By Neeraj Nanda

Melbourne, February 5: Cricket Australia today confirmed Australian fast bowler Brett Lee has been diagnosed with a broken foot following a fielding incident in Friday night’s KFC T20 International against India at the MCG.

Cricket Australia team Doctor Trefor James said:

“Brett Lee sustained a fracture of his right foot when he was struck by a ball in the last over of his spell during the KFC T20 against India at the MCG on Friday night.

“He was able to complete the over however the foot became more painful and swollen the following day. An x-ray has confirmed a fracture of the small toe and we now expect Brett will return to cricket in four-six weeks.”

A decision regarding a replacement player for Lee will not be made until after today’s first Commonwealth Bank ODI against India at the MCG. Squad members will return to homeports until Wednesday when the squad will congregate in Perth for Friday’s second match, Cricket Australia media release says.

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By Zofeen Ebrahim

KARACHI, Jan 26, 2012 (IPS) – “He was a happy child, my younger brother,” Mohammad Ramzan, 18, reminisced, his voice steeped in sadness.

Eldest among six siblings, Ramzan is still coming to terms with the murder of his 11-year-old brother, Shan Ali, who worked as a child domestic worker in a posh locality in the national capital, Islamabad.

Ali was allegedly strangled by his employer, Atiya Al Hussain, on Jan. 5, for neglecting her child.

She and her husband, Mudassar Abbas, told police that Ali had committed suicide, though the autopsy suggested the boy had been strangled to death.

“The woman has since confessed that Ali neglected her seven-month-old son while she was trying to catch up on her sleep and had, in a fit of anger, strangled him,” Ramzan told IPS over phone from Islamabad, where he works as a security guard in an office.

Many wealthy households employ children, some even as young as six, a practice not prohibited by law in Pakistan.

Because of the invisible nature of this issue and the difficulty in accessing domestic child workers, no recent nationwide study exists. In 2003, UNICEF reported that eight million children, under 14 years of age, were engaged as labourers in brick kilns, carpet weaving units, agriculture, small industries, and in homes.

An International Labour Organisation (ILO) report in 2004 estimated that around 264,000 children were engaged in domestic labour in Pakistan.

Child domestic workers can often been seen sitting meekly in the corner of expensive restaurants keeping an eye on a sleeping baby while the employer’s family enjoys a sumptuous dinner. They accompany rich kids to birthday parties, but do not take part in the celebrations.

“In Pakistani culture it was once considered an act of charity to employ poor children,” explained Samar Minallah, an anthropologist and a documentary filmmaker.

“In the past, there was a culture of entire families of employees being looked after by feudal lords. With time we saw this disappearing and the child was separated from his parents and employed in a nuclear family setup,” she said.

In many cases, said Minallah, the child is the only worker in the house. “I witnessed this in many posh urban areas,” Minallah told IPS. Recently she made a film ‘I have a dream’, on the dark reality of what she calls the “worst form of exploitation of children.”

“Many families prefer to employ young boys and girls because there are women and daughters in the house. They feel safer around them,” explained Ramzan, who does not find children working in whatever capacity of any consequence or even hazardous.

Sending children off to work in homes could mean additional income, says Anees Jillani, an advocate at the Supreme Court of Pakistan. “And then there is the additional incentive of having to feed one less mouth and more space in the room that they call home,” he explained.

Over the years, however, the Pakistani media have been consistently reporting on the abuse and violence that child domestic labour often suffer at the hands of their employers.

In the last two years, the Society for the Protection of the Rights of the Child (SPARC), a non-governmental organisation, has documented 18 cases of extreme violence inflicted by employers, resulting in the death of 13 children and serious injuries to five.

To date not one employer has been charged as guilty. “The perpetrators usually buy off the poor parents in out-of court settlements,” said Jillani, who is also a child rights activist. Last year, a six-year-old Laiba’s body was found in a deserted place in the eastern city of Lahore, in Punjab. She was beaten to death by her employers for urinating on the kitchen floor.

