflecting a year-on-year increase of 16.7 percent. Money supply of narrow sense (M1) was 15.3 trillion yuan, up 21.1 percent. Cash in circulation (M0) was 3.0 trillion yuan, up 12.2 percent. Savings deposit in Renminbi and foreign currencies in all items of financial institutions totaled 40.1 trillion yuan at the end of 2007, up 15.2 percent. Loans in Renminbi and foreign currencies in all items of financial institutions reached 27.8 trillion yuan, up 16.4 percent.



Figure 11: Urban and Rural Households’ Savings Deposit in RMB and its Growth, 2003 - 2007



Loans in Renminbi from rural financial cooperation institutions (i.e. rural credit cooperatives, rural cooperation banks, and rural commercial banks) totaled 3.1 trillion yuan by the end of 2007, an increase of 508.5 billion yuan as compared with the beginning of 2007. The loans in Renminbi for consumption use from all financial institutions totaled 3.3 trillion yuan, an increase of 869.9 billion yuan. Of all consumption loans, those for individual housing totaled 2.7 trillion yuan, an increase of 714.7 billion yuan.

Funds raised in 2007 by enterprises through issuing stocks and share rights on stock market amounted to 843.2 billion yuan, an increase of 283.8 billion yuan over the previous year. Of this total, 283 companies issued A-shares (including newly issued and convertible loan stocks) with 7 companies issued A-share rights, receiving 772.8 billion yuan worth of capital altogether, an increase of 526.4 billion yuan over 2006. The issue of 14 H-shares raised another 70.4 billion yuan worth of capital, a decrease of 242.7 billion yuan. The number of listed companies (with A- or B-shares) on China’s stock market rose from 1,434 at the end of 2006 to 1,550 at the end of 2007, representing 32,714.1 billion yuan worth of market value, a growth of 265.9 percent over the previous year.

The total corporate bonds issued throughout the year reached 1,708.4 billion yuan, an increase of 352.0 billion yuan over 2006. Of this total, the financial bonds were 1,191.3 billion yuan, a growth of 230.8 billion yuan; the enterprise (corporate) bonds were 182.1 billion yuan, an increase of 80.6 billion yuan; and the short-term financing funds were 334.9 billion yuan, an increase of 40.6 billion yuan.

The premium received by the insurance companies totaled 703.6 billion yuan in 2007, up 25.0 percent over the previous year. Of this total, life insurance premium amounted to 446.4 billion yuan, health and casualty insurance premium 57.4 billion yuan, and property insurance premium 199.8 billion yuan. Insurance companies paid an indemnity worth of 226.5 billion yuan, of which, life insurance indemnity was 106.4 billion yuan, health and casualty insurance indemnity 18.0 billion yuan, and property insurance indemnity 102.1 billion yuan.

IX. Education, Science and Technology

In 2007, the post-graduate education enrollment was 1.2 million students with 420 thousand new students and 310 thousand graduates. The general tertiary education enrollment was 18.85 million students with 5.66 million new students and 4.48 million graduates. Vocational secondary schools of various types had 20 million enrolled students, including 8 million new entrants, and 5.3 million graduates. Senior secondary schools had 25.22 million enrolled students, including 8.4 million new entrants, and 7.88 million graduates. Students enrolled in junior secondary schools totaled 57.36 million, including 18.69 million new entrants, and 19.64 million graduates. The country had a primary education enrollment of 105.64 million students, including 17.36 million new entrants, and 18.7 million graduates. There were 410 thousand students enrolled in special education schools, with 60 thousand new entrants. Kindergartens accommodated 23.49 million children.

Figure 12: New Entrants into Education, 2003 - 2007


The amount of expenditures on research and development activities (R&D) was worth 366.4 billion yuan in 2007, up 22.0 percent over 2006, accounting for 1.49 percent of GDP. Of this total, 18 billion yuan was appropriated for fundamental research programs. A total number of 1,540 projects under the National Key Technology Research and Development Program and 2,541 projects under the Hi-tech Research and Development Program (the 863 Program) were implemented. The year 2007 saw the establishment of 9 new national engineering research centers and 6 national engineering laboratories. the number of state validated enterprise technical centers reached 499 by the end of the year. The technical centers at the provincial level numbered 4,023. Some 694 thousand patent applications were accepted from home and abroad, of which 587 thousand were domestic applications, accounting for 84.5 percent of the total. A total number of 245 thousand patent applications for new inventions were accepted, of which 153 thousand were from domestic applicants or 62.4 percent of the total. A total of 352 thousand patents were authorized in 2007, of which 302 thousand were domestic patents, accounting for 85.7 percent of the total. A total of 68 thousand patents for new inventions were authorized, of which 32 thousand were domestic ones, accounting for 47.0 percent. A total of 210 thousand technology transfer contracts were signed, representing 220 billion yuan in value, up 21.0 percent over the previous year. The year 2007 saw 10 times of successful launch of satellites and Chang’e-1 circumlunar exploration satellite was launched successfully.

By the end of 2007, there were altogether 24,700 laboratories for product inspection, including 356 national inspection centers. There were 184 organizations for product certification and management system certification, which accumulatively certified products in 70 thousand enterprises. A total of 3,720 authorized measurement institutions enforced compulsory inspection on 42.18 million measurement instruments in the year. A total of 1,411 national standards were developed or revised in the year, including 747 new standards. Through out the year, a total of 3,350 weather forewarning signals were released and alarm signals were 690 times. There were 1,314 seismological monitor stations and 31 seismological remote monitor network stations. The numbers of oceanic observation stations were 66 and oceanic monitor spots reached 9,200. Mapping departments published 1,946 maps and 417 mapping books.

X. Culture, Public Health and Sports

At the end of 2007, there were 2,856 art-performing groups, 2,921 culture centers, 2,791 public libraries, 1,634 museums, 263 radio broadcasting stations, 287 television stations, 1,993 radio broadcasting and television stations and 44 educational television stations throughout China. Subscribers to cable television programs numbered 151.18 million. Subscribers to digital cable television programs were 26.16 million. Radio broadcasting and television broadcasting coverage rates were 95.4 percent and 96.6 percent respectively. The country produced 402 feature movies and 58 science, educational, documentary, cartoon and special movies. A total of 43.9 billion copies of newspapers and 2.9 billion copies of magazines were issued, and 6.6 billion copies of books published. by the end of the year, there were 3,952 archives in China and 67.87 million documents were made accessible to the public.

By the end of 2007, there were 315 thousand health institutions in China, including 60 thousand general hospitals and health centers, 3,007 maternal and child health-care institutions, 1,400 specialized health institutions, 3,540 epidemic disease prevention centers (stations) and 2,590 health monitoring institutions. There were 4.68 million health workers in China, including 2.04 million practicing doctors and assistant practicing doctors and 1.47 million registered nurses. General hospitals and health centers in China possessed 3.279 million beds. There were 24 thousand community health service centers. the number of rural health care centers was 39 thousand, possessing 675 thousand beds and employing 863 thousand health care workers. In 2007, 3.581 million people were infected by A or B class infectious diseases, with 12,954 reported deaths. the incidence of infectious disease was 272.4 per 100 thousand, with the death rate standing at 0.99 per 100 thousand.

In 2007, Chinese athletes won 123 world championships on 22 sports events. Eight athletes and 2 teams broke 10 world records on 10 occasions. the amateur sports activities were carried out vigorously.

XI. Population, Living Conditions and Social Security

At the end of 2007, the total number of Chinese population reached 1,321.29 million, an increase of 6.81 million over that at the end of 2006. The year 2007 saw 15.94 million births, a crude birth rate of 12.10 per thousand, and 9.13 million deaths, or a crude death rate of 6.93 per thousand. The natural growth rate was 5.17 per thousand. the sex ratio at birth was 120.22.



In 2007, the annual per capita net income of rural households was 4,140 yuan, or a real increase of 9.5 percent over the previous year when the factors of price increase were deducted. The annual per capita disposable income of urban households was 13,786 yuan, or a real increase of 12.2 percent. The Engel coefficient (which refers to the proportion of expenditure on food to the total expenditure of households) was 43.1 percent for rural households and 36.3 percent for urban households. The population in absolute poverty in rural areas with annual per capita net income below 785 yuan numbered 14.79 million at the end of 2007, a decline of 6.69 million over the previous year. The low-income population in rural areas with annual per capita net income between 786 - 1067 yuan numbered 28.41 million, a decline of 7.09 million.

Figure 13: Per Capita Net Income of Rural Households and its Growth, 2003-2007


Figure 14: Per Capita Disposable Income of Urban Households and its Growth, 2003-2007


At the end of 2007, a total of 201.07 million people participated in basic pension program, a year-on-year increase of 13.41 million. Of this total, 151.56 million were staff and workers, and 49.51 million were retirees. A total of 220.51 million people participated in urban basic health insurance program, an increase of 63.19 million, of whom 179.83 million people participated in urban basic health insurance program for staff and workers, 40.68 million people participated in programs for residents. A total of 31.31 million people participated in urban health insurance programs were migrant workers coming from the rural areas, an increase of 7.64 million. Some 116.45 million people participated in unemployment insurance programs, an increase of 4.58 million. A total of 121.55 million people participated in work accident insurance, an increase of 18.87 million, of which 39.66 million were migrant workers coming from the rural areas, an increase of 14.29 million. A total of 77.55 million people participated in maternity insurance programs, an increase of 12.96 million. A total of 2,448 counties (cities, districts) conducted the new cooperative medical care system in rural areas, attracting 730 million farmers which represented a participation rate of 85.7 percent. The total expenditure of the new cooperative medical care system in rural areas reached 22 billion yuan, benefiting 260 million people. In 2007, the urban medical assistance helped 4.07 million people, up by 117.2 percent. The rural medical assistance helped 6.03 million people, up by 150.1 percent. A total of 23.06 million people were funded by the civil affairs department in the rural cooperative medical care system.

The number of people receiving unemployment insurance payment stood at 2.86 million. A total of 22.71 million urban residents received the government minimum living allowances, or 310 thousand more than the previous year. About 34.52 million rural residents received the government minimum living allowance, an increase of 18.59 million.

Social welfare institutions of various types provided 2.05 million beds by the end of 2007, accommodating 1.63 million inmates. There were 128 thousand community service facilities and 10,299 comprehensive community service centers were set up in urban areas. A total of 63.2 billion yuan worth of social welfare lottery tickets were sold, raising 21.7 billion yuan of social welfare funds. A total of 4.2 billion yuan were received from direct donations.

XII. Resources, Environment and Work Safety

A total of 188.3 thousand hectares of cultivated land was used for construction purpose in 2007. An area of 17.9 thousand hectares of cultivated land was destroyed by disasters, 25.4 thousand hectares of farmland was converted into land for ecological preservation. The structural adjustment to agriculture led to a reduction of 4.9 thousand hectares of cultivated land. Land reclamation and re-development programs added 195.8 thousand hectares of cultivated land. As a result, the year 2007 witnessed a net reduction of 40.7 thousand hectares of cultivated land.

The total stock of water resources in 2007 was 2,469.0 billion cubic meters, a year-on-year decline of 2.5 percent, or 1,873 cubic meters in per capita terms, down by 3.0 percent. The annual average precipitation was 608 millimeters, up by 1.9 percent. Large reservoirs in China stored 186.9 billion cubic meters of water at the end of 2007, 5.2 billion cubic meters more than that at the end of 2006. Total water consumption went down by 0.6 percent to reach 576.0 billion cubic meters, of which water consumption for living purposes rose by 1.6 percent, for industrial use up by 2.7 percent and for agricultural use down by 2.2 percent. Water consumption for every 10 thousand yuan worth of GDP produced was 253 cubic meters, a decline of 10.8 percent. Water consumption for every 10 thousand yuan worth of industrial value added was 139 cubic meters, down by 9.5 percent. Per capita water consumption was 437 cubic meters, down by 1.1 percent.

National land surveys and geological explorations discovered a total of 208 new mineral deposits in large or medium size, including 50 energy mineral deposits, 73 metallic mineral deposits, 82 non-metallic mineral deposits and 3 aqueous and gaseous deposits. Increased reserves were found for 77 minerals, including 1.21 billion tons of crude oil, 697.4 billion cubic meters of natural gas and 40.62 billion tons of coal.

A total of 5.20 million hectares of forest were planted, 3.71million hectares of forest were survived, of which 2.56 million were afforested by manpower. Some 2.68 million hectares were afforested through key afforestation projects, accounting for 72.2 percent of the total planted area of the year. About 2.27 billion trees were planted in 2007 by volunteers. By the end of 2007, there were 2,531 natural reserves including 303 national ones and covering a total area of 151.88 million hectares, or 15.0 percent of the total land area of China. A total of 39 thousand square kilometers of eroded land were put under comprehensive treatment programs, and 33 thousand square kilometers of land were closed for nurture and protection in areas suffering water and soil erosion.

Preliminary estimation indicated that the total energy consumption in 2007 amounted to 2.65 billion tons of standard coal equivalent, up 7.8 percent over 2006. The consumption of coal was 2.58 billion tons, up 7.9 percent; crude oil 340 million tons, up 6.3 percent; natural gas 67.3 billion cubic meters, up 19.9 percent; and electric power 3,263.2 billion kilowatt hours, up 14.1 percent. The consumption of major kinds of raw materials included 520 million tons of rolled steel, up 17.4 percent; 3.99 million tons of copper, up by 13.0 percent; 11.12 million tons of electrolytic aluminum, up by 27.6 percent; 10.48 million tons of ethylene, up by 11.4 percent; and 1.33 billion tons of cement, up 10.5 percent.

Figure 15: Total Energy Consumption and its Growth, 2003-2007


Monitoring of water quality on 408 sections of the 7 major water systems in China showed that 50.0 percent of the sections met the national quality standard of Grade III for surface water, 26.5 percent of the sections met the quality standard of Grade IV or V, and 23.5 percent were worse than Grade V. There was no significant change of the water quality in the 7 major water systems as compared with that in the previous year.

Monitoring of oceanic water quality at 296 offshore monitoring stations indicated that oceanic water met the national quality standard Grade I and II in 62.8 percent of the stations, down by 4.9 percentage points from the previous year; water quality at 11.8 percent of the stations met Grade III standard, up by 3.8 percentage points; and water of Grade IV or inferior quality was found at 25.4 percent of the stations, up by 1.1 percentage points. A total of 145 thousand square kilometers of oceanic waters did not meet the quality standard for clean oceanic water, a decrease of 4 thousand square kilometers. of this total, seriously polluted oceanic area occupied 29 thousand square kilometers. Seriously polluted oceanic area in Bohai Sea occupied 6 thousand square kilometers.

In the 557 cities covered by air quality monitoring program, 389 cities reached or topped air quality standard Grade II, accounting for 69.8 percent of all cities under the program; 152 cities attained Grade III, accounting for 27.3 percent; and air quality in 16 cities was inferior to Grade III, accounting for 2.9 percent. of the 342 cities subject to noise monitoring program, 6.1 percent enjoyed fairly good environment, 64.6 percent had good environment, 28.1 percent had light noise pollution, and 1.2 percent experienced medium noise pollution in downtown areas.

The average temperature in 2007 was 10.1℃, which was 0.2℃ higher than that in previous year. Typhoon hit China 8 times in 2007, 2 more compared with that in 2006.

