Resounding Modi wave as BJP secures 303

New Delhi, 24 May 2019 — The BJP's resounding victory in the Lok Sabha elections that saw Prime Minister Narendra Modi make headlines across national and international dailies and also paint a vast swath of the mainland saffron brought in its wake some outstanding results from a number of states.

In the final tally that the Election Commission continues to update the most striking numbers for the Bharatiya Janata Party were in West Bengal, where they decimated the Mamata Banerjee led ruling dispensation Trinamool Congress. To the eight years of Trinamool at the helm the Amit Shah-led BJP pulled up the biggest upset, falling just short of three seats to the TMC's figure. The final tally of 42 seats: BJP- 18, TMC- 21, Congress-3.

In Uttar Pradesh, the saffron party made a huge comeback improving its tally to 62, the SP-BSP Mahagathbandhan managed 5 and 10, respectively, while Congress somehow was spared the royal humiliation, as UPA chairperson Sonia Gandhi's Rae Bareli seat remained with the party,while others got 2.

Maharashtra where the ruling BJP has not had a very happy bon homie with its ally Shiv Sena, it managed 23 seats, while Sena 18, Sharad Pawar led NCP got 4, Congress won the lone seat in Chandrapur defeating Union Minister Hansraj Ahir, and others two.

In Bihar, the BJP-JD-U, got 17 and 16 respectively, while the Congress again managed only one seat that of the Kishanganj constituency. The others bagged 6. The biggest upset was for the jailed RJD supremo Lalu Prasad, whose Rashtriya Janata Dal could not manage even a single seat amid the bickering among his sons.

In the national capital and Uttarakhand, it was BJP all the way as it managed all seven seats and five seats.

It sweeped Gujarat, Haryana and Himachal as well, bagging all 26, 10 and 4 seats, respectively.

In both Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan, BJP fell short by a single seat of a complete sweep.

The Congress' humiliation was completed with Madhya Pradesh joining the other heartland states bowing to Modi brand of "nationalism"

BJP won 28 of 29 Madhya Pradesh seats and 24 of 25 in Rajasthan. Barring Chhindwara that returned the sole Congress candidate Nakul Nath, the BJP swept all including the Guna seat held by Congress General Secretary Jyotiraditya Scindhia.

The Congress' presence in the north was only defined by eight seat win in the Captain Amarinder singh led Puanjab, where the BJP and Akali's managed two seats each. The Arvind Kejriwal led Aam Aadmi Party was one of the greatest casualties, that manged only one seat by Bhagwant Mann in Sangrur.

In the Northeast, Assam where BJP got 9 seats, Congress 3, while other 2. In Arunachal Pradesh and Tripura, the BJP emerged as sole winning party as it bagged both seats in both states. In Manipur the saffron party got 1, while the second seat went to others.

In the South, the BJP could not open its account in Kerala, where Congress bagged 15 of the 20 seats, the grand old party's only saving grace as their party chief managed to hold on to the Wayanad seat with record margin, after losing the family borough Amethi to BJP's Smriti Irani in a see-saw battle. The Left got one seat with the CPM winning Alappuza and other managed 4.

In Tamil Nadu, the DMK made a comeback with 23 of the 38 seats in contention, as voting was cancelled for the Vellore seat. Congress won 8, while the AIADMK managed only one. While the BJP could not open its account in the state, the others got 6.

In Jammu and Kashmir, though, the BJP riding on the Balakot airstrike bagged 3 of 6 seats, while the rest went to others. Mehbooba Mufti's PDP and Congress could not open their accounts.

In Odisha the battle went to the wire, but the Naveen Patnaik led BJD bagged 11 of 21, while BJP make gains with 9 seats bettering its previous hold and the Congress got one. [IANS]

BJP prime ministerial candidate’s wishes are unlikely to be fulfilled in North East

Industry insiders say lack of technical manpower & infrastructure 

hurts IT growth in Northeast

HARICHANDAN ARAKALI & INDU NANDAKUMAR

BANGALORE

Narendra Modi may want information technology companies to flock to the Northeast but software services firms are saying the BJP prime ministerial candidate’s wishes are unlikely to be fulfilled any time soon.

