Posted by: John Elliott | March 27, 2012

India’s coal industry under attack at home and abroad

UK hedge fund challenges government on public sector controls

India’s coal problems are getting worse and are in the news for all the wrong reasons. The industry has been failing the country for years by not maximising the output of efficiently mined coal. As a result, power supplies have been crippled because of coal shortages, and the government has failed to act.

Now the government faces legal action for forcing Coal India (CIL), which it controls, to curb price rises and thus breach its fiduciary responsibilities as a public quoted company – CIL floated 10% of its shares on the stock market 18 months ago. The action, which was initiated today by a London hedge fund, effectively challenges the way that the government uses listed public sector companies for social economic purposes such as curbing inflation, and could upset its already weak programme of public sector share divestment.

Alongside that, the government is accused in a report being finalised by its Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) of losing an astronomic Rs10.6 lakh crores ($210bn) by allocating blocks in the highly corrupt industry to private sector companies without competitive bidding.

These two sets of charges provide yet another example of how India – and in particular the current government – is failing to cope with the ramifications of running a fast-moving globalised but still semi-controlled economy in an increasingly corrupt environment.

Power shortages

The industry is dominated by CIL which produces 80% of supplies. Private sector players, mostly power companies, have entered the business in recent years. Many of them however are less interested in producing coal than in blocking activity at their mines till prices rise. Either way, India has not been getting the coal it needs, and some power generators’ coal stocks have been down to just a few days supplies.

The stock market issue arises from CIL’s highly successful $3.5bn flotation in 2010 of a 10% equity stake, which brought in its first outside shareholders including foreign financial institutions.

Since then, CIL has been seen internationally as a good stock, which contrasts sharply with its reputation in India as a slow and inefficient public sector organisation that fails to meet the country’s needs. Its chairman and top executives have enjoyed being feted abroad in the past 18 months, but the international view is now changing because neither the government nor CIL has faced up to the implications of a public sector company’s responsibilities to maximise profits for its shareholders.

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Children’s Investment Fund Management of the UK, a hedge fund which has a 1%-2%  equity stake and is CIL’s largest shareholder after the government, is accusing the management of failing in its fiduciary duty because it has accepted “unreasonable and unlawful directions” from the Government on pricing. CIL sells its coal at 40-70% below market prices and recently accepted a government directive to cancel a price increase.

The government appears to have brushed the criticisms aside, and Alok Perti (right), the government’s secretary for coal, is reported to have said that the fund could sell its shares if it isn’t happy.

That may be because risk factors mentioned by CIL in its 2010 share prospectus warned that the  government’s interests as the controlling shareholder “may conflict with your interests as a shareholder”, and that the coal price it charged “does not fully reflect market prices of coal in India or in international coal markets”.

CIL has however suddenly become more cautious and has refused, since the fund started its attack, to agree to a request last month from the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) to sign 20-year fuel supply agreements with power producers. These agreements would bind it to deliver at least 80% of the contracted coal, and make up any shortfall on the 80% with imports that would probably cost up to 50% more than Indian coal. Reports suggest that independent directors on the board recently opposed the move because they knew that the coal delivery target could not be achieved. The board is believed to be reconsidering the demand tomorrow (March 28).

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Chris Hohn (right), chief investment officer of the Children’s hedge fund, which makes large donations to charity, is an internationally known activist shareholder. He has hit headlines for several years with demands for companies in various countries including Japan and Germany to change their practices. In a television interview yesterday, he accused CIL of “an illegal breach of their fiduciary duty”.

This raises important issues for the conduct of partially privatised public corporations, but the problem is not new. Pradip Shah, who runs Mumbai-based IndAsia Fund Advisors wrote four years ago that, “faced with opposition protests on price rise, the central governments have been bottling inflation by asking oil companies to subsidise petroleum products for the consumers”. This meant that public sector oil companies that had 20% to 45% of their equity floated on the stock market were then losing over $120m a day on government orders.

It has taken an international hedge fund to blow the whistle. Significantly, that has been possible because of India’s right to information legislation. Hohn bases his charges on documents exchanged between Perti and the CIL board – documents that in past years would have remained confidential.

What the government now needs to do is obvious. Firstly it should set up an overall energy regulator (not just a coal regulator which government is considering) to preside over supplies in all energy sectors including items such as the allocation of mining licences and pricing. It should also rationalise its subsidy arrangements so that public sector corporations can maximise their profits while the poor are catered for separately.

Sadly, the chances of this government making such policy leaps are slim, as has been seen in so many other areas over the past three years.

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Posted in environment, India, India corruption, India economy, India energy, India infrastructure, India public sector, India UK | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted by: John Elliott | March 18, 2012

Rushdie rubbishes ‘dim’ Imran Khan while Pranab Mukherjee plays ‘party pooper’

It’s been quite a weekend. India’s finance minister Pranab Mukherjee presented a desperately ineffectual and unimaginative Budget on Friday, and then failed to turn up at India Today magazine’s annual conclave yesterday (Saturday) morning, where he was billed to be the first speaker.

He withdrew not because he was too busy or had lost his Budget nerve, but because he did not want to attend the same event as Salman Rushdie (below), the famous fatwa’d and Booker prize-winning Indian-born author who withdrew from the Jaipur Literature Festival two months ago because of alleged death threats.

Apparently Mukherjee was worried about being criticised by Mamata Banerjee, chief minister of West Bengal, for being at the same event as an author accused of insulting the prophet Mohammad with his 1988 novel, Satanic Verses.

Banerjee has been using her Trinamool Congress party’s role as a small minority member of the governing coalition to wreak havoc on policies, and Mukherjee did not want to give her a new weapon. She has for the past few days been trying to block very small increases in rail fares and tonight (Sunday) has forced Dinesh Trivedi, the railway minister who belongs to her party, to resign.

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So Mukherjee stayed away, as did Akhilesh Yadav, the new 38-year old chief minister of Uttar Pradesh (UP) fearing, conference sources tell me, criticism from older members of his party who would like to trip him up in his new post. Omar Abdullah, the chief minister of Jammu and Kashmir, also stayed away, though he insisted to me in sms messages that he had a potential problem to deal with in his state. Both chief ministers have big Muslim populations

These withdrawals followed a much more interesting and headline-catching boycott by Imran Khan, the veteran Pakistani cricketer, who hopes his Tehreek-e-Insaf party will win the next Pakistan election with right-wing support from the army and Islamic parties. Imran was billed to be the speaker at the conference’s closing dinner last night, and his absence meant that Rushdie was promoted from a lesser afternoon slot to take his place.

