When hunting is all they have done for generations, it is difficult to contemplate an alternate means of living overnight. Inasin Bai, an intrepid member of the hunting tribe of Pardhis brazenly questions, ‘what about us?’, now that hunting is banned...
We are a nomadic clan. For generations we were known as baheliyas and have been hunting to earn a living. We know no other skill. Living in the jungle has been a way of life for us. Tigers are like cats for us. We stay in the jungle and for days our men roam around the jungle and study the routes that the animals take, especially the tiger.
Tigers fetch us good money because the buyers are readily available. A lot of
business comes from the crocs as well. But for killing them we use poisonous tablets. Once the men have hunted the animals, it is the women’s job to shave the skin off, to clean it and to look for a buyer at a good price. Till the time we are in the forest, we often feed on birds like bater (quails). Our kids have learnt to mimic the voice of the bird well, which it assumes as another bird’s call and also responds. This makes it easier for us to trace them and then we hunt them with a catapult. But now animals have to be protected and hunting has been made illegal. So suddenly our means of earning a living has become illegal. The rules are so strict that most of our men are in the jail. It has been three months that we have been ostracized from our community because we have stopped hunting in the hope that the government would provide us with an alternative. But now there seems to be no source of earning from the jungle. It seems like it will take long before anything is done for us. The money in the work they offer us isn’t enough and the work is tiresome too. If we don’t get enough food to survive, we would have no other option but to go back to the community and engage in hunting, which is no more legal. Everybody thinks that the count of tigers and other animals is falling, but we can’t die of hunger for them. I’m sure you would weigh human life more than that of an animal!....Continue
We are a nomadic clan. For generations we were known as baheliyas and have been hunting to earn a living. We know no other skill. Living in the jungle has been a way of life for us. Tigers are like cats for us. We stay in the jungle and for days our men roam around the jungle and study the routes that the animals take, especially the tiger.
Tigers fetch us good money because the buyers are readily available. A lot of
business comes from the crocs as well. But for killing them we use poisonous tablets. Once the men have hunted the animals, it is the women’s job to shave the skin off, to clean it and to look for a buyer at a good price. Till the time we are in the forest, we often feed on birds like bater (quails). Our kids have learnt to mimic the voice of the bird well, which it assumes as another bird’s call and also responds. This makes it easier for us to trace them and then we hunt them with a catapult. But now animals have to be protected and hunting has been made illegal. So suddenly our means of earning a living has become illegal. The rules are so strict that most of our men are in the jail. It has been three months that we have been ostracized from our community because we have stopped hunting in the hope that the government would provide us with an alternative. But now there seems to be no source of earning from the jungle. It seems like it will take long before anything is done for us. The money in the work they offer us isn’t enough and the work is tiresome too. If we don’t get enough food to survive, we would have no other option but to go back to the community and engage in hunting, which is no more legal. Everybody thinks that the count of tigers and other animals is falling, but we can’t die of hunger for them. I’m sure you would weigh human life more than that of an animal!....Continue
iniquitous tax, hurts the poor more than the rich, and must be undoubtedly contained. To that effect, the banking industry seems to have paid heed to RBI Governor Y.V. Reddy’s suggestion (or was it an order?) that “net interest margin of banks was high and there was scope for reducing lending rates.” Considering the fact that non-food credit off-take has come down in the recent past, large banks like SBI, HDFC and ICICI decided to bring down the rates. Thanks to the ‘peer fear’, other banks are falling in line. Increasing credit flow to small scale and medium enterprises, and providing a boost to the housing sector as well as to other productive sectors are amongst the few cited positive effects of the rate slash. But in reality, have banks bent down because of a political diktat from the finance ministry?
of FY 2007 at 4.9% (its fastest pace in the last four years), many felt that the worst was over. But, as the US Commerce Department, on January 30, came out with the latest numbers, it only provided further credence to the arguments that the US is knocking on the door of recession, if not already in.
as the minister. Do you see a situation wherein the national carriers could become minor players in the company of many private operators, big and small? Although the number of passengers carried by the national carriers has increased considerably, registering a growth of almost 25%, the market share has been impacted due to the entry of private airlines, availability of low cost carriers, decline in capacity share, and delay in acquisition of new and latest technology aircraft. However, a number of initiatives have been undertaken like acquisition of new aircraft, merger of Indian and Air India, aggressive marketing and sales initiatives, which has resulted in marked improvements in market share.
as a cricket administration institution and as a positive for the team is not up to the mark. “It’s easy to manipulate the masses when it comes to winning elections. But to really manage the Indian cricket team, you need to be an emotionally intellectual person, which Pawar isn’t at all,” feels a former cricketer who knows the BCCI President for the past five years. For instance, they say that the BCCI shouldn’t have been so quick in asking the Indian team to continue with the current Australian tour after what happened during the second test at Sydney. It should have waited to gauge the mood of the team and taken into account the feelings of the manager. In the end, BCCI had to backtrack and use its clout to force the ICC to arrive at a face-saving solution.
Paper No. 99 named Dreaming with BRICs: Path to 2050 is no news now-a-days, at least in India, given the impunity with which this has often been referred to by nation’s polity and policy makers to showcase the bright future of our country. And also as if forewarn all those, who are yet to make up their minds about investing in India or take it seriously, as to what a grave mistake they would commit if they gloss over the writing on the wall.
a decade ago and was talked about in the IT arena as ‘the’ idea that would take away computing from the desktop to an imagined central hub – of course known to most, today, as the Internet. After a promising start ‘Grid Computing’ eventually found no takers, but the idea lingered on and has now made a comeback of sorts, reinvented and rechristened as ‘Cloud Computing’ or simply stated, a cluster of programs running through thousands of parallel computers and accessible through the Internet.
of entry and exit from the stock market or a mutual fund is a difficult call. The decision purely depends on the investor’s choice, driven by his investment objectives, his perception of the market and other relevant factors. However, common sense tells us that a good time to enter a market is when the market looks attractive and valuations of stocks seem relatively cheap. Similarly, exit when it is on a high. But for a happy exit, the following points should be kept in mind: