Will The Social Web Kill Google?

Is the social web an asteroid for the Google dinosaur?

By Andrew Keen

Google launched last year its own social networking site, Google +, as part of efforts to keep up with Facebook.

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

• Social media and government challenge Google's internet dominance of internet economy
• Google is relentless about its desire to make itself the center of the new social world
• Keen: Google is trying too hard to transform itself into a social company
• Keen: 2012 will be remembered as the year when Google's fortunes began to wane

Editor's note: Andrew Keen is a British-American entrepreneur and professional skeptic. He is the author of "The Cult of the Amateur," and the upcoming (June 2012) "Digital Vertigo." This is the latest in a series of commentaries for CNN looking at how internet trends are influencing social culture. Follow @ajkeen on Twitter.

For all the creative destruction that the Internet has wrought over the last decade, there has been one constant: Google's remarkable dominance of the internet economy.

In a "Web 2.0" world dominated by search and by the link, Google and its artificial algorithm have reigned supreme ever since the company's much vaunted IPO in August, 2004.

But now, as we go from a Web 2.0 to a Web 3.0 economy, even the once invulnerable Google might be in trouble.

Yes, for the first time in a decade, Google's global dominance of the Internet economy appears in jeopardy. This challenge to Google is twofold -- from both the market and from the government.

Andrew Keen

The market threat comes from the increasing ubiquity of social media. The link economy is being replaced by the "like" economy in a Web 3.0 world described by LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman as "real identities generating massive amounts of data."

And the rise of social media with its avalanche of personal data is, of course, being primarily driven by Facebook, the locomotive of the like economy, with its near billion members and its expected $100 billion IPO later this year.

The dramatic shift from traditional search to social media was underlined last week in a speech by Tanya Corduroy the London Guardian's director for digital development. Eighteen months ago, Corduroy revealed, search made up 40% of the Guardian's traffic and social only made up 2%. Last month, however, she acknowledged a "seismic shift" in the Guardian's referral traffic, with Facebook driving more traffic than Google and making up more than 30% of the newspaper's referrals.

Of course, Google hasn't stood still in the face of the Facebook tsunami. First there were the social products Buzz and Wave, both of which were embarrassing failures. And then last year, Google launched the "quasi Facebook competitor" Google +, a product that one ex Google employee believes has "ruined the company" by trying to transform all Google products into social services. Indeed, Google has even launched a new search product called Search Plus Your World (SPYW), perhaps the company's most "radical" move in its history, which determines search results according to social rather than algorithmic criteria.

While the jury is still out on the success of Google +, with data showing that users spent an average of only 3.3 minutes on the network last month, there is no doubt that Google is relentless about its desire to make itself the center of Web 3.0's social world. Larry Page, Google's new CEO, has even tied 25% of all bonuses to the success of the company's social strategy.

Indeed, the problem might be that Google is trying too hard to transform itself into a social company.

Google's announcement in late January, that it intended to consolidate personal data across its different products and services -- from Gmail to YouTube to Google + to SPYW to Google maps to traditional search - had one concerned technology writer suggest that Google will now know more about us than our wives.

And while senior Google executives like Google + supremo Vic Gundotra promise that they won't break users' trust, more and more pundits fear that Google's obsession with keeping up with Facebook is making a mockery of its "Do No Evil" corporate mantra.

In my view, Google is no more or less evil than a multi-national bank or oil company. But there is good reason to fear the company's insatiable appetite for our personal data in today's Web 3.0 world. That's because Google's business model remains primarily the sale of advertising around its free consumer products. Thus, Google's desire to intimately know us is primarily driven by its core business objective of -- one way or the other - selling that knowledge to advertisers.

This threat was laid out chillingly by the Center for Digital Democracy in a complaint about its new privacy policy to the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC): "In particular, Google fails to inform its users that the new privacy regime is based on its own business imperatives: To address competition from Facebook, to grow its capacity to finely profile and target through audience buying; to collect, integrate, and utilize a user's information in order to expand its social media, social search, and mobile marketing activities ..."

Governments around the world are, however, waking up to this threat. A number of U.S. lawmakers, for example, questioned the impact of this new policy on users' privacy.

While earlier this week, the FTC published a 57-page report of privacy recommendations which included the addition of a "do not track" system intended to give us more control over our online data. And last month, the White House proposed its own "Privacy bill of rights" that depends on voluntary commitments by both Google and Facebook.

