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A multi-billion dollar auction of new bandwidth for phone operators in India was rigged to favor certain companies, according to a report by the auditor -general of India. The report says the auction was conducted by the Communcations ministry in a way "that lacked transparency and fairness." The report focusses on a few of the operators including Reliance Communications. The result is a loss of 1.76 trillion rupees or $39 billion, according to auditors. The cellphone industry in India is seeing rapid growth- 18 million new users were added in October 2010, with the total reaching 671 million. By comparison China has 830 million users. Of 122 licenses granted in the 2008 auction, 85 went to companies that "suppressed facts, disclosed incomplete information and submitted fictitious documents," according to the auditor's report. and in at least one instance, the Ministry's department of Telecommunications "miserably failed to do the due diligence in the examination of the applications," the report said....

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This article is a must read for everyone to know where our plastic and other paper waste is ending up. With China's ban on importing plastic waste the stuff is being shipped to India, Malaysia, Philippines and Vietnam. Now these countries are turning it back. Who needs sometimes contaminated waste. In the U.S. it ends up mostly on landfills. It is a health hazard as one recent story of waste shipped out to a part of Chile shows- with health problems for people in the vicinity. The WSJ has done an excellent story with diagrams and pictures in this exceptionally good story we recommend for our readers to know what is happening worldwide with plastic waste.  There is increasing education of the harmful effects of plastic and there is a government campaign in India supported by the prime minister Modi to reduce use of plastic bags and find ways to dispose off local plastic waste. In the light of this why would India or Malaysia or any other Asian or Latin American or African country want any other country's plastic waste, particularly when it is a health hazard. In fact China for so long allowing importing of plastic waste till recently so it could be processed with low cost labour and reused for plastics production is incomprehensible, considering the health risks involved. ...

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By preventing serious illness in patients two pills for coronavirus from Pfizer and Merck can change the course of this pandemic. Pfizer will give a royalty free license to Medicines Patent Pool, an organization backed by the United Nations for its coronavirus pill. Merck has also given a royalty free license to Medicines Patent Pool for it pill. This organization will then grant a license for the manufacture of the coronavirus pills to poor developing countries. India is included in the list of countries yet China, Russia and Brazil are excluded for the Pfizer license.  Merck has given Indian generics manufacturers approval to make the pill. This will provide supplies of the pill to 105 developing countries, South Africa will also make the pill to provide it at $10 a course in Africa. Pfizer will begin manufacturing of large quantities in 2022 with 50 million planned for 2022 and 21 million in the first half of 2022. Pfizer pill will be made available in 95 countries. The Merck pill is called Molnupiravir. Pfizer pill is called Paxlovid with 30 pills taken over the course of 5 days. Pfizer pill is effective in studies when given to people who had not been vaccinated. It has to be given within 3-4 days of getting coronavirus confirmed through a test which makes testing critical for its use. ...

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Meeting between prime minister Modi of India and prime minister Sharif of Pakistan is unlike anything that has happened between leaders in the region since independence in 1947. Sharif told NDTV: "I intend taking up threads from where Vajpayee and I left off in 1999." Modi says Sharif touched on some emotional things in his conversation. Sharif told Modi about his visits to his mother once a week, and how Modi's visit to his mother seen by Sharif when visiting his mother touched both of them deeply. Rarely has a visit been captured in poetry in the manner Sharif did in answering a question, when he recited an Urdu couplet: "cling to the tree and hope, for spring is in sight."

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Give that information disclosure is not rapid enough or transparent in India, this writer says there are probably more Satyams out there in India's listed companies. He finds that the company's outside auditors, its Board with Krishna Palepu, a Harvard Business School Professor, and Vinod Dham one of the brains behind the Intel Pentium chip, and stock exchange regulators, all failed to exercize the due diligence and supervision that they were expected to perform. Only outside institutional investors acted and forced the company chairman to make the disclosures about its practices.

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LNG and other deals signed during president Trump's visit to India. Exxon and Chart Industries signed agreements to increase India's gas network. India has huge energy needs and the U.S. with large energy supplies is a natural partner for LNG imports.

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After a good start the vaccination drive is slowing both in India and the US. Vaccine supplies need to be boosted in India and the government has given approval to the Pfizer, Moderna and J&J vaccines to boost supplies. The Sputnik vaccine from Russia has also gained approval with new supplies of that vaccine expected in India. Vaccine skepticism is a problem in the US and Europe. Supplies of the Pfizer vaccine will be boosted in Europe with the EU contract for 1.8 billion doses signed recently. This should give the slow vaccination drives in France and Germany a boost.

