India Archive

With the United States currently fighting two wars abroad and facing a health care crisis and an economy on life-support at home, Pentagon officials are hoping to meet a looming threat to America’s future global dominance — not to mention national security — by boosting capacity in elementary school classrooms across the nation. In January, the Pentagon approved a proposal by their risk-taking research agency, DARPA, to invest $45 million into efforts to increase enrollment in computing, science, technology, engineering and mathematics programs (CS-STEM). To do so, DARPA wants to develop extracurricular initiatives to target and engage elementary aged kids, […]

Normally I’d have bookmarked this kind of item for an “Off the Radar” post. But for a variety of what seem like obvious, if intuitive and somewhat intangible reasons, I’m elevating major telecom transactions to “On the Radar” status, alongside weapons sales, nuclear agreements, gas and oil deals and the like. In this case, that’s partly because it’s an Indian telecom company, Bharti Airtel, buying Kuwait-based Zain’s African operations, to the tune of a $10.7 billion purchase price. (The deal has yet to be finalized, pending due diligence.) This is significant for a few reasons. First, as Thomas P.M. Barnett […]

NEW DELHI — After a freeze on bilateral dialogue of more than a year, New Delhi’s proposed talks with Islamabad at the foreign secretary level, now scheduled for Feb. 25, have invited diverse reactions. India’s previous refusal to engage with its neighbor in the aftermath of the Mumbai terror attack of Nov. 26, 2008, was meant to pressure Islamabad to both prosecute the perpetrators of the Mumbai carnage and offer unambiguous commitments to crack down on terrorism. The scars from the Mumbai attack, which left 170 people dead, have not yet healed. Nor has Pakistan done anything substantive to assuage […]

The UAE raised quite a few eyebrows last December when it announced a $40 billion contract for setting up four nuclear power stations in its territory. But what surprised analysts even more than the size of the contract was who won it: a South Korean consortium led by Korea Electric Power Company (KEPCO), with Toshiba Westinghouse as a minor partner. KEPCO managed to beat out heavyweight rivals, including a consortium led by French major Areva and the U.S.-Japanese alliance of GE-Hitachi, to walk away with the deal. Pundits have talked quite a bit of late about the shift from West […]

With both Indian and Pakistani media sources reporting — and largely supporting — renewed hope for the re-engagement of formal talks between the two nations, panelists at a recent Asia Society talk, “India and Pakistan: Back from the Brink?” agreed that a unique window of opportunity to rev up the historically stalled negotiations now exists — and must be seized. Dr. Adil Najam told event attendees that the time is now ripe, but that relations could soon sour if not taken advantage of. Najam, a professor in international relations at Boston University, said the key to successful, substantive talks will […]

Human rights activists are turning up the heat on British company Vedanta Resources over charges that its operations threaten the existence of India’s Dongria Kondh tribe. Cast as a “David versus Goliath” fight by the tribe and its supporters, the Vedanta story comes at a time when stakeholders continue to look for a firm definition and application of a community engagement concept known as Free, Prior, Informed Consent (FPIC), to benefit indigenous peoples around the world. Survival International has appealed to the makers of the blockbuster movie “Avatar” to help the Dongria Kondh fight off mining plans and the pollution […]