But Google, driven by its Facebook envy, is in no mood to voluntarily commit to protecting our privacy. In spite of overt U.S. and European government pressure not to implement a policy that consolidates all our personal data across the company's many products and services, Google did indeed, on March 1, unilaterally move ahead with this controversial new privacy policy.

And herein, I suspect, lies Google's greatest vulnerability. Late last month, France's data protection authority, the Commission Nationale de l'Information et des Libertes (CNIL) wrote to Larry Page warning him that Google's new privacy policy might be unlawful in the EU. The CNIL letter was strongly supported by EU Justice Commissioner Viviane Reding, who also requested that Google delayed the implementation of the policy.

Next month, European Union regulators, led by Competition Commissioner Joaquin Almunia, will announce their plans for pursuing an antitrust investigation into Google's broad business practices, particularly accusations by a number of companies including Microsoft, Travelocity, Expedia and Kayak that it has abused its dominant position in search.

Given all the controversy surrounding the company's new privacy policy, don't be surprised if this contributes to Almunia formalizing the antitrust charges against Google.

I suspect that 2012 will be remembered as the year when Google's fortunes began to wane. The company won't disappear, of course. But with an inexperienced new CEO, a badly botched new privacy policy, a marked decline in public trust and a looming EU antitrust investigation, it is hard to see Google dominating today's Web 3.0 world from the same unchallenged position as it once controlled the Web 2.0 economy.

Do Shaken Or Stirred Cocktails Make You Drunken?

By Brent Rose 

Shaken or Stirred: Which Gets You Drunker? A Scientific Exploration

Some bartenders have a chip on their shoulders when it comes cocktails. Shaking waters it down, they say. Stirring is better. James Bond is a pussy.
We wondered—what's the scientific difference? Does one way or the other produce a pour that's more warm or watery? Do the fluid dynamics in the darkness of a shaker lead to other intangibles that make our favorite drinks so delicious? Prepare to have your faith shaken, because we have reached some stirring conclusions.

It's Friday afternoon, you've made it through the long week, and it's time for Happy Hour.

The Question

What inebriates better: a cocktail that is shaken or stirred?

The Methodology

We've seen subjective tests of the shaken vs. stirred debate before—the Mythbusters confirmed that you can taste the difference. But is that due to temperature, alcohol by volume (ABV), or something else? What about all those ice chips you see in a shaken drink—do they matter?

We began the test by measuring all the ingredients by weight, starting with the ice. Different sized ice cubes have larger or smaller surface areas, and thus melt differently. So we made 14 identical ice cubes in the same tray, each using exactly 25 grams of water.

For the alcohol, I measured out 70 grams of terrible, cheap, 80-proof vodka (40 percent ABV). A digital thermometer indicated the vodka's temperature to be 73 degrees Fahrenheit.

To calculate the contents of the shaken and stirred samples, we used a digital scale to measure how much water weight the solution gained, and a distilling hydrometer—called a Proof and Tralle Hydrometer—to measure proof. This thing is pretty cool: It floats in a vial of liquid, with preset levels corresponding to the solution's ABV. We tested the hydrometer's accuracy by checking still water, then uncut Georgi vodka, and it dialed up dead-on measurements of 0 proof and 80 proof, respectively. Excellent.

The Experiment

 

To create solution A, our shaken sample, we poured 70 grams of vodka (just under 2.5 fluid ounces) into a standard metal cocktail shaker. We added five 25 gram ice cubes all at once, slammed on the lid and shook the hell out of it for a stopwatch-timed 30 seconds. We immediately strained the drink into a dry, room temperature glass and inserted a digital thermometer. We set the drink aside, covered it, and allowed it to get back to room temperature for an accurate hydrometer reading. Then, to the scale for a weight check. To make the stirred solution B, we repeated the previous steps—70 grams of vodka, five 25 gram ice cubes—and then gently but thoroughly stirred with a long spoon for 30 seconds. The drink was strained into a separate, identical glass, then checked for temperature, proof, and weight.

The Results

• Temperature: This was the first dramatic difference. The shaken drink dropped down to a frosty 29 degrees F, whereas the stirred cocktail measured only 38.1 degrees. The ice cubes couldn't have transferred all that heat without melting and therefore diluting the solution. Time for a weigh-in.