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No country benefited more than first Japan and then South Korea till 2000, and now China till 2022 from the trade and sharing of industrial technology enabled by the American backed system of trade and industry. Walter Russell Mead says in WSJ that China has chosen to challenge the system through which it developed into an industrialized nation with the US running huge trade deficits, sharing its technology and letting Chinese manufacturing displace American local manufacturing. China is seen as challenging the system. Yet what has happened is that this process of displacing American manufacturing and industry was not sustainable anyway and continued for a decade longer than it would otherwise have lasted because American industry could not easily reverse a course it had set of setting up manufacturing in China, once that manufacturing base had already been transferred from the US to China and American companies had grown accustomed to a new state of affairs of making overseas in China. Not much thought was given to how American workers would react to that situation as companies and industries making that transfer made independent decisions. This led to the election of Trump with wins in midwestern states that had suffered from loss of manufacturing communities.  The Trump tariffs on Chinese goods and the Biden administration lining up completely behind American workers and families for the first time for Democrats has sent the signal to China that it finds the situation of China's dominance in the trade system unacceptable. The document of "China 2030" of the Chinese Government with planned dominance in key sectors and industries was met with alarm across America in all parties. The paradox of Apple as a key sector in Chinese manufacturing and the largest American company is the result of policies pursued by America without realizing the true cost of shipping manufacturing out of the country. That process is now being reversed with change of management starting at Intel Corp. and other companies to bring the manufacturing base back to the US. This policy is being resolutely pursued by the US and will speed up following the pandemic which has further demonstrated how much of a mistake the policy of sending out manufacturing in critical areas such as health could be. This is the reality behind the rhetoric and verbal exchange between China and the US. With the rapid growth of Chinese manufacturing countries such as India were put in a difficult situation  as this was preventing the local industrial base developing in India with Chinese imports in the same way as it had damaged that of the US and the EU. Worse it led to the use of US and European technology in China's defense industrial base including aviation and other sectors that threatened India's borders with repeated Chinese incursions in the Himalayas, from the Pakistan western Himalayas to Ladakh and the eastern Himalayan mountains. That situation existed long before the Trump and Biden administration and the Modi administration called for a return to America of its industrial manufacturing base and its technological leadership. Both the Bush and Obama administrations and the Indian Congress administrations failed to realize the dangers of letting the US, European and Indian industrial base wither. India is not just a country but a culture that extends from the Himalayas all the way across Bangladesh to the Indonesian islands which shares a common cultural history of Buddhism and the Vedanta. This is a region that has a population of about 2 billion people. In a larger sense the cultural history extends to  Vietnam and Japan with its Buddhist culture whose origins go back to India, and also of China itself. In the larger sense this is a population of close to 3 billion people. The economic development of this region and learning from the parliamentary traditions and scientific discoveries of the modern period since 1700 is a task for both the US, Europe and the people of the region.   ...

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A former Defense Minister of Japan serving twice and senior member of parliament of the LDP, says Japan's arrangement in Asia with the US is for a team approach. This means if the US acts to defend Taiwan, Japan is likely to join the US. creating a wider war engulfing Asia. It is in this context that the G7 conference in Hiroshima, the nuclear war museum, and others, need to broaden the approach to give people everywhere in the US and Asia a chance to understand all narratives of all the countries involved. Including in this case China's as a country subject to invasion by colonial powers, so that all the narratives can be fully understood. There is a reason for this and that is that the 18th 19th and 20th centuries offer a poor example for prevention of nuclear war. China, Japan and India share a common connection to the two thousand years old Buddhist and Vedantic ideas no matter how bruised they were by colonial powers. They offer many openings for the Chinese, Japanese and Indian people in their common history of Buddhist thought and pathways, to find a common ground. ...

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Abbott is looking for new ways to market in emerging markets. New flavors for Ensure in Asia would include lemon-honey. And cumin-jeera jal is a flavor for a supplement for diabetics in India. Abbott has a five year contract with India's drug maker Biocon to develop products for the Indian market. Abbott faces strong competition from other nutrition companies such as Nestle in India, which has 75% of the market for baby formula in India, and now owns Pfizer's baby nutrition business. With the $10 billion already spent on the Solvay and Piramal acqusiitions in India, Abbott has less room to make further acqusiitions. It will focus on organic growth with investment of about 7% of sales in R&D to develop new products. The split in Abbott's business with the separation of the pharmaceutical unit, will lead to a more consumer product oriented company.