The absence of technical manpower, exacerbated by the lack of infrastructure, prevents development of IT in the Northeast, insiders in India’s $108-billion outsourcing industry said, reacting to Modi’s exhortation.

“Why can’t Manipur be made into an IT hub,” Modi asked, in a speech in Imphal, blaming the Congressled government for the Northeast’s woes, including crumbling infrastructure and persistent “insurgency.”

“There is no harm in considering the Northeast. In fact, wherever IT industry goes, it gives people highpaying jobs,” said Rostow Ravanan, chief financial officer at Bangalore-based Mindtree, which is setting up its largest training centre in Bubhaneshwar.

However, “at this point of time, I don't see many IT firms setting up their centres in the Northeast because there aren't too many engineering schools,” Rostow Ravanan said.

The reasons for the IT industry shunning the region are fairly simple, according to industry insiders: “It is no rocket science ... beyond the existence of an airport, if there aren’t good schools, hospitals and entertainment that the IT talent looks for,” the region won’t attract the industry, said one executive, who didn’t want to be named.

“Forget the Northeast, there’s hardly any IT presence in Kolkata,” the person said. Sops Key for Expansion for Technology Firms

As long as smaller cities don’t offer the type of availability of talent and infrastructure needed for the IT industry, young people will continue to flock to bigger centres such as Bangalore or Hyderabad.

“It’s primarily because of the physical and social infrastructure and the availability of talent and opportunities. The opportunity actually feeds off on the first three and then it becomes a cycle ... because there is a lack of opportunity the other three don’t develop, so it’s a little bit of a tricky situation,” the person said. 

This means, once people decide not to move, then it’s impossible to achieve scale in an industry such as the IT sector. Given the right incentives, however, not just India’s large technology firms but even midsized companies would be willing to expand to tier-2 cities, which often bring their own advantages, such as people staying longer at their jobs, being more satisfied as they stay closer to their families and so on.

The lack of technical manpower is the single most important reason for the industry to shun the region, and concerns such as less-than-stable governance seem to be more secondary.

“The challenge lies in attracting large pools of technical manpower in the Northeast,” said Ganesh Natarajan, CEO of Pune-based Zensar Technologies.

“The Centre should first set up four large universities in Guwahati, Shillong, Manipur and Arunachal, focused on employable skills,” Natarajan said.

Between 2011 and 2021, the region will have close to 17 million job seekers and only 2.6 million jobs, half of which will be in Assam alone, according to a January 2013 report by the Indian Chamber of Commerce and the consultancy PricewaterhouseCoopers.

The National Association of Software and Services Companies, the industry’s lobby, has tried getting the central government to consider a two-tiered incentive policy to encourage the IT industry to push deeper into smaller cities and towns. Such a policy is yet to materialise.

Incentives could include support on capital investments, tax holidays and employment-generation based subsidies. India could even follow what China is attempting in trying to develop its interior provinces, where for each person a company hires, the government offers some incentives, industry insiders said.

One executive, who didn’t want to be named, said “we don’t need incentives to work in Hyderabad, Bangalore or Chennai anymore. The industry needs incentives to work out of a Bhopal or Bhubaneswar and then gradually even a place like Guwahati may start looking attractive, but by choice I have no illusions about the industry moving to the Northeast anytime soon.”

