New Delhi, Nov 30 : Assam government has launched a special
drive to seize illegal arms allegedly being kept by different groups in
some areas, including Bodoland Territorial Council (BTC).
“It is a fact that there are illegal arms in Assam. Not only in BTC
areas but in other areas also. Many groups are keeping illegal arms,”
Chief Minister Tarun Gogoi said at a press conference here.
He said a special drive has been launched to seize the illegal arms
and maintain peace in the state. Floating of illegal arms are said to be
the key reasons
for many deaths in recent clashes between Bodos and immigrant Muslims.
Gogoi also said “certain forces” were instigating both Bodos and the
immigrant Muslims and creating tension between the two communities.
He said out of nearly five lakh people affected in the recent
violence, who stayed in relief camps, most of them have return home and
only 37,000 were still staying in the camps now.
The Chief Minister also denied involvement of any Bangladeshi
national in recent clashes saying his government was not protecting any
foreign national.
Jorhat, Nov 29 : Naglo
and Lonliam, two nondescript villages in the Lazo area of Tirap district
in Arunachal Pradesh, have taken a path-breaking decision that could
stir others like them out of their opium-induced stupor.
The two villages have agreed to give up
opium cultivation and will sign an understanding with the district
administration to that effect when five frontier districts, including
Tirap, of the state, bordering Myanmar and China, join hands to launch a
massive awareness campaign on December 11 in the remote villages
adjoining the Golden Triangle to make people aware of the ill effects
of opium.
The campaign has been prompted by the
largescale deforestation undertaken by the villagers of Longding, Tirap,
Changlang, Lohit and Anjaw districts to clear land for opium
cultivation. The opium grown in these districts makes its way not only
into the domestic market in a raw form but also enters the
international drug trade after being taken to Myanmar where there are
factories to refine these products into heroin.
Tirap deputy commissioner Sachin Shinde said over
phone today that this would be the biggest such campaign launched in
the five districts. “It’s a sort of custom for many villagers to take to
opium cultivation. Many of them are unaware of its ill effects and the
awareness campaign will be the best way to check opium cultivation in
these parts.”
The six-day campaign will begin with a
motorcycle-cum-jeep rally at Khonsa, the district headquarters of
Tirap, and will pass through the opium-growing areas before ending at
Kibithoo, the easternmost point of roadhead in India, in Anjaw
district.
Said Shinde, “Naglo and Lonliam have
agreed to give up opium cultivation completely and will sign an
understanding with the district administration as the rally passes
through these villages. We will distribute chicks among the villagers so
that they can start poultry farming instead.”
As part of the initiative, a documentary
film has also been prepared with messages from political and religious
leaders denouncing the practice of cultivation and consumption of opium.
“The legal implications of growing,
selling, possessing opium have also been explained in the documentary.
Interviews of farmers who have given up opium cultivation and taken to
cultivation of cash crops such as cardamom, ginger and kiwi fruit have
also been taken. The documentary is proposed to be screened at all the
places through which the rally will pass during interaction with the
public from these opium-growing districts,” Shindhe said.
An official at the Narcotics Control
Bureau, Northeast, said opium cultivation was a major problem in these
five districts of Arunachal Pradesh.
“We have been carrying out operations
regularly to destroy poppy crop in these districts. But our efforts
generally go in vain given the constraints of terrain and time. We are
only able to destroy the crop growing in the immediate vicinity of
easily accessible roads. It is impossible to cover the entire area
before the crop is harvested,” he added.
Last year, the Narcotics Control Bureau,
with the help of local administration, had destroyed 1,300 acres of
poppy cultivation in these districts. But these efforts are generally
opposed by the villagers for whom opium cultivation is a source of
livelihood.
“We are also carrying out awareness campaigns to educate the people about the ill-effects of opium,” the NCB official said.
New Delhi, Nov 29: Chinese nuclear-capable SU-27 fighter
aircraft came close to a confrontation with Indian Air Force jets on
October 30 afternoon in the Tawang region of Arunachal Pradesh, says a
report in the Delhi tabloid Mail Today.