At the end of 2007, the daily treatment capacity of city sewage reached 70.00 million cubic meters, up 10.0 percent over that in 2006. City sewage treatment rate was 59.0 percent, up 3.3 percentage points. The floor space with central heating systems amounted to 2.85 billion square meters, up 7.1 percent. Greenery coverage reached 36.0 percent of the urban area, up 1 percentage point.

In 2007, natural disasters caused 236.3 billion yuan worth of direct economic loss, down by 6.5 percent. Natural disasters hit 48.99 million hectares of crops, up 19.2 percent, of which 5.75 million hectares of crops was demolished, up 6.2 percent. 2007 witnessed 9,260 forest fires, up by 13.3 percent. There was no extra big forest fire. Floods and waterlog caused a direct economic loss of 82.6 billion yuan, up by 46.9 percent and left a death roll of 1,168, up by 54.9 percent. Drought caused a direct economic loss of 78.5 billion yuan, up by 10.9 percent. Oceanic disasters caused a direct economic loss of 8.84 billion yuan, down by 59.5 percent. The occurrence of red tides hit an accumulative area of 11,610 square kilometers, down by 41.5 percent. China registered 25 thousand geological disasters which left a death doll of 598 and made a total direct economic loss of 2.48 billion yuan. The country recorded 6 earthquakes with magnitude 5 and over, 3 of which caused disasters, causing a direct economic loss of 2.02 billion yuan.

The death toll due to work accidents amounted to 101,480 people, a year-on-year decrease of 10.1 percent. The death toll from work accidents every 100 million yuan worth of GDP was 0.413 people, a decline of 26.3 percent. Work accidents in industrial, mining and commercial enterprises caused 3.05 deaths out of every 100 thousand employees, down 8.4 percent. The death toll for producing one million tons of coal in coal mines was 1.485 persons, down 27.2 percent. The year 2007 witnessed 327 thousand traffic accidents, claiming 82 thousand lives, injuring 380 thousand people and causing a direct property loss of 1.2 billion yuan. The road traffic death toll per 10 thousand vehicles was 5.1 persons, a decrease of 1.1 persons.
Notes:

1. All figures in this Communiqué are preliminary statistics.
2. Statistics in this Communiqué do not include Hong Kong SAR, Macao SAR and Taiwan Province.
3. Due to the rounding-off reasons, the subentries may not add up to the aggregate totals.
4. Gross domestic product (GDP) and value added as quoted in this Communiqué are calculated at current prices, whereas their growth rates are at comparable prices.
5. The base figures for calculating the output growth rate of major farm products are adjusted correspondently according to the results of the second national agricultural census. The output of fruits and vegetables are under checking, and will be published separately.
6. Six highly energy-consuming industries are: manufacture of raw chemical materials and chemical products, manufacture of non-metallic mineral products, smelting and pressing of ferrous metals, smelting and pressing of non-ferrous metals, oil processing, coking and nuclear fuel processing, and production and supply of electricity and heat.
7. Output and consumption of rolled steel include duplicated counting of rolled steel as intermediate inputs used for producing other types of rolled steel.
8. The national total of fixed assets investment is larger than the aggregate sum by adding up the subtotals of fixed assets investment in the eastern areas, central areas, and western areas due to the fact that some of the trans-regional investments are not covered by regional figures.
9. The investment in real estate includes the investment made in real estate development, construction of buildings for own use, property management, intermediary services and other real estate development.
10. The original premium income received by the insurance companies refers to the premium income from original insurance contracts confirmed by the insurance companies, same as the “premium received by the insurance companies” in previous Communiqués.
11. The number of people covered in urban basic health insurance programs for urban staff and workers include staff and workers and retirees insured. the urban basic health insurance programs for urban residents refer to urban non-employed residents who are not covered by the urban basic health insurance programs for staff and workers.
12. The consumption of water for producing 10 thousand yuan worth of GDP is calculated at 2005 constant prices. The turnover of post and telecommunication services is calculated at constant prices of 2000.
13. The consumption of energy for producing 10 thousand yuan worth of GDP, the total emission of chemical oxygen demand (COD) and the sulfur dioxide (SO2) of the whole country will be further certified by relevant departments and be published in near future.

What Makes a Miracle? Some myths about the rise of China and India

By Pranab Bardhan

After more than a century of relative stagnation, the economies of India and China have been growing at remarkably high rates over the past 25 years. In 1820 the two countries contributed nearly half of the world’s income; by 1950, with the industrialized West having pulled away, their share had fallen to less than one-tenth. Today it is just less than one-fifth, and projections suggest that by 2025 it will rise to one-third. (In 2008 the World Bank is expected to issue revised numbers about cost of living in China and India, which may somewhat reduce these estimated income shares, both current and future).

The consequences of this expansion are extraordinary. The Chinese economy in particular has made the most headway against poverty in world history, with hundreds of millions of people moved out of the most extreme poverty within just a generation. (The environmental consequences are comparably remarkable, though perhaps proportionately disastrous).

What explains this strikingly rapid growth? The answer that continues to dominate public discussion in the United States runs along the following lines: decades of socialist controls and regulations stifled enterprise in India and China and led them to a dead end. A mix of market reforms and global integration finally unleashed their entrepreneurial energies. As these giants shook off their “socialist slumber,” they entered the “flattened” playing field of global capitalism. The result has been high economic growth in both countries and correspondingly large declines in poverty.

While India’s performance has been substantial, China’s has been truly dramatic. The particularly dramatic Chinese performance (like the earlier economic “miracles” in South Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore) suggests, in the dominant narrative, that authoritarianism may be better than democracy for development—at least in its early stages. Regional economic decentralization provided local autonomy and incentives, and, even without democracy, led to broad-based local development. But the narrative warns that global capitalism has brought rising inequality, more in China than in India. The idea is that this may portend serious trouble for Chinese political stability, as China does not have the capability of democratic India to let off the steam of inequality-induced discontent.

This story contains a few elements of truth and provides many comforts to our preconceptions. But through sheer repetition it has acquired an authority that does not withstand scrutiny.

Start with the claim that global integration and associated market reforms resulted in high growth, which in turn produced dramatic declines in extreme poverty. Applied to China, the timing simply does not fit. China has indeed made large strides in foreign trade and investment since the 1990s, but well before then, say between 1978 and 1993, the country had already achieved an average annual growth rate of about nine percent—even higher than the impressive seven percent growth rate in East Asia between 1960 and 1980.

China’s poverty-reduction storyline is similarly flawed. While expansion of exports of labor-intensive manufactures lifted many people out of poverty over the past decade, the principal reason for the dramatic decline over the past three decades may lie elsewhere. World Bank estimates suggest that two-thirds of the decline in extremely poor people (those living below the admittedly crude poverty line of one dollar a day per capita at 1993 international parity prices) between 1981 and 2004 had taken place by the mid-1980s. Much of the extreme poverty was concentrated in rural areas, and its large decline in the first half of the 1980s may have been principally the result of domestic factors that have little if anything to do with global integration: a spurt in agricultural growth following de-collectivization, in which output increased at 7.1% per year on average between 1979 and 1984, almost triple the 1970-78 rate; a land reform program, involving a highly egalitarian distribution of land-cultivation rights subject only to differences in regional average and family size, which provided a floor for rural income; and increased farm procurement prices.

As for India, market reforms may not be mainly responsible for its recent high growth. Reform has clearly made the Indian corporate sector more vibrant and competitive, but most of the Indian economy lies outside the corporate sector; for example, 93 percent of the labor force works outside the corporate sector, private or public.

