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March 6, 2006 issue - Every year at the World Economic Forum in Davos, there's a star. Not a person but a country. One country impresses the gathering of global leaders because of a particularly smart Finance minister or a compelling tale of reform or even a glamorous gala. This year there was no contest. In the decade that I've been going to Davos, no country has captured the imagination of the conference and dominated the conversation as India in 2006. It was not a matter of chance. As you got off the plane in Zurich, there were large...

NEW DELHI -- President Bush will visit India in the first week of March, setting the stage for a far stronger relationship between the two largest democracies. He will arrive at a time when India's economy has been growing at over 7% annually, and is set for even higher growth as the government embarks on a program of increased liberalization designed to overhaul the country's creaking infrastructure. But economic attractions aside, the main thrust of the visit will be strategic. The Bush National Security Doctrine of 2002 envisages much closer cooperation with India to build strategic stability in the Indian...

xploding at the seams with building, investment and trade, India can hardly keep up with itself. Airplanes coming into Delhi and Mumbai routinely end up circling the airports for hours, wasting precious jet fuel, because there are not enough runways or airport gates. City streets originally built for two lanes of traffic are teeming with four and sometimes five lanes of cars, auto-rickshaws, mopeds, buses and trucks. This energy-guzzling congestion will only become worse as India continues producing fairly high-quality goods and services at lower and lower prices — from automobiles that cost only $2,500 to low-budget airline flights for...

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan, Feb. 12 — Arrests and interrogations of suspects in a recent series of suicide bombings in Afghanistan show that the attacks have been orchestrated from Pakistan by members of the ousted Taliban government with little interference by the Pakistani authorities, Afghan officials say. In taped interviews by an Afghan interrogator, two Afghans and three Pakistanis who were among 21 people arrested in recent weeks described their roles in the attacks, which have killed at least 70 people in the last three months, most of them Afghan civilians but also international peacekeepers, a Canadian diplomat and a dozen Afghan...

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NEW DELHI/SRINAGAR: Said to be one of the brains behind the 2005 serial blasts in Delhi, Abu Huzefa alias Abdullah Wahi was shot dead in an encounter with a joint team of Rashtriya Rifles, J&K Police and Delhi Police in Jammu and Kashmir on Monday morning. Huzefa, district commander of Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) in Srinagar, had worked in tandem with Abu Alqama, a Pakistan-based LeT operative, to engineer the blasts which rocked the Capital on October 29 last year. Huzefa belonged to Pakistan and was involved in several sensational encounters with security forces in the past few years. Monday’s encounter, which...

In a step up of service-to-service engagement, India and the United States will conduct the biggest-ever army level exercises near Ranikhet in Uttaranchal in January, as American officials on Friday indicated that Washington was working to open doors to high-technology transfers. A company force of the US army will conduct joint exercises with a thrust towards anti-insurgency operations in the mountainous terrain near Choubhatia, US officials said adding that, in the coming year, armed forces of the two countries would participate in 'more complex, patterned war games'. "The US Pacific Command wants to expand its military-level innteraction with India over...

A Delhi bus driver who saved the lives of around 70 passengers when he took a bomb from his vehicle during last month's terror attacks has been speaking of his experience. More than 60 people were killed and hundreds were injured when three bombs exploded in busy shopping districts in the Indian capital on 29 October. Among the wounded was Kuldeep Singh, who carried a bomb off his bus after it was found by one of the passengers. Mindful of the fact that the bus was fuelled by highly-explosive compressed gas, he urged the 70 passengers to flee while he...

DUBAI CITY, Dubai--India's a tough place to live. That's the pitch Dubai is using to woo companies to bring outsourcing work to the tiny island nation. The city-state, part of the United Arab Emirates, has kicked off an effort to land some of the outsourcing work that is heading to countries with low labor costs like India and China. But instead of trying to compete head-to-head against those giants, the country is positioning itself as a place where companies can place their more senior or more qualified employees who may not want to live in Bangalore or Mumbai. The plan,...

Vairengte (mizoram), September 26: What was till two decades back a battleground where Mizo guerillas used non-conventional combat tactics against Indian troops is now a favourite training ground for Army personnel of other countries. A 42-member US Defence team is learning new techniques from Indian Army personnel at the Counter-Insurgency and Jungle Warfare School (CIJWS) in the hills here in Mizoram, as part of the post 9/11 Indo-US cooperation. This is the third US batch to be trained in India. Army personnel of several other countries are in queue to enrich their counter-insurgency techniques here. The US team has seven...

A simple philosophy guides the Indian-American community in Houston, Texas, USA: every little helps. Thus, 11-year-old Shruti Desai, who was among those who gathered to help, spent five hours making up Ziploc plastic packages -- containing toothpaste, moist towels, shampoos, soaps and other everyday needs -- for the evacuees displaced by Katrina. Also engaged in the task of making up such bags was Premal Desai. Having recently fractured her leg, she could not go to the Houston's Reliant Astrodome, where nearly 17,000 evacuees have received shelter, for relief work, so she decided to do what she could where she was....