Sir Salman Rushdie (to give him his full title) did little in his 30-minute speech (video here) and 50 minutes of questions and answers to build on his reputation as a serious literary figure, but instead generated world-wide publicity for often cheap remarks that will no doubt help sales of his books..

Im the Dim

Much of his speech, which was generally well received and good entertainment, was a music hall act aimed mainly at insulting Khan. He even asked his audience whether they had “noticed a physical resemblance of Imran Khan and Gadaffi”. He followed that by suggesting the cricketer-turned politician was a “dictator in waiting” and repeated a joke, which has been circulating in Pakistan for years, that he was known in his London socialite days as “Im the Dim”.

Rushdie then turned on the Indian government for keeping him away from the Jaipur festival, which was a gross over-simplification of what happened when his appearance on the festival programme became tied up with the UP election campaign.  He also mocked Rahul Gandhi, heir apparent head of the Gandhi political dynasty, whose leadership of Congress’s UP election campaign was a disaster.

Significantly, the Islamic activists who effectively blocked Rushdie’s visit to the Jaipur festival did nothing to stop him appearing yesterday – just as they did not object when he spoke at the same India Today conference two years ago. This underlines the belief that political parties, including Congress, used the Rushdie controversy in January to woo Muslim votes in UP. That led Rushdie to say that Gandhi had spent “years and years of kneeling down in front of every mullah you could find, and it did not even work”.

“Here in India a combination of religious fanaticism and political opportunism and, I have to say, public apathy, is damaging the freedom on what all freedoms depend: freedom of expression,” said Rushdie in one of his more serious moments.

Party Pooper

A far more thoughtful and reasoned speech was made earlier in the day by Vince Cable, Britain’s commerce minister, on whether “capitalism can be compassionate”. Reflecting battles he has had as a minority coalition member of the UK’s Conservative-led government, he said “financial capitalism is potentially toxic unless regulated”.

A headline in the India Today group’s Mail Today newspaper yesterday morning said “Pranab Plays Party Pooper”. It referred to the Budget, where Mukherjee increased indirect taxes and laid out unrealistically over-optimistic hopes for controlling India’s economy.

But the headline writer must have known that Mukherjee was also dropping out of the conference – an action that showed the government is not its own boss, having ceded that role long ago to its minority coalition partners.

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Posted in British politics, India, India books, India British relations, India Pakistan, Kashmir, Pakistan, Rahul Gandhi, Uttar Pradesh, West Bengal | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted by: John Elliott | March 15, 2012

India’s design awakening begins in Delhi

India’s modern and contemporary artists enjoy an international following, and the country’s manufacturing industry is becoming recognised abroad. But India’s design industry is scarcely known or recognised, even in India. There are markets for Indian fashion and traditional handicrafts, but little attention is paid to modern design – except maybe for autos, the high-end of home interiors and corporate logos – and there is scant design education.

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“Companies live on design but don’t see it as an important function,” says Rajshree Pathy (left), an Indian entrepreneur and contemporary-art collector, who ran the first India Design Forum in Delhi last weekend.

“India is one of the largest consumers of design, be it automobile, textile, industrial or product design, so there’s no end to the need for design professionals, but CEOs see it as elitist or something just for handicrafts.”

India is now emerging, 20 years after the economy began to open up, into a new consumer society where the drab products, poor quality, shortages, and inefficiencies of India’s pre-1991 controlled economy are becoming less acceptable.

There is a parallel here with the UK. By the end of the 1950s and early 1960s, people were tiring of the bleak decades after the Second World War and began to break out and recognise the importance of design (for British style of the 1950s, see the vast carpet at Delhi’s new airport!).

By the early-1980s, this led to design being accepted in the UK as an interesting and viable profession and that could now happen in India, whose rich cultural history has yet to have a significant influence on modern designs trends.

“We do not know Indian brands but we should, considering the country has the knowledge, infrastructure, intelligence and rich culture to offer the world. If India does not establish some brands soon it will be too late since all the imports will just take over the country,” says Karim Rashid (below), a US-based designer.

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He says it was a shame that the Delhi hotel he stayed in for the forum had “Italian lighting, Italian furniture, German sinks, German faucets, French products” – he was in the Meridien Hotel, which prides itself on its support for modern design but, like most Indian hotels, shies away from exposing its guests to local products (even breakfast marmalade!).

Inspired by the Dubai Design Forum four years ago, Pathy organised the two-day event (which she plans to repeat next year) through her south India-based Coimbatore Centre for Contemporary Art. Working with her daughter Aishwarya, she brought together some 700 Indian designers, architects and students with some famous international figures, such as Rashid, Paola Antonelli, a leading American curator, an America-based designer (below), and Lidewij Edelkoort, a fashion expert from France for a series of lectures and debates. 

However, when she went “knocking on doors” for sponsors in India, Pathy was regularly rebuffed. She says that most of the people she approached saw design as a subject for fashion and luxury goods, with little relevance to their own work.

The conference’s list of 40 sponsors included only two manufacturing and infrastructure companies – Punj Lloyd, a leading engineering group, and Titan, a watch manufacturer in the Tata group. More mainstream Tata companies, such as Tata Motors and Tata Steel, were not there, nor for example were Mahindra and Hero from the auto industry and Godrej and ITC from consumer goods.

“In the West, design plays an integral role in improving the quality of life,” says Atul Punj, chairman of Punj Lloyd. “In India it must have relevance for the masses.” His company chose to support the forum to “help shape design aspirations” in everyday life, including “sustainable cities in India with contemporary design in public utilities, buildings and infrastructure”. Given the unauthorised and uncontrolled expansion of most Indian cities, frequently with poor quality construction, that is a significant aim coming from the head of a major construction group.