Taqi Usman, 12, was clubbed to death by his employer for not feeding her dog. In most cases, domestic workers were penalised for being just who they were – mere children.

In 2010, when 12-year-old Shazia Masih, a maid in an advocate’s house died, the media coverage was intense. The paltry sum of 720 rupees (eight dollars) a month in return for washing dishes, mopping floors and cleaning toilets helped pay off her family’s debts.

There were 17 blunt injuries on Shazia’s forehead, cheeks and scalp and she died after the wounds inflicted on her by the employer became infected.

“Clearly the profiles of the employers suggest that this has nothing to do with literacy levels. It is a reflection of how far a society tolerates injustice and exploitation,” said Zarina Jillani, who works for SPARC.

Reacting to such cruel deaths, SPARC urged the government to take immediate steps to ban child domestic labour in line with laws that already prohibit children from being employed in hazardous industries.

SPARC’s Jillani considers domestic labour even more hazardous than factory work because of its “hidden nature, slavery like conditions, the complete control of the employer and the absence of a protective parent or adult and the potential for all kinds of abuse.”

While the country has ratified the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Child, advocate Jillani rues there is no legal validity for it in the country. “The ILO has lately introduced a domestic labour convention but Pakistan is yet to sign it,” he told IPS.

SPARC believes that the answer lies in extending existing labour laws to domestic work and making education compulsory.

Ramzan, who is completely unlettered like the rest of his siblings, says: “We don’t have the choice or the luxury to attend school. We all work, and the more hands there are, the easier it is to feed the many mouths.”

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  WASHINGTON, Jan 31, 2012 (IPS) – Home to over 44 million small retailers, many of them family- owned, neighbourhood stores no bigger than 200 square feet, India is a land renowned for its various “wallas” – small traders who produce, hawk, repair or deliver just about anything you could want at any hour of the day or night.

But a recent push by some of the world’s biggest multinational corporations (MNCs) like the U.S.’s Walmart, Britain’s Tesco and France’s Carrefour to enter India’s 450-billion-dollar consumer market could signal the swan song of the country’s traditional and beloved small business sector.

Earlier this year, intense public opposition halted the Indian government’s decision to open the sluice gates to increased foreign direct investment (FDI) from single- and multi-brand retailers, prompting a spate of heated debate about the possible impacts of such a move on the economy.

Though the final decision to allow unchecked investment in a hitherto protected sector has been tabled, the battle for small retailers is far from over.

Formerly lucrative markets in Western Europe and North America are drying up, the spending capacity of their middle classes exhausted by years of consumption from the very businesses that are now banging at the gates of fresh marketplaces in the global South.

As one financial crisis after another crashes over the developed world, MNCs are looking elsewhere: in the townships of South Africa, along the banks of the Amazon, in the favelas of Brazil and now in India’s urban centres, which are teeming with over 169 million potential customers in just 53 cities.

History repeats itself?

When Walmart initially began its campaign to penetrate the Indian market, its website promised to provide the country’s “underserved” market with a wider range of goods at lower prices, while increasing efficiency, reducing waste and creating jobs.

But a closer look at the “Walmart effect” in the birthplace of the world’s largest private employer pulls back the veil on a less rosy reality.

“The proliferation of Walmart across the U.S. has led to the lowering of income of over a million workers,” Deidre Griswold, a former U.S. presidential candidate and editor of the Workers World newspaper, told IPS.

“It has the world’s biggest computer (system) and the largest fleet of trucks, both of which it touts as examples of its productivity. But what is the use of increased productivity if it’s not coupled with more leisure time and better salaries for workers?”

The average “sales associate” at Walmart earned less than 250 dollars a week, an annual income that lies well below the U.S.’s official poverty line for even small families.

“Walmart reflects the central problem with capitalism, where ‘productivity’ only means bigger profits for capitalists and further exploitation of workers. Most Walmart employees are only hired on a part-time basis, making it impossible for them to claim unemployment benefits even though they barely earn enough to survive,” Griswold added.