Take the fast-growing service sector, where India’s IT-enabled services have acquired a global reputation while employing less than a quarter of one percent of the total Indian labor force. Service subsectors like finance, business services (including those IT-enabled services), and telecommunication, where reform may have made a significant difference, constitute only about a quarter of total service-sector output. Two-thirds of service output is in traditional or “unorganized” activities, in tiny enterprises often below the policy radar and unlikely to have been directly much affected by regulatory or foreign trade policy reforms. It is a matter of some dispute how much of the growth in traditional services (mostly non-traded) can be explained by a rise in service demand in the rest of the economy, and how much of it is a statistical artifact, since the way output is measured in these traditional services has been rather shaky all along.

As for poverty, the latest Indian household survey data suggest that the rate of decline, if anything, slowed somewhat in 1993-2005—the period of global integration—compared with the ’70s and ’80s. Moreover, some non-income indicators of poverty such as those relating to child health, already rather dismal, have hardly improved in recent years. (For example, the percentage of underweight children in India is much larger than in sub-Saharan Africa and has not changed much in the past decade or so). Growth in agriculture, where much of the poverty is concentrated, has declined somewhat over the past decade, largely because of the decline of public investment in rural infrastructure such as irrigation. Little of this has much to do with globalization. Indeed, some disaggregated studies across districts in India have found trade liberalization slowing down the decline in rural poverty. Such results may indicate the difficulty displaced farmers and workers have had adjusting to new activities and sectors due to various constraints such as minimal access to credit, information, or infrastructural facilities like power and roads; the high-school-dropout rate; and labor market rigidities—even as new opportunities are opened up by globalization.

The pace of poverty reduction in India has been slower than that in China not simply because Chinese growth has been faster, but also because the same one percent growth rate reduces poverty in India by much less, thanks largely to higher wealth inequalities (particularly in land and education). The Gini coefficient (a standard statistical measure of inequality, with a value of one indicating extreme inequality and zero indicating perfect equality) of land distribution in rural India was 0.74 in 2003; the corresponding figure in China was 0.49 in 2002. To a large extent this difference reflects a higher proportion of landless and near-landless people in India. In addition, educational inequality in India is among the worst in the world. According to the World Development Report 2006, the Gini coefficient of the distribution of adult schooling years in the population was 0.56 in India in 1998/2000, which is not only higher than China’s 0.37 in 2000, but even higher than almost all Latin American countries. To a large extent, this indicator reflects the high number of illiterate and near-illiterate people relative to the rest of the population in India.

The storyline about China and India’s “socialist slumber” is equally suspect. China and India have become poster children for market reform and globalization in much of the financial press, even though both countries’ economic policies with regard to privatization, property rights, and deregulation have departed demonstrably from free-market orthodoxy in many ways.

And what about the earlier period? Was it really an utter waste? While socialist control and regulations undoubtedly inhibited initiative and enterprise in both countries, the positive legacy of reforms undertaken in the ‘70s and ‘80s cannot be denied, particularly in China’s recent pattern of state-controlled capitalist growth.

China’s earlier socialist period arguably provided a good launching pad for market reform. That foundation provided wide access to education and health care; highly egalitarian land redistribution that created a rural safety net and thus eased the process of market reform, with all its wrenching disruptions and dislocations; increased female labor participation and education that enhanced women’s contribution to economic growth; and a system of regional economic decentralization (that linked the career paths of Communist Party officials to local area performance). County governments were in charge of production enterprises long before Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms set in, and, even more significantly, the earlier commune system’s production brigades evolved into the highly successful township and village enterprises that led the later phenomenal rise of rural industrialization.

In all these respects China’s legacy from the earlier period has been much more distinctive than that in India. When I grew up in India, I used to hear leftists say that the Chinese were better socialists than us. Now I am used to hearing that the Chinese are better capitalists than us. I tell people, only half-flippantly, that the Chinese are better capitalists now because they were better socialists then!

The earlier period’s legacy in both countries is also evident in the cumulative effect of the state’s active role in technological development. It is often overlooked that the Chinese have succeeded in international markets with more than simple labor-intensive products such as clothing, toys, shoes, and wigs. Both China and India (but China more so) have succeeded in exporting more sophisticated products than is usual in countries in their respective per capita income ranges: China, in consumer electronics, including computers and other information- and communication-technology-related goods, and auto parts; India, in software, pharmaceuticals, vehicles, steel, and auto parts. This performance is remarkable (though more in gross value of exports than in value-added terms, as some of the components and technology used in production are acquired from abroad) and is due primarily to sizeable skill and technological bases, enriched over the years of “socialist slumbering” by indigenous learning-by-doing and nurtured by government policies of building domestic capability—sometimes at the expense of static resource allocation efficiency.

Of course, there are many cases in which protection from foreign competition sheltered massive inefficiency. But the overall storyline is by no means so simple. Consider auto parts. For many decades both countries practiced protection of “local content” (of components) in automobiles, contrary to the orthodox free-trade policy prescription. As a result workers in the auto parts industry acquired skills necessary to compete successfully in the global economy and have now reached international best practice.

What about democracy’s role in economic growth? The much more dramatic success of China (and, earlier, that of other East Asian countries under authoritarian regimes) compared with India does not in any way prove the superiority of authoritarianism over democracy in matters of development. Authoritarianism is neither necessary nor sufficient for development. That it is not necessary is illustrated not only by today’s developed countries, but by scattered cases of recent development success: Costa Rica, Botswana, and now India. That it is not sufficient is amply evident from disastrous authoritarian regimes in Africa and elsewhere.

The relationship between democracy and development is much more complex than the conventional wisdom suggests. Even if we were not to value democracy for its own sake (or regard it as an integral part of development by definition), and looked at it in a purely instrumental way, democracy has at least four advantages from the point of view of development. Democracies are better able to avoid catastrophic mistakes, (such as China’s Great Leap Forward and the ensuing great famine that killed nearly thirty million people, or its Cultural Revolution, which may have resulted in the largest destruction of human capital in history) and have greater healing powers after difficult times. Democracies also experience more intense pressure to share the benefits of development, thus making it sustainable, and provide more scope for popular movements against industrial fallout such as environmental degradation. In addition, they are better able to mitigate social inequalities (especially acute in India) that act as barriers to social and economic mobility and to the full development of individual potential. Finally, democratic open societies provide a better environment for nurturing the development of information and related technologies, a matter of some importance in the current knowledge-driven global economy. Intensive cyber-censorship in China may seriously limit future innovations in this area.

All that said, India’s experience suggests that democracy can also hinder development in a number of ways. Competitive populism—short-run pandering and handouts to win elections—may hurt long-run investment, particularly in infrastructure, which is the key bottleneck for Indian development. Such political arrangements make it difficult, for example, to charge user fees for roads, electricity, and irrigation, discouraging investment in these areas, unlike in China where infrastructure companies charge full commercial rates. Competitive populism also makes it harder to cut losses resulting from experimentation in industrial policy in India, where retreating from a failed project—with inevitable job losses and bail-out pressures—has electoral consequences that discourage leaders from carrying out policy experimentation in the first place. Finally, democracy’s slow decision-making processes can be costly in a world of fast-changing markets and technology.

China is widely, and rightly, acclaimed for its decentralized development: in the 1980s and ’90s local industries flourished under the control of local governments and collectives. This aspect of industrialization has largely bypassed India so far, even though important constitutional changes favoring devolution of power to local governments were carried out in the ’90s. Of course, decentralization is not always a good thing for development. Some have complained that decentralization in post-Soviet Russia was growth-retarding, as provincial governments were captured by oligarchs, thus legitimizing the subsequent centralization of power by Vladimir Putin. Although egalitarian land reform in China may have helped avert the capture of local institutions by local elites—at least in the initial years of market growth—the problem has plagued regional decentralization in India and Russia.