Mark Twain said long ago that there were only three interesting cities in the US: Boston, New Orleans and San Francisco. I have had the pleasure of living in or near Boston and San Francisco for years, but I have only been to New Orleans twice: once, many years ago, and the second time just a few months ago. Mark Twain was right: these three cities are definitely unique and different: no concrete canyons, these. When the Loma Prieta earthquake hit San Francisco in 1989, I was in London, and the images I saw on television convinced me that my...

Former US president Bill Clinton is scheduled to visit India's Uttar Pradesh state to promote a health program in a region where Japanese encephalitis has killed nearly 500 people. The United States embassy in New Delhi described Clinton's brief stopover on Wednesday in the northern Indian city of Lucknow as a "private visit". "Former president Clinton will arrive in Lucknow and leave the next day for China after launching a project which aims to reinforce our medical infrastructure," state government spokesman Sanjay Bhatia said. "The State Health Mission is aimed at strengthening the health services of the state. The planned...

Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has arrived in the Afghan capital, Kabul for a two-day visit aimed at strengthening relations. Mr Singh is the first Indian prime minister to visit Afghanistan in nearly three decades. He will use the visit to emphasise Delhi's commitment towards rebuilding Afghanistan's economy, infrastructure and democratic institutions. The war-ravaged country is a strategically crucial ally for India. Motives for generosity India is Afghanistan's biggest donor in the region. It has spent over $500m in Afghanistan since the overthrow of the Taleban in 2001. Much of this money has been spent in rebuilding Afghanistan's infrastructure with...

BARAUB (GUREZ), JULY 31: The Shina-speaking Gurezis, ethnically linked to Gilgit in Pakistan’s Northern Areas, thought that the 2003 Indo-Pak ceasefire on the Line of Control (LoC) had broken down when artillery guns boomed and lit up the night sky last fortnight. But this was no cross-LoC firing: it signalled the last phase of the Indian Army’s operation against Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) cadres infiltrating this sector. Operation Makalwain was no Kargil though Mushkoh Valley, from where Pakistanis first intruded in 1999, lies adjacent to Gurez. But it was perhaps one of the biggest operations since the mountain conflict: an entire Indian...

LONDON: Around a quarter of Muslims in Britain sympathise with the motives of the London bombers, while some six per cent are even ready to support those who carry out such attacks, a survey said on Saturday. As Britain is reeling under the impact of two terror attacks within a fortnight, 88 per cent of British Muslims who participated in the survey in the "Daily Telegraph" said they clearly have no intention of justifying the bomb blasts. But, around six per cent of the participants in the survey opined the bombings were justified and some 24 per cent said they...

Pune, July 22: When someone who’s worth around Rs 40,000 crore wants to build a house, what does he do? India’s richest man and software major Wipro’s chairman Azim Premji has opted for the common man’s route—go for a loan. A small one-line footnote buried in page 191 of the company’s annual report for year-ended March 31, 2005, released today, spelt it out. It said that the annual compensation includes ‘‘a subsidy of $4,808 (approximately Rs 2.07 lakh) to Azim H Premji, for interest payments on his independent housing loan.’’ The loan in question is for his palatial farmhouse next...

NEW DELHI, July 15 - American troops killed 24 men suspected of being Taliban fighters fleeing Afghanistan into Pakistani territory, the Pakistani military said Friday, but left unclear whether American forces had crossed into Pakistani territory. Maj. Gen. Shaukat Sultan, the Pakistani Army spokesman, said in a telephone interview from Islamabad that American-led coalition forces attacked the suspects on Thursday in the eastern Khost region of Afghanistan, prompting them to flee across the border. "They were hit by coalition forces on the Pakistan side, when they were trying to run away from the operation," General Sultan said. American forces in...

Since April, 2005, there has been a co-ordinated escalation of acts of jihadi terrorism in Iraq, Afghanistan and Jammu and Kashmir in India. I believe the coming months will see more incidents of jihadi terrorism in these three areas. In Iraq, there are signs of a decrease in the operations of the Arab Sunni resistance fighters, who owe their loyalty to the old Baath Party disbanded by the Americans after they occupied the country. They are distinct from the Arab Sunni terrorists of foreign origin, who owe their loyalty to Osama bin Laden and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. The Iraqi resistance...

Indians are the world's biggest bookworms, reading on average 10.7 hours a week, twice as long as Americans, according to a new survey. The NOP World Culture Score index surveyed 30,000 people in 30 countries from December 2004 to February 2005. Analysts said self-help and aspirational reading could explain India's high figures. Time spent on reading meant fewer hours watching TV and listening to the radio - India came fourth last in both. The NOP survey of 30,000 consumers aged over 13 saw China and the Philippines take second and third place respectively in average hours a week spent reading...