• Weight: Both solutions started at exactly 70 grams of pure vodka. After stirring the liquor with the ice cubes, solution B gained 16 grams of water weight, coming in at 86 grams. That sounds significant, until it is compared to the weight of shaken solution A: 116 grams! It gained a whopping 46 grams—more than half its original weight—from trace amounts water knocked off of the ice cubes.

• Proof: Now, for the hydrometer—the moment of truth. Once both solutions had reached a temperature of exactly 72.4 degrees F, I tested them, twirling the hydrometer to free any lingering bubbles. The stirred drink had dropped down from 80 proof to a count of 60, or 30 percent ABV. Now, listen to this: The shaken drink's purity had plummeted, with the hydrometer hovering between the lines marking 45 and 46 proof—around 23-percent ABV. In other words, shaking just ice and alcohol can cut a spirit's potency nearly in half, and which dilutes a drink 1.75 times more than stirring it does.

We cross-checked this with the amount of water weight gained, and it adds up. According to the weight, the stirred Solution A is now 32.6-percent ABV (65.2 proof) and the the shaken Solution B is now 24.1-percent ABV (48.2 proof). In other words we're within a two percent margin of error, which ain't bad at all.

I passed the glasses around the office for a subjective taste test, and everyone agreed that the stirred drink tasted much stronger. And this crowd knows what a cup of lukewarm Georgi is supposed to taste like. So there you have it.

So should I shake or should I stir?

Economical drinkers usually want the most booze for the buck, so it would seem stirring is the way to go. Savvy readers may remember that last week's Happy Hour on booze myths stated that diluted drinks actually get you drunk faster than straight drinks. But a martini glass is only so big. In bars, what doesn't fit into a glass gets poured out. A 4-ounce martini that's 30 percent water simply has less vodka in it than a 4-ounce martini that's 15 percent water. So forget James Bond and his "shaken, not stirred" mantra. He was probably just pacing himself so he could fight/screw someone in the next scene.

But there is a time to shake a drink. Most bartenders go by this general rule: Cocktails that have juice, dairy, or egg whites should be shaken. Shaking aerates these cocktails in a pleasing way, creating a nice frothy effect. It's almost like making a meringue. In contrast, cocktails that only use spirits—such as martinis and Manhattans—should be stirred. A stirred Manhattan is strong, clear, and beautiful. Have you ever seen a shaken Manhattan? It looks like sewage.

Of course, there's no accounting for personal taste. Some people will ignore this hard-earned data. Barbarians.

Check back next Friday afternoon to see new variables plugged into our favorite equation:
Booze + Science = Happy Hour.

Mary Kom gears up for road to London Olympics

New Delhi, Apr 5 : After clinching an unprecedented five world titles, M.C. Mary Kom will make a bid for a berth in the Olympics as she spearheads the country’s 10—strong squad at the World Championships in Qinhuangdao, China – women’s boxing’s first and only qualifying event before its historic debut at the London Games.

After a two—day trial at the National Institute of Sports in Patiala, the Indian women’s team for the mega—event from May 9 to 20 was announced on Wednesday, with the country fielding boxers in all the three weight categories in which women pugilists will make their Olympic debut (51kg, 60kg and 75kg).

In the 51kg, it is the ever—reliable Mary Kom, who has dominated the World Championships with five gold medals, and is on a high after clinching the Asian Championship title just a few days ago.

The 29—year—old mother of two from Manipur would be without doubt India’s best bet for getting an Olympic slot given her unmatched international feats, which brought her the name ‘Magnificent Mary’.

The 60kg division features L Sarita Devi, another veteran who has two World Championship gold medals under her belt besides four Asian titles. The 75kg division has Pooja Rani, who had notched up a bronze medal at the recent Asian Championships.

“We have selected a strong team and hopefully we will get good results at the World Championships.

All three Olympic categories have very strong contenders in our team who have been good international performers. They were selected after elaborate trials and I am sure they will deliver,” Indian Boxing Federation Secretary General P K Muralidharan Raja told PTI.

Helpdesk For Northeast Students at Delhi University

New Delhi, Apr 3 : Northeastern students applying to various colleges under Delhi University (DU) in the coming June-July academic session will have a helpline number, a helpdesk and a joint coordination committee catering to their admission queries and needs.