But even China has had trouble with decentralization in recent years. With local party officials prospering in a reward system that emphasizes local economic performance (with access to profits of local collective enterprises and the power to privatize them), the central government in China is now finding it difficult to rein them in, particularly in matters of land acquisition (where local officials are often in cahoots with local commercial developers), toxic pollution and violation of consumer- product safety regulations (often in collusion with local businesses). The “harmonious society” mantra chanted by the central leadership has not yet succeeded in curbing the capitalist excesses of local business and officialdom. The centralization of tax reform since 1994 has reduced the incentives of the local bureaucracy to serve social needs, particularly in interior provinces. The lack of democratic-accountability mechanisms is, and will continue to be, felt acutely by local populations who face limits both in the types of economic growth they can pursue and in the delivery of social services.

In short, in the absence of democratic devolution, China’s much-celebrated regional decentralization may now be a source of much discontent and may undermine the economic growth it has done so much to foster.

A final element of conventional wisdom is that globalization has led to rising inequality, and that inequality-induced grievances, particularly in rural China, cloud the country’s political future and hence its economic stability. But the effect of globalization on inequality is difficult to disentangle from that of other ongoing changes (such as skill-biased technical progress due to new information and communication technology), and so the causal link between globalization and inequality is not always clear. Moreover, Chinese provinces with more global exposure and higher growth did not have a greater rise in inequality compared with the other provinces in the interior. Decline in agricultural growth in recent years, in both China and India, may also have something to do with the rise in aggregate inequality, as inequality is significantly lower in agriculture than in other sectors.

As for inequality-induced political instability, a frequently cited fact reported from official police records is that incidents of social unrest have multiplied nearly nine-fold between 1994 and 2005. While the Chinese leadership is right to be concerned about inequality, the conventional wisdom in this matter is somewhat askew, as has been pointed out by Harvard sociologist Martin Whyte and his team. Data from their 2004 national representative survey in China show that the presumed disadvantaged in rural or remote areas are not particularly upset by rising inequality. This may be because of the “tunnel effect,” a familiar concept in the literature on inequality: when you see other people prospering you are hopeful that your chance will soon come (you are more hopeful in a tunnel when blocked traffic in the next lane starts moving). This is particularly so with the relaxation of restrictions on migration from villages and improvement in roads and transportation. Farmers are incensed by forcible land acquisitions or the severe environmental damage of land, air, and water than they are by inequality. Chinese leaders have so far succeeded in deflecting the wrath felt toward corrupt local officials and in localizing and containing rural unrest.

It may seem counterintuitive but the potential for unrest is arguably greater in the currently booming urban areas where, along with the breaking of the real estate bubble, a possible global recession could ripple through the excess-capacity industries and financially-shaky public banks. With a more Internet-connected and vocal middle class, a recent history of massive worker layoffs, and a large underclass of migrants, urban unrest could be more difficult to contain.

When faced with political shocks, the Chinese leadership has a tendency to overreact, suppress information, and act heavy-handedly, unnecessarily exacerbating the problem. Still, China now has a very strong economy, which can act as a cushion, and provide more financial resources for assuaging local grievances.

Chinese and Indian economic performance has been far better in the last quarter-century than in the previous two hundred years—and this is one of the striking events in the recent history of the international economy. Other countries must adjust to this reality, and learn to treat the partial restoration of the earlier global importance of these two countries as an opportunity for trade, investment, and exchange of ideas, not as a threat. (We also need to work in tandem with them on the environment.) But we must remember that the story of their rise is more complicated and nuanced than standard accounts make out. That more complex story includes the positive legacy of China and India’s earlier statist periods, which offers general lessons for the process of development much too often ignored.

Source.
This marvelous, balanced research by Pranab Bardhan, a professor of Economics at the University of California, Berkeley, is highly recommended.

Travel to India? Incredibly unsafe India

The rape of a 35-year-old foreigner, holding dual citizenship of France and Switzerland, in Pushkar a week ago (the complaint was filed only on Saturday) is the third such incident involving foreign tourists in the last few weeks, in Rajasthan. And this has seriously rattled the ministry of tourism and the tourism industry in general.

Minister Ambika Soni has called a high-level meeting of state tourism secretaries on January 24 to try and find a solution to this serious law and order problem. Recently, Union Tourism Secretary S. Banerjee wrote to all state governments, reminding them of the ministry’s earlier recommendation to deploy special police at popular tourist sites.

The number of foreign tourists in the country has been going up steadily. So has foreign exchange earnings: it was nearly $6,500 million in 2007, up 25 per cent from the previous year. Those in the industry fear the assaults could change all that.

“The dollar is falling, and it has affected our trade. This is somehow being compensated by greater tourist inflow. But if international tourists get concerned about their safety and begin choosing other Asian destinations like China and Singapore over India, the industry is doomed,” says Tahiruddin Tahir, president, Tour Guides Association at the Taj Mahal in Agra.

On Saturday, an American teacher’s wallet was stolen at the Taj. “Such incidents are being noticed and talked about more. The government needs to make tourists feel secure again,” Tahir says.

Agra has reported a number of cases of rape and sexual assault on tourists since September last year.

Ministry officials say law and order, which includes tourist safety, remains a state subject.

Meanwhile, any action the states have taken on Banerjee’s suggestion seems largely token. In Delhi, the tourism police has just about 80 personnel and 10 PCR vans for tourist assistance. This when government statistics reveal the Capital sees the highest number of tourists in the country (20 lakh in 2006). “Ten vans for a destination like Delhi is just not enough. They need to sensitise the entire police force to make tourists feel comfortable,” says a Delhi tourism department official.

Jane Rankin Reid, an Australian who has traveled extensively in India in the last 10 years, says: “I had to learn to cover my shoulders and not show my knees, which is hard to do in the heat. My bottom got pinched in Delhi a few times but to be honest, my bottom got pinched in Rome and London too.” Reid doesn’t subscribe to the view that it’s the colour of her skin that makes her a target. “I don’t think it is because I’m white. None of the sexual come-ons had racial overtones, just the desperation of men not knowing how to respect women.”

Reid has built this opinion over years of staying in India. For most other tourists, such ugly incidents could shape opinion. Countries like the US, UK, Australia, Canada and France have, in travel advisories, already warned citizens on the law and order situation here.

Source

More Than 2 million Kids Under 5 Died in India Last Year Only

Even Indian government and news medias often brag that or "India is the third largeat economy" and often connect India with "superpower". India's human development is worse than many African countries in many factors.


A new report by the U.N. Children's Fund or UNICEF, reveals that India accounted for more than two million of the 9.7 million children who died in the world before their fifth birthday last year. In other words, one-fifth of the worldwide deaths of children under the age of five occur in the populous South Asian country.

Victor Aguayo at UNICEF in New Delhi says it is now recognized that malnutrition levels in India are "unacceptably high."

The U.N. says India also has the largest pool of children who have never been immunized - about 9.5 million. These children are more vulnerable to diseases such as measles and diphtheria. (Source)

According to the World Factbook published by CIA, India's birth rate is about 2.2%. Simple calculation tells that about 10% of Indian newborns will die before they are 5 years old. That's human disaster.


Details in the report highlighting some stark realities. On the ‘human poverty’ rank devised for 108 developing countries, India ranks 62nd; even Kenya is better than us, at 60th place! This data is for 2004. In the category ‘children underweight for age 0-5’, our rank is 132nd, and India’s adult illiteracy rate is put at 39 per cent. Compare this with the adult illiteracy rate in Rwanda (35.1 per cent) and Malawi (35.9 per cent).

To those who love to talk about a “young India” against an “ageing China” and boast of how over 50 per cent of our population is below 25 years, the data from the CII/WEF study are thought-provoking.

Regular employment represents only 15 per cent of total employment in India, and employment in firms with more than 10 employees - only 4 per cent of total employment. This is the reality of Indian economy. (Source)

Chinese Go after Broadband when cell phone becoming hot in India

Some data from guardian's news:

According to the internet consultancy Point Topic, 298 million people had broadband at the end of March and that is already estimated to have shot over 300 million.