Anand Mahindra, who runs the Mahindra group, says he stayed away partly because the India Design Council, which he heads, has yet to decide how to help such ventures. His interest in design is shown by the evolving styling of his company’s passenger vehicles, culminating in its new curvaceous XUV 500 (below) that is a welcome break from the look-alikes that dominate India’s roads. Tata’s Nano mini-car (below) is also the result of extensive design activity.

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Rashid and other speakers talked at the conference about the need to realise that designing involves reacting to “the needs of society, functions and aesthetics”. That was quite different from the more common “styling” that adapted established ideas, as happens with many car designs for example. There was massive potential, he said, to use Indian ideas in contemporary settings, designing for international markets.

“Global brands use design companies in places like Paris and New York that often involve Indian craftsmen and designs, so why isn’t India doing it itself?” asks Pathy. Her answer is that there is “no design thinking”, and that such an initiative-based concept does come easily in a country where all teaching is by rote and “the education system doesn’t allow you to be a creative thinker”.

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A National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad, Gujarat, produces a few dozen design graduates but that is a tiny pocket of excellence. Anand Mahindra agrees that design is not yet accepted as enough of a mainstream activity in India and that there are not enough design schools – something his council is working on.

India undoubtedly has the brains and the massive human potential to bridge these gaps, as Mike Knowles, a British furniture designer and dean of the Delhi-based Sushant School of Design, has discovered. “One major advantage India has over other nations is the dynamic qualities of students who quickly grasp the fundamentals of great design, with their many-millennia old culture exploding into creative activity,” he says.

So now is maybe the time for a generational change – the forum’s 700 delegates were noticeably younger than at most Delhi conferences and included 100 students. Currently however, says Knowles, a lack of design education is the main problem. “Most young people with design skills would rather call themselves artists because that’s where the money and glory is”.

An earlier version of this piece is on The Economist‘s books art and culture blog, Prospero http://www.economist.com/blogs/prospero/2012/03/india-design-forum .

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Posted in India, India entrepreneurs, India environment, India festivals, India infrastructure, India innovation, Indian modern art, Tata | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted by: John Elliott | March 6, 2012

Crony capitalists line-up changes in UP as Rahul Gandhi stumbles

As India waited this morning for results of five state assembly elections, the most telling headlines in the day’s newspapers, along with Rahul Gandhi’s dismal failure to galvanise votes in Uttar Pradesh (UP), were on share movements yesterday of leading companies – Jaiprakash (JP) group companies went down while Anil Ambani’s Reliance (ADAG) stocks went up, as did shares of sugar companies.

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Those share movements, which continued today till they were overtaken by heavy falls on the stock market, reflect the ousting in the UP elections of the blisteringly corrupt Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) government, led by chief minister Mayawati who favoured JP companies with massive land deals and a grand prix circuit, and also persecuted sugar companies with vindictive extortion.

They also welcomed the overwhelming victory of the Samajwadi Party (SP), whose leader Mulayam Singh Yadav (right) has helped Ambani with land for power projects in the past and will be kinder to sugar companies. Another group that will benefit is Sahara, headed by Subrata Roy, which has large real estate interests. 

Such is the condition of crony politics in India’s largest state which has a population of some 200m – roughly the same as Brazil, or France Germany and Italy combined. The question now is whether the SP, led by Mulayam Yadav, 72, who has been chief minister three times before (1989-91, 1993-95 and 2003-07), will abandon the gangland ridden “goonda raj” of his past administrations and let his 38-year old son Akhilesh (below), who has been an MP since 2000, push constructive development policies.

Overall the state assembly election results announced today have been extremely bad for Congress, not only in UP where Gandhi’s dynastic credentials failed to make a mark, but also in Punjab which it unexpectedly lost to the regional Akali Dal party, and in Goa where it was routed by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) after its state government’s involvement in extensive mining corruption. To varying degrees, these results show voters reacting to Congress’s dire performance and weak leadership nationally, with the government’s series of corruption scandals and other policy failures, as well as to price rises and other local issues.

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In UP, once its main political base,   Congress did dismally – even losing heavily in three parliamentary constituencies (Amethi, Rae Barelli and Sultanpur) where Rahul and Sonia Gandhi are the MPs. It won only 27 seats in the 403-seat assembly, up from 22 last time (see table below). That was far far short of the 100-plus it had hoped for, and less even than the figure of around 60 that would have been tolerable. Its vote share was marginally better, rising from 12% to 17%.

Gandhi had seemed to be having a good election campaign in terms of personal image because he developed, during some 200 meetings, into a powerful speaker (as I noted here a month ago). However he appears to have had little impact on many places that he visited where he garnered widespread publicity for chatting and staying with villagers.

He and his family projected their dynastic credentials with aplomb, but the result will inevitably lead to questions about the future of the clan. Despite his protestations of commitment to UP, Gandhi was not identified personally to the future of the state because he was not standing as the potential chief minister (that would have been an extraordinarily difficult  job, which he scarcely needs when the prime minister’s job has – at least till now – been within his grasp). He also spent most of his time telling his massive poor audiences what they did not have, and how awful Mayawati’s government had been, instead of having concrete proposals for boosting their livelihoods.

That was a losing formula that was made worse, according to party spokesmen, by weak constituency-level organisation and ill-advised selection of candidates. The lesson therefore is that the dynasty’s assumed “magic” has limited currency, though Gandhi’s energetic campaigning might well help Congress in the next general election that is due in  2014.

Speaking on Indian tv this afternoon, Gandhi took responsibility for the UP defeat and said he would “continue working for the people” and to improve the country’s political system. “I expect some victories and some defeats along the way, and this is one of the defeats,” he added, indicating some analysts are suggesting that he does not have ambitions to enter the government and become prime minister any time soon.

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Gandhi had an easy target in Mayawati, whose overwhelming corruption and self-aggrandisement has been among the worst ever seen in independent India. Businessmen have told me she extorted an alleged $100m a year from the sugar industry, mainly by using minor breaches of regulations to demand corrupt payments that far exceeded routine bribes. She started court cases against reputable heads of well known companies, who sometimes fled to avoid jail. In futile attempts to clean up her government’s image, she sacked or suspended over 20 ministers in December and dropped contentious candidates, but it was clearly too little too late.