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Jaishankar was asked at the 2021 GLOBSEC conference in Bratislava in 2021 why he thinks anyone will help India in case of a problem with China after it did not help others for Ukraine. Chancellor Scholz of Germany cites Indian Foreign Minister Jasihankar's remarks in Bratislava, Slovakia, in 2021. Jaishankar said- "Europe has to grow out of the mindset that Europe's problems are the world's problems, but the world's problems are not Europe's problems. That is if it is you it's yours, if it is me it is ours. I see reflections of that. There is a linkage today which is being made. A linkage betwen China and India and what's happening in Ukraine. Chia and India happened way before anything happened in Ukraine. The Chinese do not need a precedent somewhere else on how to engage us or not to engage us or be difficult with us or not to be difficult with us." These are Scholz's remarks at the Munich Security Conference. Scholz says Jaishankar has "a point."  "This quote from the Indian Foreign Minister is included in this year's Munich Security Report and he has a point it would't be Europe's problem alone if the law of the strong were to assert itself in international relations." To be credible European or North American in New Delhi or Jakarta, it is not enough to emphasize shared values. "We generally have to address the interests and concerns of these countries as a basic prerequisite for joint action. And that's why it was so important to me to not merely have representatives of Asia, Africa and Latin America at the negotiating table during the G-7 Summit last June. I really wanted to work with these regions to find solutions to the main challenges they face growing poverty and hunger, partly as a consequence of Rusia's war, as well as the impact of climate change or COVID-19. There is another side to this -Scholz and Germany's president Frank Walter-Steinmeier are from the social Democrats party which has sought closer cooperation with Russia, and also carry a great deal of ambivalence for the war. America is not fighting this indirect war in its neighborhood, Germany is. And some of the roots of this conflict go back to the Napoleonic invasion of Russia in the 1800's period and the German invasion in the 1940's. Macron is even more ambivalent in his position and he has remained this way from the beginning- not committed to humiliating Russia. In a way it is the position of the Social Democrats from the historical context of Germany's invasion of Russia, and Christian Democrats eagerness to create a German recovery with low cost Russian energy that created the dependence that Russia sought to use. In what it sees as the unfairness of NATO being allowed to expand right next to its borders. Because of a sense of righteousness on both sides- Russia of the Soviet period failing to see the feelings of a Budapest in 1956, East Berlin in 1953, and Prague in 1968, sees little wrong in an invasion of Kviv. And with it all the biography of Brezhnev the last leader of the Soviet Union, describes that very struggle in the Great Patriotic War the soviets fought against Nazi Germany which was fought by Ukrainians including Leonid Brezhnev with great will and purpose against all odds.  Cambridge historian has written the history of Europe that Scholz is cited to be reading in 2021- Europe The Struggle for Supremacy 1453 to the Present.  It shows Europe since 1453 engaging in balance of power of European powers, Sweden Denmark, Russia, Austria, Germany, France, Britain, Turkey, continually for 500 years. Europe simply forgot its own history. Asia including Japan, China, Indonesia and India, simply emerging from the situation of falling behind in science, technology, and the industrial revolution and building their economies with the help of the US since the Meiji Restoration in Japan in 1868. The Balance of Power Simms says was maintained for 500 years is simply based on no country allowed to act with impunity, no country allowed to do whatever it wanted because of its position of strength at that moment or period of time. In that situation all other powers regrouped to keep the balance from being upset. The war in Ukraine is also likely to end in a way that is consistent with that which Brendan Simms writes about because this has not changed now for over 500 years. Biden knows this and it has fallen on America to shoulder the burden for this in the last 150 years, Scholz is aware of this, Modi in India sees this, and Jinping in China realizes this even with its concerns about Taiwan.   ...

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Streets in Marseille with tons of rubbish piling up as garbage bin workers seeking a 21 hour week go on strike in Marseille, France. Much has changed in European countries as countries such as India work on a Clean India effort to clear up rubbish through Swacch Bharat campaign.