The news report, said to be based on reports filed by the IAF and
external intelligence agency RAW, says, on October 30, some IAF jets
were on a routine sortie mission in Arunachal Pradesh, when the Chinese
People's Liberation Army Air Force's Lhasa-based radar picked them up,
setting off a chain reaction.
At 3:04 pm, two chinese
nuclear-armed Sukhoi-27 jets took off from Gonggar air base in Tibet to
confront the IAF jets. The Chinese aircraft, according to the Mail
Today report, flew southeast towards the Indian side, and were picked up
on the radar at 3:29 pm near Cuona.
The drama lasted for nearly
50 minutes, just 30 km short of the Line of Actual Control, but the
Chinese fighter aircraft realizing that the IAF jets had no intention of
any offensive move, turned back, says the report.
The Research and Analysis Wing sent to the government a report on the
incident on November 9.
The newspaper report says the radars twice lost
track of the Chinese Sukhoi-27 aircraft, giving anxious moments to the
top IAF brass. The Indian jet fighters too disappeared from the radar
once, says the report.
The Chinese Sukhoi-27 aircraft was
provided tactical radar support by the 42 Radar Regiment of the PLAAF,
which is deployed all over Tibet.
The PLAAF is Asia's largest
air force with nearly 1,600 aircraft. China has already five operational
airfields in Gonggar, Pangta Linchi, Hoping and Gar Gunsa.
By Lalremlien Neitham New Delhi, Nov 29 : In the semi-finals played today in the sixth edition of the NE Tamchon Football Trophy at Dr.Ambedkar Stadium, New Delhi, HSA FC (Hmar) ousted last year's champion Kangleicha Sanaroi Lup (KSL) in a penalty shoot-out while Zeliangrong FC also enters the final with a 1-0 win against TSFD FC (Tripura) .
In the first semi-finals match played between HSA FC and KSL, the HSA FC were given a penalty kick, scoring a goal on the 6th minute of the game.
KSL were also given a penalty kick evening the score.
Before the first half was over, both the teams scored two goals each.
In the second-half, HSA FC scored another goal which was soon evened by KSL with another goal.
As the match ends with a 3-3 draw, extra time of 30 minutes was played but both team failed to score any goals.
In the penalty shoot-out, HSA FC goalie saved a goal and HSA FC won the match by 8-6 .
In the second semi-finals, previous year's runner-up Zeliangrong FC played against TSFD FC (Tripura).
Zeliangrong FC scored a goal in the first-half of the match.
Zeliangrong FC dominates the match and with TSFD FC not scoring any goal, Zeliangrong FC won the match with a 1-0 win.
For the HSA FC, this is the third time that it enters the finals at the NE Tamchon Football Trophy.
It played finals against Zeliangrong FC in 2008 and again with DMZP FC in 2010.Zeliangrong FC lifted the trophy in 2008 and were runners-up in the previous year.
The final match between the HSA FC and Zeliangrong FC will be played at 5:30pm on December 1, 2012 at Dr.Ambedkar Stadium, New Delhi.
The tournament is supported by the Ministry of Youth Affairs & Sports and the Ministry of DoNER.
It is also co-sponsored by ONGC, Oil India Limited and COSCO.
The champion will be awarded the North East Tamchon Football Trophy in addition to Rs.five lakhs cash prize, medals and certificates.
The trophy can be owned by any team who wins the trophy consecutively for three years.
No team has owned the trophy yet.
The first runners up will be awarded medals and certificates, with a cash prize of Rs.three lakhs.
And the second runners up will be awarded medals and certificates, with a cash prize of Rs.two lakhs.
Consolation prizes of Rs.25,000 each will be awarded to 5 teams who qualified for the quarter-finals.
Cash prize of Rs.5,000 each will be awarded to the best goal keeper, best striker, best mid-fielder, best defender, best coach and man of the tournament.
And Rs.20,000 will be award to the Best Team of the Tournament (Fair Play Award).
The closing ceremony of the tournament will be held from 4:00pm before the final match.