Furthermore, the lack of formal employment contracts for a majority of employees “effectively crushes workers’ collective bargaining power and destroys what is left of the unions”.

Walmart has also been proven to decimate local economies.

According to some estimates, for every Walmart that opens, 100 stores in the area are forced out of business.

Ten years after Walmart arrived in Iowa in 1990, “the state lost 555 grocery stores, 298 hardware stores, 293 building supply stores, 161 variety stores, 158 women’s apparel stores, 153 shoe stores, 116 drugstores, and 111 men’s and boys’ apparel stores.”

The Economic Policy Institute (EPI) found that Walmart was responsible for 27 billion of the U.S.’s 235-billion-dollar trade deficit with China in 2006. The total deficit accounted for 1.8 million lost jobs, of which Walmart was singlehandedly responsible for about 200,000 as a result of its imports from China.

Roughly 133,000 of these were manufacturing jobs, one of the few sectors that provides benefits and offers decent pay to U.S. workers with less than a college education.

Each of the 4,022 stores Wal-Mart operated in the U.S. resulted in 77 workers losing their jobs, mainly because of the company’s huge deficit with China.

Its ability to impact so heavily on international trade has effectively made Walmart a nation unto itself – already its yearly profits exceed the annual GDP of Norway, the 25th largest economy in the world.

Critics contrast Walmart’s success with the overall deterioration of the standard of living in the average U.S. household, 17 million of which were food insecure in 2010, the highest number ever recorded in the U.S. according to the World Hunger Organisation’s annual report.

India – even more vulnerable?

If a single corporation has the power to render hundreds of thousands of workers jobless in the one of the world’s wealthiest countries, it is not too difficult to imagine MNCs’ impact on India, already home to well over 400 million poor people by the most conservative estimates.

According to Jayati Ghosh, an economist at the premier Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, every job Walmart offers in India will come at the expense of 17 or 18 small traders and their staff.

With joblessness already on the rise (total employment growth dropped from 2.7 percent between 2000-2005 to just 0.8 percent between 2005- 2010, according to the latest National Sample Survey), many argue that India can ill afford to open its doors to mammoth corporations.

A quick assessment of employment patterns among three leading MNCs debunks the Indian ministry of commerce’s promise to create four million jobs through its relaxation on FDI in three years.

Tesco boasts upwards of 490,000 employees in 5,380 stores worldwide; Carrefour has just over 471,000 workers spread over 15,937 stores; Metro, with just 2131 stores, hires 283,000 people annually; and Walmart operates 9,826 stores staffed by roughly two million people.

“If four million jobs are to be created in India, Walmart (which averages 219 employees per store) will need to open over 18,600 supermarkets in India,” Ghosh said. “If the average of the four retailers (above) are considered, i.e.: 117 employees per store, over 34,180 supermarkets have to open in three years, or 644 supermarkets in each of the 53 cities.”

In an apparent attempt to “protect” small retailers, the Indian government stipulated that companies entering the market should invest a minimum of 100 million dollars, thereby supposedly ensuring that foreign businesses would not compete with small local stores.

But given that Walmart’s annual revenue is almost 400 billion dollars, it could easily set up a network of small- and medium-sized stores to meet the needs of a diverse clientele and thus nudge domestic retailers out of the picture.

Ghosh also stressed the risk of Walmart buying out local private sector retailers in order to secure the necessary monopoly with which to completely dictate terms in a newly acquired market.

“This is how the global retailers have expanded their operations in many developing countries in Latin America and Asia,” Ghosh said.

For example, “Walmart entered Mexico in 1991-92 with a 50-50 joint venture with the local firm CIFRA. By 1997 it had acquired majority stake in the venture and increased its stake to 60 percent in 2000. By 2004, Walmart alone accounted for over 25 percent of all retail sales in Mexico and 43 percent of all sales by the big box retailers.”

If, like the average Indian consumer, the government wants to protect the diversity and history of its smaller traders, it will have to sacrifice Walmart in order to safeguard its ‘wallas’.