Economic growth in UP over the past five years of around 6%-7% has looked good on paper, but neighbouring states did much better and the growth was focussed to a considerable extent on Mayawati’s pet infrastructure projects, leaving vast areas of the desperately poor state under-developed. She is also credited with improving street-level law and order, which was appalling when Mulayam Yadav was last chief minister, and she always relies on the state’s strong Dalit (bottom of the caste hierarchy) voters for support – but these factors did not save her from defeat.

The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) had mixed results. It unexpectedly won control in Goa, but marginally failed to win a clear victory in Uttarakhand (a state adjacent to UP). Its score in UP was worse than predicted and it even lost for the first time ever in Ayodhya, a town seen as a symbol of  BJP power and Hindu nationalism. 

It is too early to interpret all the national implications of the polls. Both Congress and the Gandhi clan have been weakened. All parties, including some in the Congress-led coalition, will feel empowered to step up their attacks. This affects the stability of the government, which has to present the Budget next week and then get it through a probably turbulent parliament. The results also change the balance of power for Rajya Sabha (upper house) indirect elections later this month and the choice of India’s next president in the summer. Much will depend on whether Congress can rely on parliamentary support from  the SP and BSP.

The most constructive hope from the results is that Mulayam Yadav (once a kushti mud wrestler) and his son will lead UP better than the family (which includes several carrying the “goonda” tag) has done in the past – with Akhilesh Yadav maybe showing that dynastic succession can sometimes provide constructive leadership from a younger generation, even as Rahul Gandhi’s born-to-rule image takes a beating.

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Posted in India, India corruption, India general election, India politicians, Manmohan Singh, Nehru-Gandhi dynasty, Rahul Gandhi | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted by: John Elliott | March 5, 2012

Ramkinkar Baij – sculpting a path for modern Indian art

The long and rich traditions of India’s modern Bengal art have been eclipsed in recent years by members of the famous Mumbai-based Progressives Group such as Syed Haidar Raza, M.F.Husain, F.N.Souza and Tyeb Mehta who have dominated the headlines and international auctions at a time when Indian modern art has become more popular.

That is now being corrected with a revival of interest in Bengal artists who were influenced in the 1800s by British and other foreign painters visiting India’s old colonial capital of Calcutta (now Kolkata) and then emerged with their own distinctive developing styles.

Ramkinkar Baij, who died in 1980 aged 70, was one of the most important of India’s early Bengali moderns, both as an experimental sculptor who broke away from the formal celebratory styles of British India and as a painter. He is now being recognised with a splendid retrospective exhibition of over 350 works at the National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA) in New Delhi (till March 31, then Mumbai and Bengaluru).

Meanwhile the privately owned Delhi Art Gallery (DAG) has had an exhibition of 102 Bengal artists beginning with early works derived from traditional miniature painting in the 19th century to the latest well-known names such as Jogen Chowdhury and Ganesh Pyne with strong figurative works. This show – The Art of Bengal – will be at Kolkata’s Harrington Street Centre from April 4-17.

The extrovert and widely travelled Progressives, who came together in the 1940s and 1950s, always had more visibility and international exposure than the more secluded Bengalis. “Ramkinkar and the others in West Bengal were not outgoing artists and he didn’t bother with how he was looked at and appreciated,” says K.S.Radhakrishnan, a leading sculptor who was a student of Ramkinkar (as the artist is usually known) and has been curating the NGMA show over the past four years.

Bengal works are usually smaller than the Progressives, and many are classified as national treasures so cannot be exported out of India. The Progressives also benefited, says Kishore Singh of the DAG, from the commercial capital of Mumbai (then Bombay) becoming an active art market with rich buyers and critics that Calcutta lost when the British capital moved to Delhi in the 1930s.

These factors partly explain why the Bengalis have not captured headline-hitting record prices such as those achieved, for example, by Raza who established an Indian art record with an acrylic on canvas abstract work that sold for £2.4m ($3.5m) at a Christies’ London auction in 2010.

Works by artists like Jamini Roy appear in most international auctions and there was one notable recent Bengali sale, also in 2010 at Sotheby’s in London, of twelve smallish paper works by Rabindranath Tagore, a revered Nobel Prize-winning writer, poet and artist who dies in 1941. This yielded prices up to £313,250 and set records for both Tagore and Indian paper works. It illustrated the potential if more were available without export restrictions, but the Sotheby’s sale was a rare event, made possible by the Dartington Hall Trust of the UK selling a collection gifted to it by Tagore in 1939.

Ramkinkar revelled in the remoteness of Santiniketan, the ashram, art centre and university town north of Kolkata that is the cultural home of Bengal art.

Much of his work drew on tribals of the area and other rural scenes. “He reflected the vibrancy of local life,” says Radhakrishnan. “Anything that moved around him moved him – women threshing paddy, big storms, tribal celebrations, marriages.”

He understood how western artists used watercolours. “His experience was totally Indian but he understood foreign art – Santiniketan was looking at Japanese art in the same way as the Impressionists did,” says Raman Siva Kumar, a professor at Santiniketan who has written a large book on Ramkinkar for the NGMA and DAG.

The NGMA exhibition is dominated by Ramkinkar’s evocative and colourful watercolours (below), but he is most famous as a sculptor who moved away from the staid formal statues of British rulers to portray local life.

“He was probably the first sculptor on the Indian art scene whom you could call a creative sculptor,” says veteran artist K.G.Subramanyan in another of the Ramkinkar books. “He made sculpture for his own pleasure, not in answer to a patron’s wishes”. Speaking at the opening of the exhibition, Subramanyan said that Ramkinkar would sometimes paint on bed sheets when he couldn’t afford canvases and did little to protect his works.

He usually worked with cement and pebbles for his outdoor sculptures because he did could not afford other materials, quickly moulding the mix before it set and then chipping at the cast. Some of his sculptures were later cast in bronze using moulds made from the original works.

One of these, a striking abstract head of Rabindranath Tagore called The Poet, is on show in both forms – the original cement work, tinted black to relieve the monotonous grey cement (above), is with the DAG, and a bronze cast is at the NGMA. Also on show is a famous sculpture of Mahtama Gandhi on the Dandi civil disobedience salt march against British rule (above).