The National Students' Union of India (NSUI) gave this information on Monday at a press conference. NSUI, which is the students' wing of the Indian National Conference, also spoke about proposals to be placed before the chief minister and the education minister.

At a meeting held in Delhi last month, which was attended by DU president Ajay Shikara, a representative of the state government and two non-political students' associations, NSUI submitted some proposals of initiatives catering to the needs of students from the northeast that were accepted by the president of DU.

A helpdesk will also be made available to give students easy access to information regarding admissions. The helpdesk will be made available at both the north and south campuses of DU, and is expected to help students travelling to Delhi for the first time.

NSUI also highlighted the security problem faced by students from the region at the meeting, prompting a proposal and a discussion on forming a coordination committee with Delhi Police.

"Last month at the meeting, we made a number of proposals, some of which were accepted by the president of DU. These will be implemented in the coming academic sessions and will help students from the region. We had asked the state government to include some provisions for setting up of institutes imparting vocational and skill development and they agreed to set up 21 such colleges in the budget," said Partho Pratim Bora, president, Assam NSUI.

NSUI at the press conference asked the state government to ensure free admission for disabled and BPL students to degree courses. NSUI also made an appeal to the ASEB not to cut of electric supply in the evening so the study time of students is not hampered. They will be submit memorandums on both these pleas.

The students' wing also came down heavily on Seba for causing serious inconveniences for students during the matric examination. It put forward proposals to start an anti-ragging helpline, open one UPSC coaching centre in Delhi and one in Guwahati for northeastern students, and two state transport busses especially for Gauhati University students.

Excuse Me! Am I An Indian?

By Chitra Ahanthem

How do I cope with being on the fringes of being an Indian and an alien in a country that refuses to embrace me and my brethren, asks Chitra Ahanthem

I am a royally confused person right now. All my identification papers say I am an Indian but I am not too sure whether I am indeed an Indian national. It starts with the fact that I have facial features that are "un-Indian" and that my origins are from a region that people in the rest of the country are more likely to locate somewhere in the Orient.

It gets complicated given that there are some 40-odd armed groups in Manipur alone (where I come from) who are supposedly fighting for their own homelands and at one point of time were fighting to secede from the country. The latter bit is complex since most groups have suspiciously kept silent on the secession bit and instead taken to training their guns (literally) on the common man. The few who do know of the region are wary over my Indianness. They sneer and ask me straight on my face, "So, you don't consider yourself an Indian?"

How do I begin to tell them that the great Indian love for Bollywood films has got to me so bad that a ban on Hindi films in 2000 by an armed group in Manipur led me to start writing?

How do I convince them that when another armed group banned "Indian clothes" for girls and women in the state, I went on with my life dressed in salwar suits while rumours flew thick that women not wearing the traditional dress (phanek) were having their dresses shredded by razor blades?

How do I tell them that every time I write about the freedom of choice, I am labelled an outsider in my community? And, how do I cope with being on the fringes of being an Indian and an alien in a country that refuses to embrace me and my brethren on one hand and accuses me of being the great betrayer of a community that carries the angst of being discarded?

I have listened to too many anecdotes and emotional outpourings of how it feels to be an alien but cannot identify with that feeling of marginalisation. It may have to do with the fact that I have lived in Imphal, the capital of Manipur in the north-eastern part of the country all my life except for a three-year stint in Chandigarh where I did my graduation.

It was then the time of four day-long road and train journeys from Imphal to Guwahati (by road) and then on to Delhi  by train and then Chandigarh by road again. The train journeys were fun for me: inevitably someone would come up and try to chat up with our group.  Sometimes it would be a child or a young man or an adult or a senior citizen.

Every one of them would ask "Where are you from?".

If I said "Imphal", they would say, "Oh! In Nepal?" and if I said "Manipur", they would get back with, "Is that in Japan /China/Thailand?"

I eventually ended up carrying a diary with a map of India  and would point out where I came from. And I would wonder what they were being taught in their geography classes!

On the few occasions that I have been called a "Chinky", I have thrown back a Manipuri terminology they would never be able to decipher, "mayang thok". Mayang interestingly is how Manipuris label outsiders in our state while 'thok' pertains to something frivolous/not to be taken seriously.