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Sachin Tandulkar batting on day 2. PHOTO: Neeraj Nanda/SAT

By Shobhit Nanda

Melbourne: Sachin Tendulkar again missed a golden opportunity to get his 100th international century after being bowled by Peter Siddle in the final over of the day. Tendulkar looked fluent and aggressive during his knock of 73 runs and was involved in a 117 run partnership with Rahul Dravid which left India in a strong position to overtake Australia and take a lead on day 3 of the boxing day match.

Earlier in the day, Virender Sehwag made 67 runs in quick time to give India a good start. Gautam Gambhir missed out with catch in the slip for 3 runs. Rahul Dravid remains at the crease on 68 not out having survived a Peter Siddle no ball taking his stumps after tea. India ended the day on 214 for 3 wickets trailing Australia’s first innings score of 333 by 177 runs.

- SAT News Service

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From Shobhit Nanda

Melbourne: Australian debutante Ed Cowan was one of the twin victim of India’s day 1 bowling attack which would have been overturned had Decision Review System (DRS) was being used in the current India vs Australia test series. The struggling Michael Hussey copped a golden duck with replays suggesting the balls clipped his shirt rather than the edge.

India none the less had a good day at the office taking 6 Aussie wickets although resistance later in the day by Brad Haddin and Peter Siddle helped Australia achieve a respectable day 1 score. Play ended with Australia at 6/277 with India’s fast bowling sensation Umesh Yadav taking 3 wickets.

Umesh Yadav facing the media after the days play said he was happy with his performance but would have preferred to have bowled more economical. His three wickets included the scalps of Warner, March and Ponting which kept Australia in check. Ishant Sharma was the unlucky having been the pick of the Indian bowler but not taking any wickets. Zaheer Khan also made a steady comeback taking the wickets of Hussey and Clarke, which Ashwin took the wicket to dismiss Cowan caught behind.

Ed Cowan, who made an impressive century in the preceding tour game against India in Canberra, was unlucky to have been given out caught behind with hotspot replays not showing any contact with the willow. Cowan commented that he wanted consistency in the use of DRS by the ICC and no doubt feels he has missed out on a century on debut. India was also at the receiving end of their decision to not use DRS when a close LBW shout late on the day against Brad Haddin was turned down by the umpire.

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By Neeraj Nanda

Melbourne: The Victorian Government today gave a Christmas gift to the traders of Little India, Dandenong by deciding to grant then six months rent relief and some other steps to address their grievances. The traders of Little India in Dandenong’s Foster and Mason Streets have been agitating for a long time demanding security of trade, relief in rent and many other demands including their lease issues which came up after the Vic Urban (Places TO Be) decided to go ahead with the revitalize Greater Dandenong project.

President of the Foster Street and Mason Street Traders Association Mr. Sayeed of Roshan’s Fashion, told South Asia Times (SAT) that he was informed of the government’s decisions on the phone by Victorian Planning Minister, Mr. Matthew Guy. According to Mr. Sayeed, Mr. Guy told him the government had decided to grant six months rent relief, Vic Urban will immediately have an offer of long term lease of the businesses and initiate talks about the business future individually with all traders.

Full details of the offer are officially not available because of Christmas holiday today. A media release is soon expected on the issue.

The Little India traders had recently held a protest rally outside the Victorian Parliament and the issue was raised by the opposition ALP in Parliament a few times.

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By Neeraj Nanda

Melbourne, Dec 22, 2011: A Melbourne teenager has been sentenced to 13 years imprisonment for the killing of Indian overseas student Nitin Garg one year back. The teenager will serve minimum of 8 years imprisonment and after that will be eligible for parole.
Delivering the verdict, the judge said Nitin Garg was knifed with a folding knife for his mobile phone and that he “was an innocent and random victim” and it was his presence in the park, not his race, that led to the fatal attack.
The killing of Nitin Garg had led to diplomatic tensions between India and Australia. The tragedy came amidst many other attacks on Indian overseas students in Melbourne and Sydney. The attacks led to a dramatic decline in Indian students coming to Australia for studies.