Source: Economic Times, Bangalore 10/2/2014

Modi’s Himalayan miracle

June 26, 2013 [TOI] --- On the evening of Friday, June 21, as India reeled from the shock of the calamity in Uttarakhand and Himachal Pradesh, Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi landed up in Dehradun with a handful of officers. By Sunday, it was claimed that he had rescued 15,000 stranded Gujaratis from the wreckage of Uttarakhand and sent these grateful folks back home. This miracle was played up in media. But how was this feat achieved in a day or so, when India's entire military establishment has struggled to rescue around 40,000 people over 10 days?  Reports say that Modi pulled off this coup with a fleet of 80 Innovas. How did these cars manage to reach places like Kedarnath, across roads that have been washed away, over landslides that have wrecked most access routes?  But let us assume Modi's Innovas had wings as well as helicopter rotors. Including the driver, an Innova is designed to carry seven people. In a tough situation, assume you could pack nine passengers into each car. In that case, a convoy of 80 Innovas could ferry 720 people down the mountains to Dehradun at one go. To get 15,000 people down, the convoy would need to make 21 round trips.  The distance between Dehradun and Kedarnath is 221 km. So 21 trips up and down would mean that each Innova would have to travel nearly 9,300 km.  It takes longer to travel in the hills than in the plains. So, assuming an average speed of 40 km per hour, it would take 233 hours of driving to pull off the feat.  This assumes non-stop driving, without a second's rest to identify the Gujaratis to be rescued and keeping the rest of the distressed folk at bay, or any time to load and unload the vehicles. And forget about any downtime for the gallant rescuers.  That is nearly 10 days of miraculous work. And Modi pulled it off in a day.  Actually, in less than a day: a breathless media reported that by Saturday, 25 luxury buses had brought a group of Gujaratis back to Delhi. For some reason, four Boeing aircraft also idled in some undisclosed place nearby.  Modi, ever modest, himself did not make the claim of rescuing 15,000 Gujaratis from Himalayan disaster in a day. It was likely dumped on a gullible media by his public relations agency, an American outfit called Apco Worldwide. In 2007, Apco was hired, ostensibly to boost the Vibrant Gujarat summits, but to actually burnish Modi's image, for $25,000 a month.  He is in good company. Apco has worked for the dictator of Kazakhstan, Nursultan Nazarbaev, the governments of Malaysia and Israel and the American tobacco lobby.  For the latter, it set up front organisations to rubbish evidence which proved that tobacco causes cancer. Apco has also worked for pariah regimes like Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan and Nigerian strongman Sani Abacha.  Its powerful advisory council includes former Israeli diplomats Itamar Rabinovich and Shimon Stein, as well as Doron Bergerbest-Eilon, who was the highest ranked officer in the Israel security agency.  Apco is credited with Modi's makeover and his holographic campaigns. Before Apco, Vibrant Gujarat was a tame affair: the first three summits generated investment promi-ses between $14 billion and $150 billion. After Apco, in 2009 and 2011, these jumped to $253 billion and $450 billion.  Apco worked tirelessly to rope in investor interest from America. It also lobbied with politicians in Washington to remove the ban on Modi travelling to the US. The ban was imposed after the massacre of Muslims in Gujarat as Modi presided over the state in 2002. So far, Apco hasn't succeeded in getting Modi a US visa.  And the Vibrant Gujarat numbers are all hot air. An analysis by my colleague Kingshuk Nag in his biography of Modi shows that only 3.2% of the 2009 number has materialised on the ground. Of the 2011 figure, a mere 0.5% is for real.  But Modi does not need Apco to lie. In 2005 he announced that state-owned company GSPC had made India's biggest gas discovery: 20 trillion cubic feet (tcf) valued at more than $50 billion, off Andhra Pradesh. This was 40% more than what Reliance had found in the same area. Modi then egged on GSPC to grab projects in Egypt, Yemen and Australia.  Many suspected that Modi's gas claim was hot air, but in the absence of evidence few could say so. But by 2012, the Centre's directorate general of hydrocarbons (DGH), which analyses and certifies all energy finds, said that it could vouch for only a tenth of Modi's claim: there was only 2 tcf of gas. And that too in areas tough to exploit.  Meanwhile, under Modi's rousing leadership, GSPC had poured in nearly $2 billion into exploration, much of it raised as debt based on its supposed 20 tcf gas find. When the gas vanished, GSPC went bust.  To rescue it, Modi asked the company to venture out into more areas, like city gas distribution. There have been problems with these businesses as well, including a very dubious transaction with a company in Barbados.  In every area the Modi narrative is a tale of bluster and bluff. But his Himalayan miracle is a barefaced, cynical lie. [TOI]