Most of his largest sculptures are at Santiniketan and are shown in large ceiling-height photographs at the NGMA. Notable among them is Santhal Family (originally done in 1938 and cast in bronze by the government after his death – seen right at Santiniketan). This depicts members of the large Santhal tribe, who are spread across eastern India, moving home with their possessions.

Siva Kumar says this work marks “a dramatic shift” in Indian sculpture because it brought tribals, who had been virtually invisible, into the centre of the Santiniketan campus and because it merged classical and modern sculpture.  Another work is a woman threshing, again shown as a ceiling-high photograph, but accompanied by a small statue and watercolours that Ramkinkar did first as sketches.

With all that rural West Bengal history and context, it is something of a surprise to find two smoothly finished carved sandstone statues by Ramkinkar guarding the doors of the Reserve Bank of India’s offices in Delhi. They are of Yaksha and Yakshi, guardian spirits of Kuber, the god of wealth, and were done in the early 1960s, but they are far from typical of his work.

I asked Radhakrishnan about Ramkinkar’s special legacy for young artists today. “He was one of a kind, cut off from the material world,” came the reply. “Here is someone who was passionate about his work which he did without caring about the market”. That is quite a contrast with so many market-driven modern artists who, helped by galleries, work to boost their prices!

A shorter version of this article is on The Economist‘s books art and culture blog, Prospero – http://www.economist.com/blogs/prospero/2012/03/art-ramkinkar-baij

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Posted in India, Indian modern art, West Bengal | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted by: John Elliott | March 2, 2012

Jairam Ramesh calls for political parties to get active in Naxalite areas

India’s Maoist rebels need mainstream party politics

Naxalite rebels need to be tackled with mainstream political activity, not just development projects and repression by security forces. This new approach for handling India’s most serious internal security problem is being pushed by Jairam Ramesh, the minister for rural development. It is also being tacitly accepted by the state government of Orissa where Naxalite candidates won elections in 30 panchayats (village-level councils) last month.

Ramesh (below) is the first central government minister to pick on party political activity as an essential means of providing a peaceful alternative to the violent occupation of tribal and other remote areas by Naxalite Maoist rebels, who are active in nearly a third of India’s 600 administrative districts and whose leaders ultimately want to overthrow democracy. He first did so in a letter to Manmohan Singh, the prime minister, at the end of December, but that was shuffled off to the Planning Commission which has been loosely in charge of the government’s non-security Naxalite policies for several years.

The Ministry of Home Affairs is in charge of security operations, along with individual states, and that has been stepped up since Palaniappan Chidambaram became Home Minister at the end of 2008. There was a decrease in violence last year, though the number of those killed by Naxalites was still high – nearly 450 civilians and over 140 members of security forces according the ministry statistics.

There are reports of Naxalite attacks almost daily. Last weekend about 150 rebels raided a stone-mine in the Bastar region of Chhattisgarh in eastern India looking for explosives and, failing to find any, set fire to eight stone crushing machines. Others torched seven construction vehicles nearby, and a defaulter was reported to have been buried alive for not repaying a loan provided by a Naxalite organisation.

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The Planning Commission was given charge of development policies a few years ago. In 2008, it produced a massive 90-page report, “Development Challenges in Extremist Affected Areas”, which helped to influence government policy on the need for development, supported by funding .

But the Planning Commission does not have the political or administrative muscle needed to implement change. Ramesh, whose high profile initiatives transformed the Environment Ministry (at least temporarily) when he was in charge there for two years till last July, is now using his current job to fill the vacuum.

The government has not taken up his call for political activity since his letter to the prime minister, but he proposed it again at the launching of a book on Naxalites – “More Than Maoism” – in Delhi last week and he then chatted to me about his ideas. “Lack of political mobilisation is the biggest weakness in these areas – you need mainstream political party activity,” he says. Last October he presented a comprehensive paper on “The Maoist issue” in Delhi (which was re-printed in Outlook magazine).

He proposed a “two track approach – one that deals with the leadership of the Naxals, who wish to overthrow the Indian state, and the other which focuses on the concerns of the people they pretend/claim to serve”. He did not mention political activity because, he says, he had not then realised how important it is for party cadres to attract young people who would otherwise turn to Naxalites leaders. He has now visited 24 of the 78 administrative districts that are most seriously affected by Naxalite occupations and violence, and says he was struck by the lack of mainstream politics in areas that had become “security fortresses” without any presence of government machinery or authority.

Politics, people, police

A “three pronged approach through politics, people and police” was now needed. “Democracy by itself won’t solve the problem,” he says. “People need to have confidence in political parties and instruments of state such as the judiciary”. That may seem an odd remark at a time when public opinion about politicians and the judiciary is desperately low because of widespread corruption and the government’s failure to govern effectively.

But Ramesh points to success in West Bengal where the Trinamool Congress chief minister, Mamata Banerjee, has been taking party politics and development into Naxalite areas. He picks out for special mention a popular young Trinamool MP, Subhendu Adhikary, who was elected last year for a constituency that includes Lalgarh, a town occupied by Naxalites in 2009. Adhikary has been holding well-attended public rallies, despite the risk of bomb attacks.

There was concern in the state of Orissa (now officially renamed Odisha) when Naxalites won the panchayat elections, several without any opposition because rivals had been warned not to stand. The Home Ministry is believed to have favoured cancelling the elections, and there was also concern that development funds allocated to the panchayats would be diverted to buy arms and explosives, or into organisations run by the Naxalites’ alternative form of government (such as the one involved in the loan defaulter’s death) .

However, Ramesh sees the panchayat elections as “a good first step” into the system. ”This is an opportunity for political dialogue,” he says. He acknowledges the risk of funds being diverted to the Naxalites and says that special safeguards will be needed – he avoids saying that panchayat funds probably leak to them already, or to other illicit recipients.

Sceptics will say that Ramesh is playing to the gallery and that talks have been tried before with little success, but governments usually come round eventually to talking to rebel groups and Ramesh’s proposal is broader based than just talks.

No-one is suggesting that political rallies and panchayat elections will end a rebellion that has raged to varying degrees for 60 years in different parts of central and eastern India. These ideas could however give politicians and official organisations a chance to offer an alternative to people who have only come under Naxalite influence because of neglect and maltreatment by mainstream society.