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PHOTO: SAT

By our community reporter

Melbourne, Dec. 6: As hundreds of Little India traders and supporters demonstrated outside the Victorian Parliament, inside the Shadow Minister for Planning Bryan Tee, raised the Little India issue in the Council, which was followed by an agitated response from Matthew Guy, Planning Minister. In his reply, the Planning Minister blamed the previous government for the Little India mess and rejected Bryan Tee’s plea for “independent mediation to find common ground and can report publicly on options for a way forward in those areas where agreement cannot be reached”. He said the issue could not be solved overnight and was ready to talk to the traders. Bryan Tee said, “As the Little India was an icon in the present situation it could be lost forever.”
Hundreds of Little India traders and supporters attended the Council session when Bryan Tee raised the Little India issue. Talking to SAT, Kaushilya, spokesperson Little India traders said we had invited the Planning Minister and the Premier also to the rally, but they did not attend. Not once in the Council the Planning Minister made eye contact with the Little India traders as they sat in the public gallery.
Earlier, a big crowd of Little India traders and supporters were addressed on the steps of Victorian Parliament by the Shadow Planning Minister Bryan Tee. He assured the traders and the Indian community that the Australian Labor Party (ALP) will stand by the Little India traders. He was then handed a petition on the issue signed by about 800 people. Others who addressed the gathering were Kaushilya, spokesperson Little India traders, Jude Perera, MP, Manoj Kumar, ALP activist, Sayeed Md., Roshans Fashions.
The protest was colourful laced with a few Bollywood dances and Indian sweets. A large number of local and India media were present to cover the event. Meanwhile, photos of the event have been posted on the Save Little India Campaign Facebook page and it has been receiving a big response from the community.

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By our correspondent

New Delhi: The fire in the two coaches of the Doon Express early on Tuesday killed seven people including an Australian women. The train was going from Howrah to Dehradun caught fire just before Giridih in Jharkhand. Three other Australian tourists were hurt in the incident. According to a witness a man was seen pouring petrol near the rail line.The railway ministry says the cause of the fire is not known.

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Mr. Ravi Bhatia, Chairman AIBC, Victoria

By our business reporter

Melbourne: The Australian India Business Council today welcomed the decision by Prime Minister Julia Gillard to reconsider the Government’s ban on the sale of uranium to India.
“The decision to reconsider this ban is long overdue” said Mr Bhatia. “India is an increasingly crucial trading partner for Australia and the ban on sale of uranium is a contentious issue preventing an open relationship”.

“With a population of 1.2 billion people and 40% of who live below the poverty line, India needs strong and reliable sources of energy to assist in her development. Nuclear energy is an essential element of India’s need for carbon friendly power” said Mr Bhatia.

“The Australian Government’s refusal to supply uranium to India has been a persistent negative influence on the relationship with India. We strongly encourage the Government to reverse its position and allow the free trade between these two great countries”
Meanwhile, in a media statement Mr. Arun Sharma, National Chairman, AIBC commended the Prime Minister on reconsidering the ban in the broader national interests and in recognition of strengthened relations between both countries.
Professor Sharma said “the Australia India relationship will redefine our nations and the region, over the coming decades. The ability for India to generate the power needed to support its rapidly growing economy is reliant on safe and secure access to nuclear power. With Australia holding a significant share of the world’s uranium reserves, it represents an important opportunity for trade that can be managed given appropriate levels of transparency”.
“AIBC believes that with adherence to International Atomic Energy Agency arrangements and strong transparency measures that Australian uranium can be sold to India for peaceful purposes. Professor Sharma acknowledges that “this is a highly emotive and sensitive issue and urges the Government to work closely with business and communities in both countries to ensure the most robust and transparent arrangements are in place to support the move.”
“India’s continued peaceful rise as the largest democracy in the world and one of the largest economies in our region is in the national interests for all Australians. AIBC welcomes the opportunity to work with both Governments to see a way clear in opening up the sale of Australian uranium into India”, the release said.

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