Well, its not just about oil...

US Congress members from the largest rice-growing states are on warpath, asking Iraq to resume buying US long-grain rice, instead of from India.  

"We liberated their country for one thing," said Texas Congressman Ted Poe. "We would think they would consider the US in trade since we spent billions of dollars not only to liberate their country, but to rebuild their infrastructure."...

...Iraq's Trade Ministry has said much of the shift is a function of the Iraqi public preferring India's Basmati rice, which the US doesn't produce...

Indian Express

More dirt on SKS: the pitfalls of chasing growth

This time, on The Hindu. Exceprts:

One loan officer signed up 273 groups in a month. Under training protocols, the ideal number of groups formed per month is 12, the maximum is 36, according to field agents and reports written by Mr. Akula.



“The focus is only on targets,” said Ramulu Sirgapur, who spent a decade at SKS before he left in December. “Even if we've given feedback, there might be recovery or repayment issues. That's OK. Just concentrate on growth.”

But basic principles of lending were overlooked, according to interviews with current and former employees, as well as correspondence and internal PowerPoint presentations by Mr. Akula.



Six current and former SKS staffers with experience in the field told the AP they no longer had time to check a borrower's assets or follow up and make sure a loan was put to productive use. They said they were pressured to push more debt onto people than they could handle, and that the number of days devoted to borrower training was cut in half.

The missing ‘F’ in decentralization

more here on livemint

In recent years, many doubts have been raised on the merits of decentralization itself – on its ability to deliver better quality of public services, on its willingness to raise resources and on its ability to improve local accountability in general. Critical to meeting these expectations is the level of devolution of functionaries to the control of local governments in our country.

UK aid to India: Part II

Even as there is more hot air gushing out of the UK, The Telegraph (the Indian one) had an interesting piece on possible reasons why the French may have been preferred over the English. The article, by KP Nayar, outlines the following reasons - we dont like pushy sellers who put up political gimmicks and publicise them unnecessarily; and we reward our 'friends in need'. For instance -

...In addition, spread across India’s entire political spectrum that includes much of the Opposition, is a firm conviction that India would not have come out unscathed from the decision to conduct the 1998 nuclear tests if it were not for the steadfast backing that President Jacques Chirac — and Nicolas Sarkozy after him — offered India in an hour of great need.


It is not widely known that during the Kargil war in 1999, the French approved with lightning speed the adaptation of Indian Air Force Mirages in tandem with equally speedy Israeli supplies of laser-guided bombs which they delivered in Srinagar: without such French and Israeli support, India could have lost Kargil to Pervez Musharraf’s perfidy.

No honourable Indian in uniform can forget that in such a situation, the US or Britain would have probably suspended all military supplies to the combatants to prove their bona fides as honest brokers for peace...

Isn't UK a friend in need, given its billions in aid, you may wonder? But that's precisely the point. In spite of its aid commitments, the Government of India has made it clear in the past that Indians won't starve in case the tap is switched off, as evident from the $23 bn of unused aid we are sitting on. Also, there are many good reasons for continuing aid to India.

But this was a much bigger decision for India, as made clear by the Telegraph article, where the stakes easily outweighed considerations of any aid that the UK might be giving India.

Waking up to shit

An international emergency, killing millions every year from among the 2.6 bn people worldwide who dont have access to toilets. The story here in The Guardian, that of Liberia and its sanitation champion, Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, none other than the President herself.

She has no doubt how critical sanitation is...

...Half the hospital beds in sub-Saharan Africa are filled with people suffering the consequences of bad sanitation. But, of course, the president sees endless statistics. Only when she looked into why so many Liberian women were dying in childbirth, and why children were dying of something as banal as the squits, did she realise "there is a relationship with water and sanitation. I needed to understand why that was so, and partly it's because people don't have access to clean water. That was an eye-opener for us."

...and is well aware of how un-sexy the subject is -

...In Monrovia, ministers and NGOs hold a weekly crisis meeting about refugees, but not about the 18% of Liberians who die because they have no toilets or clean water.

Towards the end of our interview, I ask the president why that is..."The humanitarian system responds to these things that get sensational," she says. "They want to be seen as responsive. The ordinary village, that no one is taking care of, that doesn't come to mind." And with that she takes her leave, to get back to the job of fixing her country, one latrine at a time.

Indian defence purchase decision a blow to UK aid strategy?

I hope not...but there were a few interesting statements made yesterday over India's decision, in a $10 bn deal, to prefer the French fighter jet Rafale over the Eurofighter, manufactured by BAE, in which the British group BAE has a stake. Excerpts below, from The Hindu -

Prime Minister David Cameron on Wednesday led an attack on India for selecting French firm Dassault Rafale for a mega deal to supply fighter jets ignoring British claims as MPs and the media accused New Delhi of “ingratitude,” arguing that Britain gave millions of pounds in aid to India...

...MPs and right-wing media questioned the wisdom of giving aid to India if it persisted in “snubbing” Britain. India's decision was described as much a failure of British diplomacy as a personal setback to Mr. Cameron in his campaign to establish Britain as a “partner of choice for India.”

In the Commons, his senior Conservative Party colleague and a contender for the party leadership David Davis called for him to pull his full weight to get India to change its mind pointing out that “we give aid to India many times more than what France gives.”

Another Conservative MP Peter Bone said it was a “myth” that “doling out billions of pounds out to countries like this exerts any influence whatsoever on the decisions made by those governments when purchasing equipment.”

“We need to slash the international development money and invest the billions saved to help hard-pressed British families,” he said...

...The right-wing Daily Mail said the contract was lost despite the government claims that the U.K.'s £1billion aid package to India would help secure the order. It recalled that the Secretary of State for International Development Andrew Mitchell justified aid to India last year on grounds that it would facilitate selling Typhoon to India...

This outrage is particularly interesting in the light of this piece of news where UK's Ministry of Defence wants to be an 'intelligent customer' which means among other things, that British manufacturers will need to compete to be supply equipment.

And as always, for the few that might still think otherwise, all aid and trade is political!

On posturing by MFIs

MS Sriram has an article on MFIs, where he insists on the importance on 'modesty' as an important personal and organisational attribute in general, doing business, but especially when working with the poor.

When Mexico's Compartamos, one of the largest MFIs in Latin America, was a not-for-profit, it was not really questioned much on its "sustainability" issue. The moment it became a bank, and particularly after it issued shares in the secondary market, several eyebrows went up. Fundamentally nothing had changed with regard to Compartamos vis-a-vis the clients. In case of Bolivia's BancoSol, the differences between the profit orientation and the social orientation became very sharp, with those with a social orientation moving back to a not-for-profit model leaving the people with commercial orientation to continue the mainstream banking operations.

Does hit home, with microfinance in India. However, we need to see 'modesty' not just in terms of lifestyle, but also in terms what we think we have achieved, especially in development