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Posted by: John Elliott | February 14, 2012

Thinkers ponder what’s amiss in India – is it jugaad?

This article provided groundwork for my book IMPLOSION: India’s Tryst with Reality that expands on the role of Jugaad in India – the book is available in leading bookshops and on Amazon and other websites as a hardback, paperback and e-book http://amzn.to/2gwrfjb  

For decades India has survived, and sometimes thrived, by turning muddle and adversity into success. In the days of the licence Raj, this enabled the country to work, creakily, until systems and machinery broke down and were patched up again. Hindustan Motors’ Ambassador car (below) is perhaps the longest surviving example of patchwork success, with its 60-year old body tarted up with chrome and its innards replenished over the years with parts from Japan and elsewhere.

That reliance on what is known as jugaad – making do and innovating with what’s available rather than looking for new levels of performance and excellence – is no longer working effectively.

Consequently, India is failing to flourish despite its many riches that range from ambitious youth, brilliant brains and abundant natural resources, to a mostly stable multi-religious democracy and an increasingly successful private sector.

The most internationally-visible recent example of jugaad  failing the country was in the preparations for the 2010 Commonwealth Games, but it also applies to the failure to tackle corruption, poor governance, poor health and education, dreadful infrastructure, inadequate defence and security equipment and training, and much else besides. As a result, much of the country is in a constant state of unstable under-performance that often benefits those in authority because they can bypass the failures and gain corruptly from the chaos, but leaves hundreds of millions of people in various forms of poverty.

Ramachandra Guha, a prolific author, suggests in the current issue of Britain’s Prospect magazine that “instability is India’s destiny”. He says he makes this point as a historian, but he fails to argue it through and indeed devalues his long article with statements like the Indian “bureaucracy is incompetent”, which is wrong, or at least only partially true.

Pavan Varma – along with most commentators – looks on jugaad as a totally positive attribute. At a power industry (IPPAI) conference in Goa last summer, he said that it involves “thinking out of the box….seizing the opportunity….refusing to accept defeat”. He saw it as a “reflection of resilience” that led to entrepreneurship.

Mark Tully, the BBC veteran, hits the point in his latest book Non-Stop India (right) by asking whether India “is still muddling through”. He quotes a car mechanic who years ago sprinkled turmeric into his damaged Ambassador car radiator to “stop the leaks temporarily”.

Commenting on traffic chaos at a nearby railway level crossing, the mechanic says: “Who does anything about anything in this country? Why are we Indians religious people? Because we know that this country only runs because God runs it. It’s all jugaar”. (Jugaar is a more phonetically correct spelling than the usual jugaad).The positive aspects are of course also being lauded internationally because of what some auto industry executives and others call India’s “frugal engineering”, where the best is made of minimal low-cost facilities.

I suggested at the conference that Varma was taking a rather romantic view, which failed to see that the “quick fix” mentality (like the motorbike water pump above, and the Pringle crisps-car repair below) stops India moving ahead because it is assumed that, even if deadlines and quality standards are missed, they can be quickly rectified – exactly the mindset that dogged the 2010 Commonwealth Games.

One does of course see the same sort of make-shift solutions in other developing countries, but in India it has become a way of life. Harking back to Tully’s mechanic, God’s jugaad makes the railway crossing work (albeit chaotically) day after day, so if God and destiny are in charge, why should anyone bother to build a stable bridge for the road traffic?

Indeed, while often solving problems and leading to some good engineering solutions, jugaad leads to complacency and acceptance of things as they are. It can undermine established systems and procedures because it deters the search for permanent solutions.

Last March, after Japan’s nuclear disaster, I suggested that such attitudes meant that India could not be relied on to ensure sustained safety if it built its planned series of nuclear power plants.

I cited various disasters in the previous year that stemmed from a jugaad mentality – extensive flooding every monsoon in Mumbai and elsewhere, radioactive steel scrap found in a Delhi recycling yard, failure to manage crowds and road congestion caused by Delhi’s annual auto and other trade fairs, gross inadequacies in police readiness and functioning, a disastrously inefficient reaction to a massive fire in Kolkata a year ago (and now more recent hospital disasters), plus countless railway crashes.

Jugaad also feeds into corruption, which thrives when quick fixes can be bought – why build a good road that would last years if you can bribe officials to accept quick-fix substandard work and then bribe them again to let you repair it!

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Posted in India, India corruption, India economic reforms, India entrepreneurs, India industry, India infrastructure, India manufacturing | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted by: John Elliott | February 6, 2012

Government “in blundering retreat ” on corruption crisis

Rahul Gandhi emerges as Manmohan Singh declines

India’s endemic corruption is demolishing the credibility of its Congress-led coalition government and threatening prime minister Manmohan Singh with an inglorious end to a long career as an economist, bureaucrat and politician. This not because new corruption cases are emerging (though some are and there are plenty in the locker), nor of course that the prime minister is himself corrupt. The problem is that wide-ranging current cases are exposing how he has failed to exert his authority.

Meanwhile in Uttar Pradesh (UP), a battle is being fought not only for which party runs the massive state after current assembly elections, but for the credibility of the Gandhi dynasty whose leader-in-waiting, Rahul Gandhi, is staking his embryonic political reputation on changing the crime and corruption-wracked state.

These then are the contrasting faces of Congress and India’s political leadership – a tired crisis-ridden national government led by a prime minister who is 80 this year, and an heir-apparent to the ruling dynasty who is little more than half his age at 41. The prime minister does not seem to want to resign for having failed, and would like to hang on till he gives way to the crown prince , but the prince shows no sign of wanting to move in to the prime minister’s office.

“I have no aspirations to become prime minister,” Gandhi said (left) at a nationally-televised press conference on the UP election trail this morning – an obvious line for him to take, but it could well be true.

Gandhi did however emerge this morning as a viable political future leader, full of much more strength and self confidence than he has shown in the past – though he did not produce any detailed policies for UP. Nor did he say how he would fulfil what he described as his “mission” to the state and try to solve its problems – would he for example risk his political reputation by taking on the extremely tough job of chief minister if he were in a position to do so?

The prime minister (below) must have been tempted to respond to the country’s anti-corruption mood and resign last Thursday when the Supreme Court cancelled 122 telecom licences  that have become the subject of a far-reaching corruption scandal since they were issued in January 2008.