Looking "un-Indian" also had its "advantages": like the time I was put up in a five-star hotel in Delhi while attending a media seminar and I was given seven-star treatment by their event co-ordinator who thought I was some stinking rich foreign tourist who just might be interested in booking their hotel as a venue for a New Year party. I loved the way her jaw dropped when at the end of my stay, I said to her in Hindi that I had enjoyed my stay at the hotel.

Once I head out of the country, immigration officials arch their eye-brows at the Indian passport I carry. In South East Asian countries, they speak to me in their various languages.

My first trip abroad was to Bangkok and the reception folks had a banner with my name but when I happily walked up to them waving away merrily, they looked right through me! They were looking out for a salwar/sari clad, bindi/bangle donning, sharp-nosed and big-eyed person, and my small eyes and small nose just did not fit their mental picture of an 'Indian'.

On a more serious note, I have heard horror stories of men driving past girls from the region in the streets of Delhi, shouting out abuses and from one account of a friend, having a beer bottle thrown at her. I have been lucky in a sense: I have never been physically targeted and have a thick skin when it comes to the leers and the taunts that I have been subjected to over the years during my visits to the city.

I tell myself they should be ashamed to be Indians for not knowing their fellow countrymen. But many others from the region react with a bitter after-taste and say that "mainland Indians" will never make them feel they belong to this country.

Some years ago, the Delhi police came out with a booklet called 'Security tips for northeast students/ visitors in Delhi', which went to great length to lay down guidelines for people from the region for "their own safety".

The manual said people from the region should not call attention to themselves, that girls from the region should not wear revealing clothes and not go out on their own. The best (?) line in that manual was the one on not "cooking 'smelly' food without creating a 'ruckus' in the neighbourhood". I got a sneaky feeling that the handout inspired the recent Gurgaon police directive to its women population to stay indoors in the evening.

Cut to March 2012, and Delhi police are on the look out for anyone with small eyes and snubbed noses, who are likely to be accosted or picked up. A Tibet an activist immolated himself in a bid to call attention to the cause of Tibet in the light of the visit by the Chinese premier to the country and the city, and Delhi police stepped in by rounding up Tibetan refugees as "precautionary measures".

The collateral damage touched people from the north-eastern region, going by news reports in some national dailies. While social networking sites are already buzzing with sarcasm, anger and indignation, the interesting bit was that one national newspaper, while quoting a Manipuri, described the person as a "Manipuri national".

The Delhi high court has now stepped in with a directive to the Delhi police not to harass people from the Northeast and Ladakh because of their facial similarity with Tibetans.

But there is more sense in taking up precautionary measures and I am going underground in Delhi by taking to the Delhi Metro with a vengeance just so I won't be picked up or hounded!

And then I ask myself, "Am I Indian?"

Tibet is in Mizoram ... or Meghalaya Probably

By Anand Soondas

After so many years in Delhi, I've finally understood the problem with a narrow pair of eyes.

It stops others from seeing you too clearly.

Which is why the big-eyed cops of the Delhi Police mistook Manipuris and Nagas, Mizos and Khasis to be Tibetans, and asked them for a passport in their own land.

These people, they failed to make out in bright daylight, just happen to be citizens of our country.

In fact, some of these distant states are so much in India without really being a part of it that many over there, tired of the inescapability of it all, would now like to actually break away.

Apart from the fact that we should increasingly be getting used to the idea of more and varied kinds of protests - over Facebook, Twitter, as graffiti, through blogs and mass text messages, even desi versions of WikiLeaks; the candle-holding and placard-waving is, of course, always there - what was most striking about the attack on north-easterners by cops fearing trouble during the BRICS meet was that there was no apology after the affront.

The courts did frown, censuring the police for "racial profiling" and for sending a bunch of Tibetans, most of them young students, straight to jail. But it is not just the cops who are doing the racial profiling.

That is truly India's default setting. The moment someone doesn't fit the general - mainstream, middle-India, call it what you will -specifications of cuisine, costume and culture, the three deadly Cs that can immediately make you invisible in a crowd, persona non grata, the labeling begins quickly, frenetically and loudly.

It makes a vice-chancellor of a university in Hyderabad say that the trick to control use of drugs in the campus is to start with a Sema and not a Shah.

It makes a room full of seemingly decent people in a Delhi office suddenly go tribal-hunting, cracking dog-meat jokes along the way. It makes landlords turn away tenants in Chennai, and taxi drivers charge exorbitant rates in Kolkata.

