Apologies for the lack of posts – again !!
Have been doing a bit of travelling over the last
two weeks. I have lots of photos to share so stay tuned.
In the meantime, here are a few articles I found.
The first talks about the onion crisis here in India.
Did you know that yesterday was “World Toilet Day”
?? That’s what the second article talks about.
Enjoy:
Tears
as India's onion prices soar
Date: November 20, 2013 - 12:55PM
Annie Gowen
A labourer sorts onions inside a storehouse in
Lasalgaon. Photo: Kuni Takahashi/Bloomberg News
Can a country of 1.2 billion people really come
undone over a lowly vegetable? In India these days, the answer is yes.
Onion prices, often volatile here, have soared in
recent weeks, sending a country that views the vegetable as a culinary staple
into a tailspin.
Some have blamed darker forces, suggesting that
traders are fixing prices or that hoarders - ''onionnaires'' - are keeping the
bulbs tucked away.
Cable news reporters do breathless stand-ups from
local markets. Special onion vans have been dispatched to affected areas. Onion
jokes pepper Twitter and Facebook. Protesters have taken to the streets wearing
garlands of the pungent vegetable.
A worker carries a bag of onions at a wholesale
market in Nashik, Maharashtra. Photo: Kuni Takahashi/Bloomberg News
The governor of the Reserve Bank of India, Raghuram
Rajan, was even asked about onions during a recent news conference.
"We have no immediate capacity to bring down
onion prices," he said with a slight smile.
"The Great Indian Tearjerker," as one
local newspaper dubbed the saga, began in August, when the price of onions
nationwide inexplicably began to rise. In the weeks that followed, onion prices
in the capital and other major cities have at times topped 75 cents a pound, a
278 per cent increase.
Workers harvest onions near Chandwad, Maharashtra. Photo:
Kuni Takahashi/Bloomberg News
The reason for this is as multi-layered as the
veggie itself. Rajan has suggested that rising consumption may be a factor.
Weather - a drought followed by an overlong monsoon season - is also an issue.
Other public officials have blamed darker forces,
suggesting that traders at the big vegetable markets are fixing prices or that
hoarders are keeping the bulbs tucked away in cold storage until the prices rise.
(One blogger nicknamed these folks "onionnaires".)
Delhi's chief minister, Sheila Dikshit, who rose to
power during a previous onion crisis, in 1998, has held news conferences in
recent days to ask for patience and plead for the black-marketing to stop.
"We are trying our best to see that prices
come down," Dikshit said. (She later told reporters that she had eaten
onions with her bhindi, or okra, for the first time in many weeks, prompting
the opposition party to send her a condolence basket of the bulbs.)
Indians have grappled with rising inflation for
months, with food prices up 18 per cent this year over last - a major
contributor to the country's slowing economic growth. Even if the economy
rebounds next year, as many analysts predict, high food prices are likely to
remain a central campaign issue ahead of parliamentary elections in the spring.
Prices of tomatoes and potatoes are rising, as well.
Recently, billboards have popped up around New
Delhi showing Narendra Modi, the opposition party's prime ministerial
candidate, posed before a heap of onions and tomatoes, shaking his fist in
indignation at the "waist-breaking inflation".
"We will change India!" the poster
declares.
In the meantime, many of India's poor and even
middle-class citizens have been forced to cut down on onions or stop eating
them altogether, which has been a tough change for some. In farming communities
in the northern states of Haryana and Punjab, many of the field workers come to
work with nothing more than a roti (Indian bread), a raw onion and a green
chilli pepper. That's lunch.
Narendar Singh, 47, a petrol station employee, said
he has not been able to buy fruit for his family of five for four months and
has cut down on vegetables, buying the cheapest gourds and chickpeas available.
"We cannot afford to buy onions to spice up
the meal, either," he said. "Instead of tomatoes, we now use tamarind
pulp to sour the curry."
His dream, he said, is to educate his three
children so they can afford fresh fruit and vegetables - and motor scooters.
Indian officials say they expect onion prices to
drop in the coming weeks because of increased imports and other measures.
One recent morning in Delhi's vegetable market, as
a cool November rain began to fall, a group of onion farmers who sell to
wholesalers said they had bought about half as many sacks of onions this year
as they did last year because the extended monsoon had spoiled their crop. Even
now, they were nervously monitoring the weather back home in the eastern state
of Rajasthan via their mobile phones; it was raining again, they said, and if
it didn't stop, the rest of the onions would rot in the field.
They said that they would get a fair price for
their wares but that they were not to blame for the rising prices, pointing the
finger at the middlemen and wholesalers.
"They buy it from us for 30 rupees and sell it
for 100 rupees. What can we do about it?" lamented Nizamuddin Khan, 30,
one of the farmers.
He said onions had been unfairly singled out in the
country's ongoing debate about rising food prices.
"Everybody's talking about onions - why can't
they talk about tomatoes and potatoes?" Khan said. "Their prices are
also touching the sky. Onions have become a political issue."
Washington Post
This article was found at: http://www.theage.com.au/world/tears-as-indias-onion-prices-soar-20131120-2xun3.html
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India 'missing' 37 million lavatories, campaigners claim
The Indian government claims it has installed 37 million lavatories to improve sanitation, but campaigners say they exist only on paper
Campaigners take to the streets of
New Delhi to mark World Toilet Day Photo: SAJJAD HUSSAIN/AFP
3:16PM GMT 19 Nov 2013
India
has 37 million 'missing lavatories' its government claims to have built in
villages throughout the country but which do not exist, campaigners have said.
The claim was
made on 'World Toilet Day' on Tuesday by sanitation campaigners who compared
figures claimed by the government's rural development ministry and official
data from India's census.
The allegations
are embarrassing for India where more people are reported to
have mobile phones than access to a lavatory. According
to the World Toilet Day organisation 2.5 billion people do not have access to a
clean lavatory, and more than 600 million of them are believed to be in India.
Campaigners
called for an inquiry into the discrepancy and said it called into question the
government's Nirmal Bharat Abhiyan scheme to build lavatories throughout the
country.
Advisers had
already called on the government to halt its lavatory building programme after
it emerged that many of the lavatories were in fact being used by store rooms,
guest rooms and kitchens by villagers who preferred to do their ablutions in
the open.
But according
to Rajesh Upadhyay of the National Confederation of Dalit Organisations which
has led the campaign, the 'ground reality' in India's villages is far worse. He
and his colleagues discovered official figures for homes with lavatories had
been vastly exaggerated.
"We
compared data provided by the Census department and Rural development ministry
and found a discrepancy in their figures. The census says 31 per cent of the
population have lavatories whereas the Rural Development Ministry says over 50
per cent have lavatories. We conclude that 37 million lavatories are missing on
the ground and are only on papers," he said.
In some
villages his team discovered fewer than one in six had access to a lavatory and
those that did were unable to use them.
He called for
an inquiry to establish the number of Indians without a lavatory and called for
new legislation to make sure every home has one.
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