Salman Khurshid, Minister of External Affairs, Govt of India will grace the occasion as chief guest and HS Brahma, Election Commissioner, Govt of India as guest of honour.
Other special invitees and guests includes Members of Parliament from North Eastern States, Delhi Commissioner of Police Neeraj Kumar and President of Delhi Soccer Association Subhash Chopra, MLA.
Shillong Chamber Choir and various artistes from North East India will also be performing during the event's evening of music.
The tournament, organised in memory of late RN Tamchon (ACP, Delhi Police) by the Tangkhul Naga Society Delhi (TNSD) since 2007, aims to promote friendship, unity and interaction through games and sports among North Eastern people in Delhi.
* The sender of this news can be contacted at lalremlien(at)gmail(dot)com .
Aizawl, Nov 28 : The Mizoram government has resumed peace negotiations with the Manipur-based Hmar militant outfit Hmar People’s Convention – Democrats (HPC-D) after the peace parleys run into rough weather for two years.
Sources said on Tuesday that the Mizoram delegates were on their way back from Manipur’s Churachandpur where they held talks with the HPCD leadership on Monday.
While all-party leaders of the Sinlung Hills Development Council and a few officials represented Mizoram, the HPCD team was led by its chairman Thangliana, who was recently alleviated from information secretary after the arrest of the outfit’s chairman H Zosangbera.
“The peace talks were held under cordial and peaceful atmosphere of mutual trust. We are optimistic that the talks would bear fruits,” one of the all-party leaders said, adding that he would not disclose any further as they were yet to give the report to state government.
Due to flight cancellations from Imphal to Aizawl for the whole of this week, the delegates were coming back by road. Resumption of the peace talks came after Mizoram chief minister Lal Thanhawla and his home minister R Lalzirliana said the state government would not sit for talks, despite the Centre’s instructions to do so, because the HPC-D was “violating the suspension of operations (SoO) agreement”.
“The HPC-D cadres had not only not remained in the designated camps but had also never deposited their arms and continued to indulge in violent and illegal activities, including extortion from across the Manipur border,” Lalzirliana had said.
Also, it was difficult for Mizoram to decide with which faction of the outfit it would engage in the parleys after the HPC-D split into two factions, according to the home minister. Lal Thanhawla had also said it was not Mizoram government, but the Centre which was supposed to hold talks with the HPC-D. The HPC-D and the Congress government began negotiations on November 11, 2010.
The bilateral suspension of operations (SoO) was also signed between the two parties on the same day with an agreement to continue the parley for the next six months. The peace talks, however, were abandoned when the state government sent a letter to the HPC-D leadership on December 22, 2010, saying that it would not accept “foreigners” as members of the HPCD delegation for the peace parley and the next date scheduled for the talks, January 14, 2011 was deferred.
The HPC-D denied that their delegation team included a foreigner and the war of words continued between the two sides with both the parties drifting further away from the negotiating table. The mistrust worsened when the HPC-D in February this year deterred village council elections in 15 villages under the Sinlung hills development council, comprising Hmar-inhabited areas in northeastern Mizoram which is being demanded by the HPC-D for Hmar autonomy.
The term of the village councils, which has been extended for two times, is expiring on November 29. State Election Commission’s attempts to conduct rural polls in the 15 villages have so far failed due the HPC-D’s diktat not to file nominations.
The HPC-D suffered a blow when the Mizoram police arrested the outfit’s chairman H Zosangbera from Delhi airport on July 17. Earlier on June 10, HPCD “army chief” Lalropuia and “deputy army chief” Lalbiaknunga, were arrested from Silchar airport.
Lalropuia has been granted bail on health ground and is undergoing treatment in Guwahati. An offshoot of the Hmar People’s Convention (HPC), HPC (D) was formed in 1995, unsatisfied with the agreement the HPC leaders signed with Mizoram government in July 1994.
The HPC had started the movement for self-governance for Hmar in the north and the northeastern parts of Mizoram after the 1986 Mizo accord failed to achieve the “Greater Mizoram” demand incorporating the Hmar people settled in Manipur and Assam bordering Mizoram.