Things are bad now. But they were worse till even a decade ago. The enormous number of people from India's northeast, along with the thousands who have migrated from Darjeeling and Sikkim each year in search of food, security and career in the booming hubs hundreds of miles away, have after all these years made our movies, music, sports and business sectors, especially the service and BPO industries, begin to acknowledge their presence.

Often grudgingly. So we have lead characters with names like Phunsuk Wangdu, a Ladakhi, in one of our biggest films of all time. And we have the Shillong Chamber Choir perform across the country and abroad to ecstatic applause.

But even here we sometimes get things wrong. An article in a national English daily (i'm not too sure if it wasn't my own TOI), Meiyang Chang was mentioned as a shining example of the north-easterner's successful foray into national consciousness, with his tentatively successful stint as a singer, TV host and bit-role actor in Hindi movies.

The truth is that the Chinese boy is from Dhanbad which, unfortunately, is not a part of the northeast yet.

Beijing would have been upset at the blatant appropriation had not Indian reality shows with Chinese-origin people been so low on its foreign affairs priority index.

That happens all the time - in Agneepath, there is a scene in which Priyanka Chopra presents 'Chinese' girls for her beauty parlour to appreciative mohalla-wallahs in Mumbai. When Hrithik Roshan speaks to one of them asking where she is from, she replies in Nepali. How does it matter seems to be the point being made. A Mizo is a Khasi is an Arunachali is a Tripuri.

To be fair, though, the fact that these regions and their people had been practically closed to, and from, the rest of India till even the '80s and the '90s, doesn't make it easy for populations in our other towns and cities to deal in appropriate ways with this group of completely different-eating, different-talking and different-looking men and women.

The exodus, nonetheless, has begun and is only getting more urgent with time. We might as well get used to it and give them the space and dignity they deserve. We can start by not asking them for passports, by not calling them 'chinkies', sometimes even 'chowmein' and 'momo', by not confusing them with Asians and other Mongoloid-featured foreigners, and by not cracking bow-and arrow jokes in our ties and suits.

Don't harass people from Northeast, Ladakh: HC to Delhi police

A day after a Tibetan succumbed to his injuries after he set himself ablaze ahead of Chinese President Hu Jintao’s visit to the Capital for the BRICS summit, the Delhi High Court stepped in on Thursday to ensure protection of human rights of all individuals, including protesting Tibetans, and restrained the police from treating those detained as criminals and lodging them in Tihar Jail.

A Bench of Acting Chief Justice A K Sikri and Justice Rajiv Sahai Endlaw also ordered the police to immediately stop “indiscriminate hounding of Tibetans in the national capital”, and asked them to immediately shift the detained persons from Tihar to Ambedkar Bhawan if they were not released by Friday morning.

“They are not criminals and cannot be treated like them. All of them have been arrested under a preventive order. It is the duty of the police not to harass people in the name of maintaining law and order in the city,” said the bench.

Advocate Anant K Asthana and other lawyers had brought up the issue before the bench on Thursday morning, seeking imminent attention of the court. They pleaded a judicial order was required to ensure that basic human rights of the individuals are not violated.

The application alleged that the police had resorted to indiscriminate hounding and were not only questioning but also detaining all those who they thought had “Tibetan features.”

“People from India’s Northeastern states and those from Ladakh are scared to step out of their houses while police go on the rampage to detain and arrest everyone who has any resemblance with Tibetans,” Asthana contended.

Taking on record his submissions, the court had subsequently called upon Pawan Sharma, the standing counsel for Delhi Police, and asked him about the police actions.

Sharma assured the court that he will pass on all requisite directives to the department, and will ensure there was no harassment. “We will also release all those detained at 10.45 am tomorrow morning,” he told the court.

The court also permitted a group of lawyers to meet those persons who were arrested and lodged in Tihar Jail, or detained in police stations, to find out whether they are from Tibet or the Northeast, and also separate the juveniles from them.

The court, however, refused to restrain police from detaining the Tibetan protesters to maintain law and order.

Two days before Chinese President Jintao’s scheduled arrival in Delhi for the BRICS summit, 27-year-old Tibetan activist, Jampel Yeshi, had immolated himself during a protest at Jantar Mantar. He died on Wednesday.

India’s AIDS Demographic Profile Shifts

By Vidya Krishnan

Marking a dramatic shift in the demographic profile of people with AIDS, migrant workers and their wives have emerged as a high-risk group (HRG) for contracting the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), with an infection rate surpassing that of injecting drug users, commercial sex workers and homosexual men, according to the latest government data.