US leads the pack with more than 60 million subscribers.

China now has more than 56 million from 41 million users a year ago.

Japan ranked third, with 26.5 million broadband users at the end of March this year.

Germany is fourth at more than 16 million.

France takes the fifth spot with 15.3 million.

Penetration in China is 14.35% while in India penetration stands at just 1.15% of the country's estimated 200 million households.

Obviously, most of Indians can only afford US$25 cell phones, but not for more expensive personal computers for internet.

India escapes U.S. list of worst human traffickers

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- India, which advocacy groups say may have as many as 65 million forced laborers, was spared the worst ranking on the State Department's new list of nations where humans are bought and sold.

The annual Trafficking in Persons report, released Tuesday, says that as many as 800,000 people -- largely women and children -- are trafficked across borders each year. Many are forced into prostitution, sweatshops, domestic labor, farming and child armies.

U.S. officials told CNN the question of India's ranking caused a heated debate between Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte.

Negroponte wanted India listed as a Tier 3 country, or worst offender. Rice overruled him out of concern about alienating the Indian government. India is on the Tier 2 watch list.

Rice agreed to undertake a special evaluation of India in six months, and then take action if India does not make improvements.

Mark Lagon, ambassador at large for the State Department's Trafficking in Persons office, said Tuesday that "many different variables" played into the decision.

The United States, however, is not immune to the problem. The State Department estimates 14,500 to 17,500 people are trafficked into the United States each year.

India was put on the watch list for the fourth year in a row "for its failure to show increasing efforts to tackle India's large and multidimensional problem," according to the report.

The report found while the Indian government was making significant efforts to combat trafficking, it "did not recognize the country's huge population of bonded laborers," which advocacy groups estimate to range from 20 million to 65 million.

The report also found efforts by Indian law enforcement agencies to punish traffickers "uneven and largely inadequate."


For more details, please refer CNN.

Faked Deaths Show Ills Of India's Police

(AP) As far as nearly everyone knew, Gurnam Singh Bandala was gunned down in a shootout with police 13 years ago during the waning days of an uprising by Sikh separatists.

That is, until Bandala turned up alive, living as a preacher outside this northern Indian city.

"It's the perfect cover, being dead," says Bandala, the classic image of a towering Sikh with his white robe, deep blue turban and long gray beard.

Authorities now believe an innocent farmer was deliberately killed by police so that they could present his body as Bandala's and collect a $60,000 bounty.

"I thought I was so lucky," Bandala told The Associated Press in an interview. But "there was no luck. There was murder."

Bandala's re-emergence is one of nearly a dozen similar cases reviewed by the AP that have surfaced recently in India. The faked police shootouts have shaken an already troubled justice system in a country that touts itself as a rights-respecting democracy where the rule of law prevails.

Former police officials and human rights activists say the fake encounters are the brutal result of a system dominated by poorly educated, badly trained and corruptible cops, dirty politicians and stagnated courts where justice, if it ever comes, can be delayed for years.

"Because cases take years to be settled, because witnesses don't show up, because bribes are paid, criminals get away. So the police resort to shortcuts," says Sankar Sen, a former policeman who's now a fellow at the Institute for Social Sciences in New Delhi.

The exact number of fake encounters is impossible to determine. Police officials acknowledge only a handful over the past two decades and say they are isolated cases.

But the former and current officers say the problem is more widespread, and rights activists estimated the number must be in the hundreds, if not thousands.

They point to the tens of thousands of people who have disappeared, many after being detained by police during one of the myriad insurgencies here in the last three decades. An estimated 3,000 people were lost without explanation during the Sikh uprising in Punjab in the 1980s and early 1990s. About 10,000 are missing in Kashmir, where an Islamic rebellion festers today.

In Punjab, the fight for a separate Sikh state left about 25,000 people dead, including 1,700 police. Bandala is one of three former separatist militants who were said to have been killed in shootouts but who recently turned up alive.

"Somebody was killed in their place," says Ranjan Lakhanpal, a human rights lawyer. "We believe there are many more."

In Kashmir, a Himalayan region wracked by an Islamic rebellion since 1989, police this year began investigating five cases, all involving security forces who may have killed innocents and claimed they were rebels to earn rewards.

And in Gujarat, a western state riven by tensions between Hindus and Muslims, three policemen and three senior officials have been arrested for their alleged role in the 2005 slaying of a Muslim couple. Authorities earlier had said the husband was part of a plot by Islamic militants to kill the state's top elected official, a Hindu nationalist.

However, the Kashmir and Gujarat probes are exceptions and most allegations never are fully checked, says Ajai Sahni, former chief of India's Intelligence Bureau, part of the country's law-enforcement apparatus. "They're the result of dogged investigations by good policemen. That rarely happens."

One reason few cases are investigated is that most Indians aren't interested. Wealthier Indians in particular have long accepted extrajudicial killings disguised as shootouts as the most expedient way to get rid of criminals.

There's even a reverential term for officers with the highest tallies: "encounter specialists."

"There is pressure from politicians, there is pressure from the public," says Sen, the former policeman. "They wat criminals eliminated, they cheer it."

Sen spent 35 years with the police, eventually running the National Police Academy before leaving the force to head the government's National Human Rights Commission.

He says that when he was a top officer years ago in the eastern state of Orissa, a politician, whom he won't name, told him to kill a troublesome bandit.

Sen says he refused, "but other policemen were more cooperative." The bandit was slain.

Police kill not only career criminals, but also stage shootouts to get promotions or rewards. That was the case with Bandala.

Bandala already was in hiding for a decade when he read, in July 1994, about his own death in a local newspaper. He worried at first, "then I realized the police wouldn't be chasing me anymore," he said.

At the same time, a woman who lived a few villages over would start looking for her husband, Sukhpal Singh.

According to court documents filed by Singh's family, police came to their home in August and picked up the farmer, then 26, for questioning.

"He disappeared like a ghost," says his widow, Dalbir Kaur. "We've never seen him again."

When Kaur and her mother-in-law went looking for Singh, the police who took him said he'd been transferred to another station. So they went there only to be told he'd been sent back to the first.

It went on and on. Months stretched into years. Singh's mother died and his family sold their small farm to pay for lawyers who are seeking $12,500 in a wrongful death suit.

Authorities have never told them what happened to Singh. But a senior Punjab police officer, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the matter remains sensitive, said authorities believe Singh was killed in Bandala's place. His body was presented as that of Bandala's and then cremated in accordance with Sikh custom.

Asked what happened to the two officers who were first credited with the killing _ and claimed the reward _ he said one, Jaspal Singh, a former deputy superintendent of police, is in jail, convicted of torturing and murdering a human rights activist. The other, Paramraj Singh Umrananagal, is now a senior Punjab police officer. He refused to speak about the case.

Bandala, meanwhile, was caught by police in 1998 and spent four years in prison on charges of carrying illegal weapons. He was convicted under his real name, but the public record _ which lists Bandala as deceased _ was never changed.

"Nobody likes to be embarrassed," the official said.

The news comes from here.

Incomplete List of Political Violences in India Since April 2006

This post only covers the deadly violences that caused causalties for political reasons in India between April 2006 and Agust 2007, such as police killings, rebellion killings, killings for political hatred and the killings for religionous reasons. This is a post that response to Indian's boasting about the superiority and the stability of their political system.

I don't think this list will cover all of those cases since I am only a blogger. Also the collection started in May 2007. A lot more incidents before then were missed in this post.

I decided to stop the collecting due to the limited time I can spend on it. But the post clearly show what is India's situation. It will answer your questions such as:
Is India politically stable?
Is India a real democratic country as India cliams?
Is India shining?

Make your judgements by truth.