Enslaved as a child, a young woman gives voice to the horrors of human trafficking with a breakthrough radio show.
She
remembers a home that looked fancy on the outside but ominous on the
inside, a dark maze of bare chambers. She remembers the parade of men,
one after the other, day by day, forcing her to have sex. She remembers
contemplating death. She wasn’t yet 10 years old.
A former sex slave finds solace at a center run by the Somaly Mam Foundation. (Jesse Pesta)
Her
name is Sreypich Loch, and she was a slave in a Cambodian brothel. If
she refused sex, she says, she would be beaten, shocked with an electric
cord, denied food and water. “What else could I do?” she asks.
Loch,
now around 20 years old, managed to escape that world and works today
to rescue other girls. She helps grab them out of brothels, and she
hosts a radio show in Phnom Penh, giving the girls a forum for their
stories. It’s a groundbreaking effort for a young woman and former sex
slave in this male-dominated society.
She
hopes that by talking about her past, she will help people understand
that slavery is alive and well. When people “hear the voice of the
survivor,” she says on a recent visit to New York City, “we can help
others.” She traveled to the U.S. with the group that helped save her,
the Somaly Mam Foundation, named for another survivor of the sex trade
in Cambodia.
Loch’s
story may sound extreme, but it is not some isolated incident. An
estimated 27 million people are victims of slavery around the world,
according to the U.S. State Department. The buying and selling of humans
is a multibillion-dollar global business, ensnaring vulnerable people
who are often kidnapped or tricked into the trade.
Loch’s
nightmare began when she was a child in Phnom Penh. Her stepfather
raped her, she says, when she was just a girl; she thinks she was around
7 years old. He threatened to kill her if she told anyone. She would be
raped again that year, by a stranger who snatched her from the street.
He made the same threat, she says: tell anyone and die.
She
stayed silent. “I was young. I was scared,” she says, speaking softly.
“In Cambodia, many fathers rape their daughters; brothers rape their
sisters.” Consistently ranked as one of the poorest and most corrupt
nations in the world, Cambodia is still reeling from the brutal Khmer
Rouge regime, which massacred as many as 2 million people in the 1970s.
Intellectuals and city dwellers were targeted and tortured in an attempt
to create a completely agrarian society. Families were ripped apart.
One
day Loch worked up the nerve to tell her mother about the rapes. She’s
not sure how much time had passed since the assaults, she says, as she
was just a child and memories fade. But she has a vivid memory of her
mother’s response. “She hit me,” Loch says. “She didn’t believe me. I
think: she does not love me.”
Loch
ran away from home, having lost faith in her family, she says. She
remembers a heavy rainfall and the feeling of not knowing where to go.
She hadn’t thought that far ahead. “I cried and cried,” she says. And
then she was found by a gang of men. “Five men raped me on the street,”
she says. “I wanted to die.”
That
might have indeed been her fate if a woman hadn’t come along, offering
to help. The woman took Loch to her home—or so Loch thought. The house
turned out to be a brothel. She was locked in a basement room and forced
to “sleep with many, many men every day,” she says. “I couldn’t see
light, just dark.”
Her
eyes fill with water at the thought of it. Then she pauses, closes her
eyes for a moment, and continues. “If I said no, pimp hit me,” she says.
“I tell pimp, please kill me.” Then she adds, “I am people. I am not an
animal. How could they do me that way?”
Sreypich Loch (right) with her rescuer, Somaly Mam, on a visit to New York City. (Courtesy of the Somaly Mam Foundation)
Loch’s
story mirrors that of many rescued Cambodian girls, who report being
drugged, locked in coffins, whipped, even covered with biting insects in
order to make them submit to sex. While their stories can be difficult
to verify independently, the U.S. State Department confirms that the
enslavement of girls in Cambodia is pervasive. “The sale of virgin girls
continues to be a serious problem in Cambodia,” the State Department
said in its annual Trafficking in Persons Report released this summer.