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India crosses the 10 million mark in coronavirus cases for the first time on December 18, 2020. The number of deaths is at 146,000. The U.S. is the only other country with over 10 million cases. U.S. has 17 million cases and 318,000 deaths on December 18. The daily cases in India peaked in September at about 94,000 and have declined to 27,000 in December. The U.S. meanwhile is hit by a second wave that is much worse than the first. Daily cases now are close to 250,000 on December 18, 2020. The daily cases in the second wave are much more severe than the first. They have increased by a factor of 5 to 10 times. Places which got through the first wave without severe damage are hit hard in December. This includes Germany, and California. In California daily cases exceed 50,000 and in Germany 30,000. In California, France, Germany, and UK, Spain, the daily cases far exceed earlier cases in the first wave by a factor of 5 to 10 times. For this reason India needs to be wary of a resurgence in the pandemic in a second wave. With its large population, need for economic recovery, and opportunity to benefit from the vaccine developments and its strict protocols for testing, isolation and social distancing, mask wearing, India can carefully and vigilantly prepare for the second wave. ...

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With vaccine hesitancy in the US the goal of vaccinating a large part of the US population is still elusive. Less than half of the US population is fully vaccinated as of July 30. The vaccination rates in the US are now much slower than India even taking into account the population difference. The vaccination in India is at the rate of 4 to 5 million a day for the past week in India. In the US this report in The Guardian shows 4.7 million vaccinated in the past 2 weeks. On July 30 856,000 people were vaccinated in the US compared to over 5 million in India.  Newspaper reporting that encourages vaccine hesitancy people to delay getting vaccinated because of poorly reported headlines is adding to vaccine hesitancy in the US. This has led to much frustration at the White House. The threat of the Delta variant is making more people to take vaccination. Southern states are seeing a jump in vaccinations. Many prominent Republicans are now endorsing vaccination.  One of the problems in tackling the Delta variant is the confusing nature of the CDC guidance on masks. On May 13 CDC issued guidance saying masks were not necessary indoors and outdoors. Now 3 months later in July the CDC says the threat of Delta variant means mask wearing is essential particularly indoors because of the higher transmissibility of the delta variant.  ...

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Two years after it was launched the Jal Jeevan Mission to bring tap water to every household in India has made significant progress. Only 17% of all rural households had tap water in 2019, today even with covid disruptions 41% of rural households have tap water. 48 million more households have tap water connections added. The goal of Har Ghar Jal (Every home tap water) is now seen as achievable by 2024. Financing in 2021-2022 is increased from 115 billion rupees to 500 billion rupees, quadrupling the financial resources dedicated to providing water to all of India's people. The Swach Bharat Mission Director General, Akshay Rout, shows how this mission for water is moving as as quickly as the open defecation free ODF mission  under SBM. A household in ODF saved Rupees 50,000 a year from cleanliness and medical costs according to UNICEF. A WHO study shows 200,000 diaorrhea deaths prevented. JJM is decentralized, demand driven and community managed. Rout says that setting a deadline and aiming for saturation that leaves on one behind is a good way of tackling critical problems such as hygiene, sanitation and water. He says shoddy implementation or product can be prevented by robust monitoring and supervision systems. By 2019 India had made big achievement in hygiene and clean India campaign with ODF open defecation free achieved under this approach. ...

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The Coal India IPO will bring $151 billion rupees ($3.39 billion). This is India's largest IPO. The IPO drew demand of $52.48 billion. The Indian government's goal is to raise 400 billion rupees for the fiscal year ending April 1, by selling stakes in state-owned companies.

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After declining sales in 2013, India's auto industry recovers in 2014 with 13% more car sales in June 2014 than the prior year month. SUV sales were up 17% in June 2014 over the prior month. Mahindra and Mahindra has 51% of the market share for SUV's from Jan to June 2014, according to LMC. Ford Motor has increased SUV sales in China and is pursuing the same strategy in India.

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PM Modi tells parliament in a reply to the president's address yesterday laying out the government's program, that if India operated at the speed of previous governments before 2014 it would take three decades to get to No.3 in the world's economies. Instead India plans to move from the 5th largest economy in the world to No.3 by 2030. He pointed to the investments that the government had made in providing housing, income support, water, on a scale uparalleled in history to bring 250 million people out of poverty. The four pillars of the programs are Nari Shakti women's progress, Yuva Shakti youth progress, Anna Data farmers progress, and strengthening the industrial infrastructure of the country. The prime minister pointed to previous prime ministers having doubts about what India could achieve in the community of nations and compared it to the convictions, the hard work and the single minded determination of the people driving progress today who have no such doubts. ...

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This BBC report looks at how doctors, nurses, police, railway employees, and sanitation workers in India are tackling the job of preventing the spread of coronavirus as India goes into a complete lockdown. The lockdown and quarantine are intended to slow the epidemic for enough time to enable bringing it under control.