BTW, recently twin bomb blasts killed at least 43 and injured more than 100 people 08/26 at India's cyber-city of Hyderabad.

08/13/2007: Source. Four Hindi speakers have been killed by separatist militants in India's north-eastern Assam state, police say. The latest deaths bring to more than 30 the number of people killed in rebel attacks in Assam in the past six days.

08/13/2007: Source. Three persons including a teenage boy were killed and 16 others injured, some of them critically in a powerful grenade explosion carried out by suspected militants in North Kashmir this afternoon.

08/13/2007: Source. Army on Monday shot dead two militants of Karbi Longri National Liberation Front (KLNLF), responsible for slaughtering 29 Hindi-speaking settlers in Assam's Karbi Anglong district since August 8.

08/12/2007: Source. Suspected rebels killed four Hindi-speaking migrant workers before dawn Sunday and three more bodies were found from an earlier killing in India's insurgency-wracked northeast, police said, bringing the death toll from a week of violence to 30.

08/11/2007: Source. Indian police hunted down and killed a suspected Kashmiri militant believed to be the mastermind of a 2005 attack on a disputed holy shrine, police said on Saturday.

08/11/2007: Source. Thirteen people were killed and 15 wounded in attacks by rebels in India's Assam state days before the country celebrates its 60th independence anniversary.

08/11/2007: Source. A top militant of the Jaish-e-Mohammed (JEM) was shot dead in an encounter with the police on the outskirts of Jammu Saturday.

08/08/2007: Source. Separatist rebels shot dead eight Hindi-speaking migrant workers in India's northeast Assam state on Wednesday.

08/08/2007: Source. Two people were killed and 12 injured in a series of bomb blasts in India's northeastern state of Assam on Wednesday.

08/02/2007: Source. Leftist guerrillas killed two people, including an elderly man, in separate incidents near Raipur.

07/27/2007: Source. Indian police kill at least 8 people in protesters clash. The protest a day earlier in Mudigonda, a small village in the southern state of Andhra Pradesh, was called by two Indian communist parties as part of a campaign to press the government to give land to the poor.

07/14/2007: Source. A local official kidnapped by rebels in the northeastern Indian state of Assam was found dead Monday.

07/11/2007: Source. Abducted Food Corporation of India (FCI) official P.C. Ram was killed in a gunbattle between security forces and members of the United Liberation Front of Asom (ULFA) at Borka Panitema village in Kamrup district of Assam from late Wednesday night to Thursday noon. Two ULFA men were also killed in the encounter with security forces .

07/10/2007: Source. Five Maoists were Tuesday gunned down by police in a gun battle in the forest region of the Western Ghats in Karnataka.

07/09/2007: Source. Maoist militants attacked Chintagufa village in the state's insurgency-hit Bijapur district Friday night and took two farmers to a nearby forest.
The bullet-ridden bodies of the farmers, Kalmu Dulla, 50, and Marwi Mura, 40, were found in the forest Monday.

07/09/2007: Source. An hours-long battle between police and Maoist rebels armed with machine guns and mortars ended with the deaths of 25 rebels and 24 police in a thick forest of Chhattisgarh State in central India.

07/06/2007: Source. Police opened fire on a crowd protesting alleged human rights abuses in Jammu and Kashmir yesterday, killing one teenager and wounding a second person.

07/06/2007: Source. Muhammad Sultan s/o Abdul Gaffor r/o Kutch Hall and Muhammad Ashraf s/o Muhammad Ramzan r/o Ranthal were killed by soldiers of 11 Rashtriya Riles to revenge the militant attack in which a soldier sustained injuries.

07/05/2007: Source. A civilian was killed and another wounded in Kashmir on Thursday when an Indian soldier fired at angry villagers who tried to seize him while he was reportedly cuddling with a Muslim girl.

07/05/2007: Source. Two villagers were killed when hundreds of Nagaland residents crossed the border and torched four settlements in Geleki, in Sibsagar district. More than 20 villagers have been injured in the attack.

07/01/2007: Source. Two villagers were beaten to death and another seriously injured on orders issued by a kangaroo court held by Maoist rebels in India's eastern state of Bihar, a news agency reported Monday.

06/30/2007: Source. Naxalites of the Communist Party of India (Maoist) attacked and blew up two police posts and killed nine persons, including seven policemen, in Rohtas district of Bihar on Saturday night.

06/30/2007: Source. Four powerful bombs set off by suspected separatists exploded in crowded markets and outside a Hindu temple in northeast India's Assam state on Saturday, killing five people and wounding more than 70.

06/28/2007: Source. At least seven suspected Muslim militants were killed on Thursday by security forces in India- administered Kashmir as they sought to cross into India while a soldier died in the encounter, officials and reports said. Three militants said to be planning a suicide attack were killed by the police in another gun-battle in the insurgency-torn state.

06/25/2007: Source. In Chhattisgarh, tension prevailed in the southern parts as Maoists allegedly killed two members of a civil militia movement soon after the blockade began at midnight on Monday.

06/25/2007: Source. At least two persons were killed and 11 injured Monday when a grenade lobbed at security forces missed the target and exploded at a bus stand in Jammu and Kashmir's Doda town, about 175 km from here.

06/24/2007: Source. Five unidentified militants were killed and three army personnel injured in the gunbattle at village Beri-Doori near the Line of Control (LoC) in Keran sector on Sunday.

06/23/2007: Source. A bomb blast in the city of Gauhati in northeast India Saturday has killed at least five people and wounded nearly three dozen more.

06/22/2007: Source. Two Maoists were killed Friday in a gun battle with police in Andhra Pradesh's Warangal district.

06/19/2007: Source. Two security personnel were killed and two injured when 20 Maoists attacked a police team on a train in Bihar in Central India.

06/18/2007: Source. A 15 year old boy was killed in a cross fire when an encounter was going on between Indian Troops and LeT militantsin Chewdara area of Beerwah of District Budgam.

06/17/2007: Source. A top rebel leader and two other suspected militants were killed on Monday in a gunbattle with Indian forces in Indian-controlled Kashmir.

06/13/2007: Source. Police killed a rebel and recovered 10 kg (20 lb) of explosives in Guwahati, A main city of Assam.

06/13/2007: Source. Two people were killed and 30 wounded in a powerful bomb blast in a crowded village market in India's restive state of Assam on Wednesday

06/12/2007: Source. Three Indian soldiers and Five suspected Islamic militants were killed in Kashmir.

06/11/2007: Source. In occupied Kashmir, an Indian police personnel and a civilian were killed and a woman was injured in an attack at Mola in Ramban district.

06/10/2007: Source. Indian troops in Kashmir have shot dead three Islamic militants along the de facto border with Pakistan and a further three people have been killed by rebels.

06/10/2007: Source. At least eleven people were killed and six injured in clashes between two rival ethnic separatist groups, Meitei and Kuki , in India's northeastern state of Manipur.

06/07/2007: Source. Maoist have killed a Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader in Jharkhand's Simdega district.

06/05/2007: Source. In Maoist attack, two policemen were killed in the eastern state of Bihar after stepping on a landmine while scouring the forest for rebels.

06/05/2007: Source. Landmine blasts, blamed on Maoist rebels, killed at least five people In the central state of Chhattisgarh on Tuesday, soon after the insurgents bombed electricity transmission towers plunging thousands of homes into darkness. At least three workers of the state electricity board were killed when the truck in which they were travelling hit a landmine.
Five policemen were also injured in Tuesday's blast in Narayanpur district in the south of the state, police said.
Last week, landmines planted by Maoist rebels in Chhattisgarh killed at least nine police officers.

06/04/2007: Source. At least four suspected Muslim militants were killed Monday by security forces in India.