“Cambodian men form the largest source of demand for child prostitution,
though a significant number of men from the United States and Europe,
as well as other Asian countries, travel to Cambodia to engage in child
sex tourism.” Among local men, demand is often fueled by myths that sex
with a virgin brings luck or good health.
Cambodia
“does not fully comply with the minimum standards for the elimination
of trafficking,” the State Department report says, but is making
“significant efforts to do so.” Officials reportedly convicted 62
trafficking offenders this past year, an increase from 20 offenders the
prior year.
Years
had gone by, Loch says, when a client took her out of the brothel to
his own home. There, she found an open window and fled, she says, hiding
in the shadows until a policeman found her. “My body was bad, smelled
not good,” she recalls. When she told her story, the police connected
her with anti-trafficking officials. They in turn referred her to a
center run by former sex slave Somaly Mam, according to a spokeswoman
for Mam’s foundation, a grassroots group with shelters across Cambodia.
No police action was taken against Loch’s captors, the spokeswoman says.
Loch, for her part, remembers seeing all the girls at the shelter and
thinking she had been sold to another brothel.
That
was around four years ago, when Loch was in her midteens. At the
center, she learned to sew and began attending school. In 2010 she
joined an offshoot of Mam’s foundation called Voices for Change, a group
of young slavery survivors who rescue girls from brothels. The
activists gain access to the brothels by bringing supplies such as soap
and condoms. Once inside they tell the sex workers that they can escape,
with the help of the foundation and the police. The victims often need
convincing. Many have been enslaved in the sex trade for so long, they
don’t know how to function in the outside world; they wonder how they
would support themselves. The activists tell them they can learn a
trade, such as sewing or hairdressing, at the shelters.
The
year Loch joined the group of young activists, she received an
invitation to tell her story on a commercial radio station in Phnom
Penh. The show sparked a storm of interest, with listeners calling in,
reporting suspicious situations and asking about sentencing for pimps
and traffickers. Loch saw an opportunity to help the public understand
the shadowy world of slavery. This year she launched her own show, which
she now hosts five days a week, interviewing former sex slaves as well
as lawyers and legislators. She believes it’s the personal narratives of
the girls that make people stop and listen.
Loch
says she is “so happy” about her job. At the same time, she says it’s
difficult to be reminded every day of her life in captivity. She is also
haunted by the absence of her mother in her life; she has not seen her
since she left home as a child.
She
draws strength, she says, from her fellow survivors. The bond between
these women is clear. On her trip to New York with two other young
survivors, Sina Vann and Sopheap Thy, she holds their hands and hugs
them frequently as they attend events and tour the city. In jeans,
sneakers, and T-shirts, their dark hair pulled back into ponytails, the
young women are quick to laugh at themselves and at one another. Vann
jokes that Loch has great strength because “she eats a lot.” Loch makes
fun of Thy for taking photos of flowers instead of Manhattan
skyscrapers.
They
look for restaurants that serve familiar dishes—rice and fish—and they
marvel at the enormous platters of food that arrive. They look forward
to going home and sharing their stories with the rest of the rescued
girls. They call each other “sister.”
The company wants to improve its mobile search services by
automatically delivering information you wouldn’t think to search for
online.
By Tom Simonite
Searching engine: Racks of networking equipment connect servers inside a Google data center in Council Bluffs, Iowa.
For three days last month, at eight randomly chosen times a day, my
phone buzzed and Google asked me: “What did you want to know recently?”
The answers I provided were part of an experiment involving me and about
150 other people. It was designed to help the world’s biggest search
company understand how it can deliver information to users that they’d
never have thought to search for online.
Billions of Google
searches are made every day—for all kinds of things—but we still look
elsewhere for certain types of information, and the company wants to
know what those things are.
“Maybe [these users are] asking a
friend, or they have to look up a manual to put together their Ikea
furniture,” says Jon Wiley, lead user experience designer for Google
search. Wiley helped lead the research exercise, known as the Daily
Information Needs Study.
