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Debate: Should the illegal immigration of Bangladeshis be stopped?

Posted by Charudatta Galande on May 22, 2010

I hope our readers liked the first debate. Today we start the second monthly debate. The Backbenchers’ Blog thanks the panelists Debjeet Sen and Priyank Chandra for being a part of this debate. depending on the reader response) debate series that we plan to have.

The topic is Should the illegal immigration of Bangladeshis be stopped?

View: Debjeet Sen argues that illegal immigration should be stopped.

Counter-view: Priyank Chandra argues that we should not attempt to stop immigration from Bangladesh.

The debate is now open to our readers to participate in. Let me write down a few rules again -

1) Comments regarding both posts or anything general should be posted here.
2) Personal attacks and insults against the authors or anyone else will NOT be tolerated. Any comments resorting to such insults will be deleted without any warning.

Depending on the reader response and feedback, the panelists might write a rebuttal post in the next week.

If you don’t want to comment but have gone through the posts and have an opinion on the issue, then please vote here-

Posted in Debate | 7 Comments »

Sabka baap

Posted by Charudatta Galande on March 28, 2010

All of our enlightened readers have watched the legendary epic movie Gunda, in which a character says ‘Aaj Gundagiri aur Netagiri ek hi baap ki do harami aulaad hain”. Legendary director of the film, Kanti Shah, writes in his autobiography, “Originally I had intended to add who the baap was, but I realized that I can afford to offend all the netas and gundas in the world, but not the baaps wearing white shirts and black coats.”

You’ve no doubt heard of lawyer jokes, the ones in which a special place is reserved in hell for lawyers. But you can’t help thinking it’s true when you read something like this.

..innocent Pakistani boy…the prosecution wanted to show the world that Pakistan was involved in the Mumbai attacks and implicated the only “readily available Pakistani national in jail”….investigative agencies framed Kasab because they wanted to prove Pakistan’s involvement…. photographs, CCTV footages and DNA tests are “improbable” and the eyewitnesses, including 10-year-old Devika Rotawan, are tutored by the prosecution…. omissions and contradictions in the eye-witness accounts to show they are either “tutored” or “unreliable.”

“Karun gela dadhiwala, pakadla mishiwala” (The bearded man did everything, but the man with the moustache got caught).

..

To this, first additional principal judge ML Tahaliyani asked: “Is this a play or for real?”

Yes, is it for real? Not that it would have much of an effect on the outcome (if at all there is an outcome to all this) since the evidence is too overwhelming for any damned lawyer to clown around and refute. If it were a criminal case, there was a good chance he would have his way.

Quoted from a document on legal aid: “Whatever standards a man chooses to set for himself, be they religious, moral, social or purely rational in origin, it is the law which prescribes and governs his rights and duties towards the other members of the community. This somewhat arbitrary collection of principles he has very largely to take as he finds and in a modern society it tends to be so diverse and complex that the help of an expert is often essential not merely to enforce or defend legal rights but to recognize, identify and define them.”
-Mathews and Oulton

Right. The principles that govern us do seem to be arbitrary, and we really do need these experts to identify and define them.

Cartoon courtesy: The Far Side (cartoon strip)

Posted in Law, Terrorism | Tagged: kasab, Law, legal-aid, Terrorism | 1 Comment »

Admin: For RSS Subscribers

Posted by Charudatta Galande on March 26, 2010

Note: This post will appear on the top for a few days, to make sure all readers get this message.

This post is for readers who use RSS Feeds to read The Backbenchers’ Blog.

The default feeds provided by WordPress do not allow us to track the number of readers of this blog. So, we have changed the RSS links to FeedBurner Feeds, which allow us to maintain stats on the blog easily. You can see the current subscriber count (using the FeedBurner Feed) below the RSS Links on the right hand side column on this page.

I request the current subscribers to unsubscribe from the current WordPress feed and update the following RSS feed in your favorite reader – http://feeds.feedburner.com/thebackbenchers
and
http://feeds.feedburner.com/thebackbenchers-comments

Thanks in advance for the huge favor. :)

Posted in General | Leave a Comment »

Crossing the cutting edge

Posted by Charudatta Galande on March 23, 2010

India has always been on the cutting edge of hi-technology. Twenty years ago, around the same time when people in the west came up with the World Wide Web, we were thinking far ahead into the future – a watch which can make you invisible. I always knew we were far ahead of the west, though at that time, Sridevi’s rain dance was far more appealing to me than cool technology. Too bad it’s not the same twenty years later.