06/04/2007: Source. Suspected separatist rebels shot dead two ruling party leaders and abducted another politician in India's north-eastern state of Assam, it was reported Tuesday. A police spokesman told the IANS news agency that militants of the banned Dima Halam Daoga (DHD) killed Purnendu Langthasa, head of an autonomous local administrative council and his colleague, Nindu Langthasa in the North Cachar Hills district after a rally for council elections on Monday.

06/03/2007: Source. Suspected rebels ambushed a police vehicle in India's troubled northeast, killing four policemen and injuring two others near Koilapahar, a village 220 miles south of Gauhati, the Assam state capital.

06/02/2007: Source. At least four Maoist militants were shot dead in armed clashes with police in India’s central Chhattisgarh state.
In 2006, 749 people including rebels, security personnel and civilians were killed in Maoist-related violence, while there were over 250 dead in the first four months of 2007.

05/30/2007: Source. At least nine people including a paramilitary soldier have been killed in separate insurgency-related violence in India's northeastern state of Manipur.

05/30/2007: Source. A Bhutanese refugee was killed and 11 injured after Indian police fired on them as they tried to cross the Nepal-India border to return to their homeland.

05/28/2007: Source. Angry villagers blocked highways and railroad lines in northwestern India for a third day Thursday as the death toll from clashes with police rose to 18 after an officer was beaten to death and police shot four protesters.

05/26/2007: Source. A bombing in Guwahati which left seven dead and 30 injured—apparently the work of the separatist United Liberation Front of Assam (ULFA).

05/25/2007: Source. Land mines planted by Maoist rebels killed at least nine police officers in the central Indian state of Chhattisgarh.

05/25/2007: Source. Maoist rebels have killed four members of its breakaway group in Lathear district of Jharkhand.
Maoists raided a village and abducted four members of Tritiya Prastuti Committee (TPC) on Monday night. They were later killed in the jungles of Lather district

05/24/2007: Source. Maoists late Sunday attacked the house of a Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M) leader in West Midnapore district of West Bengal, killing his father-in-law, police said Monday.

05/19/2007: Source. Five Islamic militants and an Indian soldier were killed in gunbattles in Kashmir.
Indian forces are seeking to suppress an Islamic separatist revolt that began in 1989 and has claimed at least 42,000 lives by official count.
Kashmiris frequently voice resentment at the presence of an estimated 500,000 Indian security forces in the region who are battling the militants.

05/18/2007: Source. At least 13 people were killed on Friday when a bomb ripped through a historic mosque in southern India, sparking clashes between angry Muslim worshippers and security forces.
At least two of the 13 deaths were caused by police who fired live ammunition and tear gas at angry crowds protesting against what they said was a lack of police protection,

05/15/2007: Source. Separatist rebels killed six immigrant labourers in coordinated strikes on Tuesday in northeast India's restive Assam state.
These attacks came a day after five people were killed on Sunday (05/13/2007)in ethnic clashes in eastern Assam.
Two people were killed on Monday (05/14/2007)in a bomb blast set off by the rebels at a market in Guwahati, the state's main city.
More than 20 000 people have been killed since the insurgency began in Assam in 1979.

05/13/2007: Source. Five Maoist guerrillas were killed in a shootout after security forces in eastern India raided a rebel hideout.
Meanwhile, in Chhattisgarh Maoist rebels killed a police constable deployed to guard state Public Health Engineering Minister Kedar Kashyap in insurgency hit Bastar district.

03/15/2007: Source. Suspected Maoist rebels stormed a police post in the heavily forested center of India early Thursday morning (03/15/2007), killing nearly 50 officers (some say 54) and their recruits from a village militia.

03/14/2007: Source. Farmers in eastern India angered by government plans to build an industrial park on their land fought police with rocks, machetes and pickaxes, and at least 12 people were killed, 39 people were wounded, including 14 police officers. The incident brought the death toll in Nandigram since violence first erupted there to 19 since January 7.

02/24/2007: Source. Fifteen police officers were killed Saturday when suspected rebels ambushed their patrol in India's remote northeast.

02/19/2007: Source. Two coaches of the Samjhauta Express traveling between India and Pakistan caught fire after twin blasts rocked the railway carriages at around 11:53 P.M. IST (18:23 UTC) on Sunday, February 18, 2007, as the train was passing through the railway station in the village of Diwana near the Indian city of Panipat, Haryana, India. The incident caused death of 68.

01/08/2007: Source. violence erupted in Assam with militants killing four more people, taking the toll in a string of deadly attacks mainly targeting Hindi-speaking migrant workers rising to 66.

01/06/2007: Source. At least 21 lives, including 13 migrant workers shot while they slept and eight government employees killed by a land mine explosion by suspected separatist rebels in Assam state.

01/05/2007: Source. A series of attacks by suspected separatist rebels killed 35 migrants and wounded at least 19 in Assam state's tea-growing districts of Tinsukia and Dibrugarh.
The Naxalites retaliated with Light Mortar Guns and rifles from the top of the hills killing on the spot two policemen.

12/25/2006: Source. At least four Naxalites were reportedly killed in a major offensive planned by police on a naxal-den in remote Gyarabatti area of north Gadchiroli.

11/26/2007: Source. a suspected terrorist bomb explodes on a train in West Bengal State, India. 5 people were killed and more than 25 were injured.

09/08/2006: Source. At least 2 bomb blasts target a Muslim cemetery in the western town of Malegaon. The blasts kill 37 people and leave 125 others wounded. The explosions have come four days before the verdicts are due to be announced for 123 defendants in a trial linked to the 1993 bomb attacks in Bombay that killed 257.

09/04/2006: Source. Indian police shot dead one of the longest surviving militants in Kashmir in an overnight raid on his hideout. Billu Gujjar, 36, a local commander of the rebel group Hizbul Mujahideen was killed on Monday in Udhampur.
On the same day, insurgents killed a soldier who resisted attempts to be forced from his home in Khaipora village. The soldier's brother was also killed.
On 09/05/2007: Source.Suspected militants shot dead 22-year-old Junaidul Haque, a resident of Sopore.
Elsewhere, in Pulwama and Anantnag, troops shot dead three militants late Monday and Tuesday, said police.

08/16/2006: Source. At least five persons were killed and 50 others, incluing five American and three French nationals, injured when a powerful bomb exploded in the complex of International Society for Krishna Consciousness .

07/11/2006: Source. Mumbai train bombings were a series of seven bomb blasts that took place over a period of 11 minutes on the Suburban Railway in Mumbai (formerly known as Bombay), capital city of the Indian state of Maharashtra and India's financial capital. 209 people lost their lives and over 700 were injured in the attacks. According to the Indian police the bombings were carried out by Lashkar-e-Tayyaba and Students Islamic Movement of India.

06/02/2006: Source. Twelve tribal villagers in India were shot dead by police on January 2 during a demonstration against the development of the Kalinga Nagar steel complex in the eastern state of Orissa. A 13-year-old boy and three women were among those killed.

05/31/2006: Source. A land mine believed planted by communist rebels killed 12 officers from a paramilitary police force when officers from the Central Reserve Police Force were heading back to their base in the state of Jharkhand. Maoist rebels were believed to be responsible for explosion.

05/01/2006: Source. Suspected Islamic militants have killed at least 35 Hindus in two separate attacks in Indian-controlled Kashmir. More than 60,000 people have been killed since an armed separatist insurgency began in Kashmir in 1989.

05/01/2006: Source. At least four people were killed and 22 injured Monday in the western Indian city of Vadodara in demonstrations over the demolition of a mausoleum.
In February-March 2003, Gujarat state saw the deaths of 1044 people - mostly Muslims - in sectarian violence, according to official government figures. Unofficial estimates put the death toll at more than 3,000.

04/13/2006: Source. Five people, one a policeman, have been killed in violence in the southern Indian city of Bangalore following the death of legendary film actor Rajkumar.