That must have been the worst day of his long career. He knew that he could have stopped the rot  some four years ago but had not done so because the Congress Party, led by Rahul’s mother Sonia Gandhi, did not want to upset its coalition partner, the DMK party, whose nominee, A.Raja, was telecom minister.

Then, on Saturday, a lower court dismissed a criminal conspiracy case brought against Palaniappan Chidambaram, the home minister, for failing when he was finance minister in 2008 to stop Raja’s business friends from making massive profits by selling shares in the licences to Telenor of Norway and other foreign telecom companies.

That judgement is likely to be appealed. If Chidambaram were eventually found legally culpable for failing to stop Raja, the prime minister would be next in line for blame, along maybe with other cabinet ministers. There was speculation last week that Chidambaram would have resigned if the court had not dismissed the case, and that would inevitably have made the prime minister vulnerable.

Meanwhile Raja has been in jail for a year – the anniversary was on February 2. That itself (along with jailing of officials involved in 2010 Commonwealth Games contracts) is a mark of progress because no politician has been jailed for corruption for so long.

“Raja in jail UPA in handcuffs” ran a front page headline in yesterday’s Indian Express on a column written by Shekhar Gupta, the paper’s editor. On the handling of the 2G scam, he wrote that the government is “in blundering retreat from one indefensible position to another, much in the fashion of our army against the Chinese in 1962″ – a cruelly damning line given that the 1962 defeat is probably India’s biggest post-independence humiliation.

The government is blundering on other fronts, often with a corruption angle. It is having an almost unbelievable confrontation with the chief of army staff over the year he was born (often not clearly recorded in India). That could have been resolved a long time ago but has been running through the headlines for weeks, culminating in General V.K.Singh, who has upset some fellow generals by tackling army corruption, getting Supreme Court support last week.

The government has also mis-managed a controversy over alleged corruption on a foreign contract in India’s space agency (ISRO). The extent of corruption was further illustrated by a report that, improbable as it might seem in the current climate, an official charged with corruption is a candidate to become chairman of government-owned Coal India.

There was also a corruption allegation last week from Canada involving Praful Patel, India’s former aviation minister (now heavy industries minister) who has been widely criticised for his handling of ailing Air India. It was alleged that he was to receive a $250,000 bribe for a proposed $100m Air India contract. This was quickly denied by Patel and disowned by a Canadian journalist involved in reporting the allegations.

British aid row over jet order

The only good news last week was that India virtually decided remarkably quickly on a $10bn-$18bn contract for 126 Indian Air Force fighter jets – with it seems no major corruption. The government is to start final negotiations for Dassault of France’s Rafale fighter, which I hear has been priced 6% below its rival, a German and British-led European consortium’s Typhoon. That has triggered annoyance in the UK and sparked an argument over the value of the country’s £266m ($425m) annual aid to India if it does not help to win such orders.

There have also been suggestions that India’s pay-off will be French help on nuclear energy projects – an inducement that does not fall under the tag “corruption”.

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Posted in dynasty, India, India corruption, India defence, India politicians, India telecoms, India UK, Manmohan Singh, Rahul Gandhi | Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted by: John Elliott | January 31, 2012

India’s successful art fair – where less is more

A shorter version of this article is on The Economist’s Prospero blog

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India revels in creating pockets of excellence out of urban noise and muddle and at turning logic on its head, and it also loves creating tamashas. That is what has happened at the four-day India Art Fair that closed on Sunday night in New Delhi.

Families and young children mixed with serious art collectors and buyers, and the organisers were pleased that their estimated 80,000 total number of visitors was considerably less than the 128,000 that they claimed last year.

“The mood of excitement to see things and to learn is palpable – there is tremendous spirit,” said Hugo Weihe, Christie’s Asian art director, standing in the middle of Sunday’s crowds that totalled some 20,000. “You can feel the future of the Indian art market here”.

Lavaris Vastu by Asim Waqif

The event, previously called the Art Summit, is unusual on the international art circuit because it aims to introduce and educate the Indian public, as well as providing sales and high-value contacts for some 90 exhibitors. Inevitably, that leads to tensions, especially between some foreign galleries that are eager for quick sales and want the public access reduced, and those who welcome the mix. Some top Indian collectors agree with that line and, along with foreign exhibitors, also want the organisers to tighten the overall standard of works next year.

Others however know that India is a country that needs to be tackled differently from other potential markets. “It’s a great place to be, but not if you want to make money quickly – if you stick around you do well,” said Conor Macklin of London’s Grosvenor Gallery that has a link with Delhi’s Vadehra Gallery.

In past years, the fair has been staged at exhibition grounds in central Delhi, which families frequently visit for a weekend’s entertainment, whereas this time it has been at a south-Delhi location that was difficult to find, adjacent to a chaotically noisy traffic interchange and overhead metro station. In usual Indian style, once one escaped from broken pavements and swirling traffic, the fair was serene and enthusiastic, spread across 12,000 sq metres in three internationally designed tents.

Bharti Kher + Subodh’s Gupta works on Hauser & Wirth – Meera Menezes photo

“We are happy with the total of about 80,000 because almost everyone who came was genuinely interested in art, whereas last year there were people who just came to walk around,” said Neha Kirpal, the founder and director of the fair.

Earlier this year Kirpal sold a 49% stake in the fair to two founders of Art Hong Kong, Sandy Angus, chairman of Montgomery Worldwide, and Will Ramsay, founder of the Affordable Art Fair. Together, they are now planning an affordable fair for India in the autumn that might draw away some of the crowds.

Half the 90 or so galleries (selected from over 250 applicants) came from India and the rest were from 20 other countries with names such as Hauser & Wirth, Lisson, White Cube, and Other Criteria, with artists ranging from Pablo Picasso to Marina Abramovic, a New York-based Serbian performance artist, and UK artists Anish Kapoor, Damien Hirst and Martin Creed.

There was not enough buying activity to provide a significant boost for India’s sluggish modern and contemporary art market, but most galleries made sales or began negotiating for later deals that ranged up to Rs60m ($1.2m) for a video installation. Others consoled themselves by making new contacts.