If Google is to achieve its stated mission to “organize the
world's information and make it universally accessible,” says Wiley, it
must find out about those hidden needs and learn how to serve them. And
he says experience sampling—bugging people to share what they want to
know right now, whether they took action on it or not—is the best way to
do it. “Doing that on a mobile device is a relatively new technology,
and it’s getting us better information that we really haven’t had in the
past,” he says.
Wiley isn’t ready to share results from the
study just yet, but this participant found plenty of examples of
relatively small pieces of information that I’d never turn to Google
for. For example, how long the line currently is in a local grocery
store. Some offline activities, such as reading a novel, or cooking a
meal, generated questions that I hadn’t turned to Google to
answer—mainly due to the inconvenience of having to grab a computer or
phone in order to sift through results.
Wiley’s research may take
Google in new directions. “One of the patterns that stands out is the
multitude of devices that people have in their lives,” he says. Just as
mobile devices made it possible for Google to discover unmet needs for
information through the study, they could also be used to meet those
needs in the future.
Contextual information provided by mobile
devices—via GPS chips and other sensors—can provide clues about a person
and his situation, allowing Google to guess what that person wants.
“We’ve often said the perfect search engine will provide you with
exactly what you need to know at exactly the right moment, potentially
without you having to ask for it,” says Wiley.
Google is already
taking the first steps in this direction. Google Now offers unsolicited
directions, weather forecasts, flight updates, and other information
when it thinks you need them (see “Google’s Answer to Siri Thinks Ahead”). Google Glass—eyeglass frames with an integrated display (see “You Will Want Google’s Goggles”)—could
also provide an opportunity to preëmptively answer questions or provide
useful information. “It’s the pinnacle of this hands-free experience,
an entirely new class of device,” Wiley says of Google Glass, and he
expects his research to help shape this experience.
Google may be heading toward a new kind of search, one that is very different from the service it started with, says Jonas Michel,
a researcher working on similar ideas at the University of Texas at
Austin. "In the future you might want to search very new information
from the physical environment,” Michel says. “Your information needs are
very localized to that place and event and moment.”
Finding the
data needed to answer future queries will involve more than just
crawling the Web. Google Now already combines location data with
real-time feeds, for example, from U.S. public transit authorities,
allowing a user to walk up to a bus stop and pull out his phone to find
arrival times already provided.
Michel is one of several researchers working on an alternative solution—a search engine for mobile devices dubbed Gander,
which communicates directly with local sensors. A pilot being installed
on the University of Texas campus will, starting early next year, allow
students to find out wait times at different cafés and restaurants, or
find the nearest person working on the same assignment.
Back at
Google, Wiley is more focused on finding further evidence that many
informational needs still go unGoogled. The work may ultimately provide
the company with a deeper understanding of the value of different kinds
of data. “We’re going to continue doing this,” he says. “Seeing how
things change over time gives us a lot of information about what’s
important.”
The end of the world is nigh—and here’s who stands to profit
By Steve LeVine
Manhattan, at the mercy of the seas. AP Photo/Mark Lennihan
First in an occasional series on the business impacts of extreme weather.
Large-scale
mayhem has produced some of history’s great fortunes: war, for example,
but also the disruptive industrial, digital and—more recently—financial
revolutions: A lot of people have become rich, others ruined.
Which brings us to climate change. Over the last couple of weeks, the Central Intelligence Agency, the International Energy Agency and the World Bank
have released separate dire warnings for civilization should global
temperatures rise as scientists now predict they will. Echoing scenarios
laid out previously by the US military, the United Nations and think tanks,
the new reports forecast the weakening of nations, the migration of
populations and rampant disease. Populous places could flood, and others
become unsurvivably hot and dry. War could break out over the right to
fertile places.
But such awkwardness aside, the
end-of-life-as-we-know-it scenario would seem to be an exceptional
opportunity in the classic chaos-boom matrix—and an unbeatable
long-range investment. China could implode, gold prices could crater,
Apple could become a technology also-ran, but there’s probably no surer
bet than a warming planet.
Some businesses have already responded. Around the world, we see carmakers churning out low- and no-emission electric cars in California, China and elsewhere, and other companies pouring billions of dollars into wind and other investments. These are essentially one-way bets—they attempt to shave off the impact of climate change.