The late 90s saw the birth of the Indian geek. Average-to-intelligent guys (and later girls) doing ‘computer courses’ and ‘in’ things like MCA and MCM were the new age engineers. The definition of a computer in my fifth grade computer class in school was still ‘It is like a television, but you can type into it, play games with it and write interact with it’, when ‘computer engineering’ became the hottest thing in the college market. Before I owned my first computer (c. 2000), Bangalore was already a hotspot on the outsourcing scene and Narayan Murthy was a household name. In popular imagination, the rise of the software industry was synonymous with the ‘Rise of India’ and a software professional was the uber-cool image of the ‘Indian techie’ and the bestseller in the marriage market. But that is not the subject of today’s post.

The Indian tech industry in the last decade has seen a surprising and welcome upturn. No, I am not talking about ISRO’s Chandrayaan or the Tata Nano. I am talking about the growth of new technology startup companies and the rise of an infrastructure ecosystem to support them – incubation centers, angel investors, venture capital, networking platforms, business plan competitions, mentoring programs etc. I know quite a few young folks my age, keen on making it big, starting companies with wild ideas ranging from self-publishing to board games.

Though most of the startups on the Indian startup scene are still dotcoms, what interests me more is the latest crop of hardware innovation companies. I believe the real big pie in the technology arena right now is the innovation segment – Indian companies designing and developing innovative hi-tech hardware products with a potential to compete in the global market. It’s heartening to see youngsters taking the big jump to compete with global giants.

Like this startup and this one too, both started by fresh engineering graduateswho managed to produce and market Unmanned Aerial Vehicles without hanging themselves to ceiling fans. Or the latest tablet PC developed by a Hyderabad-based startup, NotionInk, which is being widely touted as an ‘Ipad Killer‘, being better than Apple’s latest baby both in terms of features and price. I really hope the Adam tablet makes it big in the global market and gives Apple a run for its money!

There’s much more to write on this, especially on the aspect of rural innovation, but that deserves a separate post. For now, I’ll just drink to the new age techies. I believe this is the future of the Indian tech industry. As Johnny Walker says in this song, “Wahaan ke log heere, yahaan ke log moti, chiba chibbbaa!” (Must-watch video)

GM crops: Old issue revisited

Posted by Charudatta Galande on February 8, 2010

The recent furore over BT Brinjal has once again brought the issue of genetically modified foods into public debate. The issue first cropped when there was an attempt to introduce BT cotton into the Indian market.

For the uninitiated, BT stands for Bacillus thuringiensis, a bacterium which produces insecticidal proteins. BT insecticides have been in use for a long time, and have been quite popular because they’re seen as environmentally friendly, devoid of potential toxicity to humans or danger of getting into the food chain.

In the mid-eighties, with the advent of genetic engineering, a Danish company came up with a tobacco plant which had been inserted with genes from BT (source), allowing it to produce the insecticidal proteins, and therefore making it pest resistant. In the mid-nineties, attempts to introduce BT-modified cotton started in India. This study is similar to many other white papers written in other countries (You could google and find studies from Argentina, China, etc) on the prospects of BT cotton. Their main argument was that increased resistance to pests would increase yield as well as reduce chemical pesticide use.

However, there were several valid concerns regarding the adoption. The most important in my opinion was that BT cotton is sterile. Which means, seeds produced by BT-cotton plants cannot be reused by farmers for replanting the next year; the farmers will have to buy expensive seeds every year from MAHYCO (the company which produces them. Incidentally, Monsanto bought 26% stake in Mahyco in 1998). But it does not stop at that. It is very much possible that cross-pollination with BT cotton will make other varieties of cotton sterile, thereby contaminating the genetic pool permanently – a recipe for irreversible disaster, besides creating a permanent dependence on the company. This ‘fear’ was ‘addressed’ by various studies like this one (‘Facts Allay Fear’), which confidently and happily beat around the bush without providing a definitive answer. Reminds me of the Academy of Tobacco Studies.

There were other fears too, such as the ballworms (the main pest targeted) developing a resistance to the BT cotton and other species of insects such as bees (which help pollination) being affected. There are also reports (this one and this one too) of other pests immune to BT replacing the ballworm as primary pests. These issues, when coupled with the contamination of the gene pool are serious concerns.

This important issue, however, has been totally absent in the current public debate over the introduction of BT Brinjal. BT is just one of many GM foods/crops under field trials in India, some of them illegal. The government should institute stronger controls on what GM foods are introduced into the market, and create a stronger framework for controlled field trails before any decision is made. This is crucial for protecting India’s self-sufficiency in agricultural production and interests of agro-based industries in the long run.

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