Top Indian collectors made substantial purchases, notably Kiran Nadar who has set up a modern art museum in Delhi. Two of the most popular video installations believed to be targeted by buyers were Lisson’s “Levitation of Saint Teresa” done by Abramovic in 2010 and a 1995 work where the artist cries and moans as she chews an onion (left). Hauser & Wirth are believed to have a sold a small neon sign by Creed saying, “Love” that was priced at $85,000 and a painting by Subodh Gupta, a leading Indian contemporary artist, for Euro 200,000 ($263,000, Rs13m).

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The Other Criteria gallery reported several sales of Damien Hirst’s Psalm prints on silkscreen with diamond dust (below right), which come in runs of 50 and are priced at £3,500 (Rs273,000).

Serigraph silkscreen prints of works by well-known modern Indian masters such as M.F.Husain and S.H.Raza, and more recent successes like T.Vaikuntum, were selling well on Ahmedabad’s Archer Gallery stand at about 5% of the price of originals.

A lot of the contemporary Indian exhibits tackled social issues that have had less attention from India’s leading modern painters, with the new artists using installations, photographs and video works.

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On the Gallery Espace stand, G.R.Irani had an installation (left) of wooden slippers and a red car roof light like those used by Indian politicians and officials) priced at Rs600,000 ($12,000). He told me it signified “a protest against violence and how we are losing our morals and values, with the flashing light creating tension”.

On a lighter note, Indigo Blue Art from Singapore sold several gaily painted fibreglass cat sculptures (bottom) adapted by Tapas Sarkar from West Bengal’s 19th century Kalighat style and priced at Rs275,000 to Rs375,000 ($5,500-$7,500).

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Special exhibitions staged on the fringe (and still open) include works by Yoko Ono (who visited Delhi recently) at the Vadehra Gallery, West Bengal works at the Delhi Art Gallery,  and Iranian art at the Devi Art Foundation where the fair’s boisterous closing party continued until the early hours yesterday morning.

The bank has been building a collection of mostly low-priced works since the 1970s, not usually as an investment though the current value is around £200m. Other figures are also impressive – a total of 60,000 works spread around 928 buildings in 45 countries, all organised to decorate offices and involve the staff. Exceptions on price are sometimes made for art to be located in reception areas, which house a Damien Hirst and Anish Kapoor.

Explaining why he was in India, Hicks said: “If you are interested in art, you come to the place where change is happening quickest”.

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Posted in India, India festivals, Indian contempoary art, Indian modern art | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted by: John Elliott | January 26, 2012

Salman Rushdie was blocked out but MF Husain is back on show

Just a few days after Salman Rushdie was excluded from the Jaipur Literature Festival because of an extremist Muslim campaign against his writings, paintings by M.F.Husain are hanging at the India Art Fair without any objections from Hindu fundamentalists who have had them taken down in the past.

The fair opens today and Husains (left and below) are on show at six galleries, four from India and two from London. In 2009, his works were not included and last year they were temporarily withdrawn , and then hung again with a police guard standing alongside them. This time there is no special security.

Like the Jaipur festival, the fair (previously called the Art Summit) has grown enormously since it were started in 2008 and it now has 91 exhibitors from 20 countries. Both events are visited by tens of thousands of people, opening up the worlds of art and literature to those who would not normally have access to see or listen to – and mix with – famous painters and authors.

The aims of the fair says Neha Kirpal, its founder and director, is to increase India’s currently very small number of art collectors, to encourage Indian companies to do more to promote art, and to open up India internationally. That is very similar to the aims of the Jaipur festival, but both are vulnerable to religious extremists who use the arts stifle debate and development.

Two Husain works with a Ravinder Reddy head

Last year Jawhar Sircar, the government’s secretary for culture, told me that the reappearance of the Husain works demonstrated India’s freedom of expression being supported by its “strength of pluralism and elasticity”.

Regrettably, that does not always happen, as was shown at the Jaipur festival last weekend, when alleged assassination and other threats led Rushdie to decide not to come to India. Risks of violent demonstrations then led to a video-link being cancelled. Legal cases have been started by Muslim and other groups against the festival organisers, alleging incitement to violence. These cases, which are likely to drag on for months and maybe years, could be used to stifle the festival and its voice in the future.

This shows how little “pluralism and elasticity” there is in Indian society when religious extremists decide to stir up trouble – especially when that coincides with a group that is politically significant, as Muslims are currently in Uttar Pradesh (UP) assembly elections. Attempts are now being made to cover up the blot on India’s open and democratic image by implausibly suggesting that the problems were started and encouraged by Rushdie and, or, the festival organisers to attract publicity, and that the legal problems were exaggerated.

India’s Congress Party is deeply involved. Though it did not initiate the crisis, it seems to have decided  to let it develop, once it started, because it is wooing the Muslim vote in UP. It is in power in Rajasthan, where Jaipur is the capital, so it controls the police and could have pressured interest groups such as the Muslim demonstrators to de-escalate the protests. It seems not to have done so and now, unsurprisingly, is denying there was any link with the UP elections.

The Art Fair has this year moved from easily-accessible central Delhi exhibition grounds to a less well-known location in the south of the city. That has enabled it to be laid out by international experts along the lines of leading events in the US and Europe, but the difficult location might deter some visitors.

Half the 91 exhibitors come from India, and works on show range in price from Rs15,000 to Rs2 crore – roughly $3o0 to $400,000. The galleries have been chosen from over 250 applicants by a selection committee based on their performance and artists, but more pruning might be needed in future years to strengthen the focus and quality of what is on show.

The exhibitors include prominent overseas galleries such as Hauser & Wirth, Lisson, and Fabian-Claude-Walter from Europe. Along with their foreign artists, most of them are showing Indian works – those three galleries for example have works by Subodh Gupta, Bharti Kher, Anish Kapoor and (less well-known) Viveek Sharma.

The next few days will be an important test of the Indian art market, which has been sluggish for a couple of years. Good sales would provide it with a much-needed boost, and a good number of visitors at the new location would also help to spread awareness of the riches of Indian and foreign art.

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Posted in India, India elections, India politicians, Indian contemporary art, Indian festivals, Indian modern art, Indian states, Uttar Pradesh | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

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