We
also have some signs of shrewd CEOs in the energy sector hedging more
broadly. As the Arctic ice-cap melts, ExxonMobil, Statoil and Total are
frantically seeking deals along newly accessible oil and gas fields,
particularly in Russia and Greenland.
But we are talking even
broader. What happens if massive drought strikes swaths of Africa, the
Indian subcontinent and the US southwest? What if the seas swallow
island nations and compel trillions of dollars in investment to preclude
the flooding of cities where much of the world’s population lives? What
if Canada and Russia become magnets of global migration, since a warmer
world could favor their water- and agriculture-rich reaches? It is the
fleet-footed buccaneer who typically capitalizes on such disorder. But
couldn’t and shouldn’t the astute, far-seeing corporate strategist
position a business to profitably respond to these and other climate-led
emergencies?
Where the opportunities lie
“Sustainability,” the buzzword for attempts to reduce carbon emissions, comprises much of the climate-change industry. Climate-change consulting, for example, is already a $1.9 billion a year
business, and is expected to grow. But if, as scientists think, at
least some of the impact is already irreversible, then reducing
emissions is only a small part of the opportunity. The rest of it is in
new businesses that understand and can profit from the impacts.
In a report
last year, New York-based Mercer said climate change is negative for
real-estate investment in low-lying and coastal areas like Bangkok, New
Orleans and Shanghai. Land in currently cool and water-rich nations,
though, will boom. So smart investors will abandon their long bets on a
wholly exposed and unprepared India, and double down on Russia. As a
corollary, agriculture will become huge in Canada, and go bust in Africa
and Latin America.
On a larger canvas, India, Indonesia, China,
Saudi Arabia and Brazil (in that order) are the riskiest G-20 investment
bets in a world of extreme weather, suggests an August 2011 report
by HSBC.
(That’s right; three of the BRICs, powerhouses of growth in
the past few years, could be serious losers in the coming decades.). The
least vulnerable to the new weather regime would be Canada, the US,
Japan, the UK and South Korea, again in that order.
In terms of
specific bets, the business of “adaptation” (another climate buzzword)
will boom. The biggest windfall seems likely in the second half of the
century, but there could be plenty of business before then.
Infrastructure would be particularly big. That would include new
facilities protected for extreme weather, and retro-fitting existing
structures and buildings against storms, rising water and floods, and
extreme heat and cold, suggests the Mercer report.
For the scale of business involved, look at Hurricane Sandy, the storm that struck the US east coast last month. Estimates
for rebuilding homes and infrastructure are about $50 billion; proposed
seawalls to prevent the same destruction in a new storm are estimated
at $10 billion-$20 billion more. So at $50 billion-$70 billion a
hurricane, one can see how an era of frequent extreme storms could be
quite a bonanza for the well-provisioned construction company. As a
corollary, forward-looking insurance companies would raise their
premiums and earn a windfall in new extreme-weather business.
What
about the fossil-fuel industry? If countries unexpectedly unite in
strong global action to curtail climate change, the sector would be in
trouble, since demand would plunge and trillions of dollars in sunk
investment could be stranded. But if things carry on much as they are
today, Mercer forecasts that by 2030, prices for oil will have risen by
25%, coal by 60% and natural gas by 35%. That suggests that current
investments would generally continue to pay off well.
But such a
future may be more complicated—companies may have to be more regionally
minded. For instance, current petrochemical facilities built by Chevron and ExxonMobil
in Saudi Arabia could be at serious risk if the country becomes as arid
as forecast, since rainfall could plummet and the seas rise. The same
goes for ExxonMobil’s refinery
in Fujian, China. Shale oil and gas drilling planned and currently
under way around the world would be highly problematic unless companies
figure out how to do it without much water. Yet other regions will boom
for drilling of all types, particularly northern areas such as Canada,
Russia and of course the Arctic.
New Delhi, Nov 30 : Assam government has launched a special
drive to seize illegal arms allegedly being kept by different groups in
some areas, including Bodoland Territorial Council (BTC).