The change is accompanied by a significant geographical shift from the south and north-east—traditionally considered high-risk—to states in other parts of India such as Maharashtra in the west, Bihar and Orissa in the east and Rajasthan in the north, which now collectively contribute nearly 50% to the new HIV infections.

The data was collected before the roll-out of the next phase of the National AIDS Control Programme, or NACP-IV. The programme, which will start from April, has been submitted to the Planning Commission for approval.

Experts say the findings reflect increasing promiscuity, especially among the migrant population. The emergence of new HRGs and geographies will require a redeployment of resources and a shift in the focus of NACP, which has succeeded in arresting the spread of HIV in states once considered to be the most vulnerable to the virus, they said.

According to the World Health Organization’s 2010 report, India is home to about 2.45 million HIV-infected people.

“Without making any moral judgements, we note that the disease profile is a reflection of the social fibre. Our data reveals that the majority of new infections are coming from migrant workers in the unorganized sector,” said Pragya Mishra, technical officer with the National AIDS Control Organisation (Naco). “Migrants labourers stay away from their families for long periods and tend to be more promiscuous. The rate of infections among housewives who are monogamous has gone up considerably,” with the virus being transmitted by their migrant labour husbands.

As recently as three years ago, injecting drug users, commercial sex workers and men who have sex with other men were considered to be at high risk of being infected by the HIV virus, she noted.

The drastic change in demography is evident in Andhra Pradesh, which was home to the highest number of HIV-infected people in India in the previous phase of the programme, NACP-III (2006-2011).

The sample surveys conducted in Andhra Pradesh indicate a significant decline in the overall prevalence of HIV across districts. Sample surveys in the state indicate that housewives are more at risk of catching the infection than the traditional HRGs, said an official at the Andhra Pradesh State AIDS Control Society (APSACS).

“Due to focused intervention, prevalence among HRGs has drastically come down,” said Kailash Aditya, joint director at APSACS. “In the future, the HRGs will be those who indulge in casual sex instead of the groups that were traditionally considered high-risk. To some extent, this shift in disease prevalence is due to the societal changes such as live-in relationships and the general increase in promiscuity.”

APSACS is turning its focus from the traditional HRGs to families of migrant labourers by launching a special project called Pehchaan.

According to the sample surveys in Andhra Pradesh, HIV prevalence among female sex workers decreased from 11% in 2008 to 7% in 2011. Among injecting drug users, the prevalence rate came down from 7% to 3% in that period. The most significant reduction, however, has been among homosexual men, with the rate dropping from 23% in 2008 to 10% in 2011.

Another shift in focus concerns the transgenders, who will, for the first time, be included in NACP-IV. Transgender refers to people whose gender identity, expression, or behaviour does not conform to that typically associated with the sex assigned at birth.

“The next phase will have increased focus on transgendered persons, with specific interventions designed to suit their needs,” said Dola Mohapatra, national director at ChildFund India, which collaborated with Naco and APSACS for their work among HIV-infected children in Andhra Pradesh.

Naco was launched in India in 1992 with the objective of slowing the spread of HIV to reduce future morbidity and mortality among the infected population.

Agatha Sangma Asks Delhi Police To Show Sensitivity Towards NE People

New Delhi, Apr 2 : Union Minister Agatha Sangma today asked the Delhi Police to show "sensitivity and respect" in dealing with people in the wake of reports that sleuths are questioning any person with "Tibetan features" as part of their efforts to prevent protests during Chinese President Hu Jintao's visit.

Sangma, who represents Meghalaya's Tura constituency, also said people have every right to protest peacefully and it was "sad" that the people from the Northeast face problems from the Delhi Police.

"Sensitivity should be there when dealing with people. I wouldn't say that it should be only because people are from Northeast and people are from Tibet," the Minister of State for Rural Development, who belongs to Nationalist Congress Party, told reporters outside Parliament House.

"If people are protesting peacefully, they have every right to do so. I think it is very important that the Delhi Police should treat them with little more respect... and little more calmer approach," she said reacting to reports that Northeast people were harassed in markets, residential areas and streets and some of them taken for questioning.

"It is a sad thing that some of the people from the Northeast face problems," Sangma said.