While India has taken tremendous strides in combating poverty in the past decade, Muslims, members of the Scheduled Tribes (ST) and Dalits saw the most progress in in reducing the impact of poverty, according to data compiled in a UN project.

The “very positive trend” during the decade between 2005-06 and 2015-16 in India is that “the poorest are catching up”, Sabina Alkire, Director of the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHDI), said on Thursday at the presentation of the 2018 Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) here.

The MPI prepared by the UN Development Programme (UNDP) and the OPHDI, takes into account various indicators of development rather than just income and aligns them to the UN Sustainable Development Goals, while serving as a measure of the intensity of poverty felt by different groups.

While ST members were still the poorest group, they have seen the fastest reduction in MPI, as have the Dalits, Alkire said.

Explaining it, Diego Zavaleta Reyles from OPHDI told IANS that the average number of deprivations or “the intensity of their poverty” measured by the MPI fell for these groups even though the proportion of poor people in these categories was relatively the same or unchanged.

Between 2006 and 2016, the MPI of the STs came down from 0.447 to 0.229 even though the percentage had fallen only from 79.8 to 50 during the decade, according to OPHDI data.

During the same period, the MPI of Dalits fell from 0.338 to 0.145 while the percentage of poor came down from 65 to 32.9.

“If we look at the religious groups, the Muslims are the poorest and they again had the fastest reduction in MPI,” Alkire said.

While MPI for Muslims was 0.331 in 2006, it fell to 0.144 in 2016, and the percentage of the poor in the community came down from 60.3 per cent to 31.1 per cent.

Nationally, 54.7 per cent of the people in all groups taken together were poor in 2006, but only 27.5 per cent in 2016, and the MPI came down from 0.279 to 0.121, the data show.

In terms of numbers, 271 million people had moved out of poverty during the decade, with the number of poor people coming down 635 million in 2005-06 to 364 million according to the MPI standards.

But “we are seeing a shift of global proportions occurring in India over a ten-year period and that is really encouraging”, Alkire said.

India is the only country for which changes of this magnitude are taking place at this time, she added.

Bihar remains the poorest state, but along with other high-poverty states – Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh and Chhatisgarh – had the fastest reduction in multi-dimensional poverty, she said.

In spite of the progress, these states still remain the poorest.

Among age groups, children, who are still the poorest, saw the fastest reduction in MPI, she said.

Such reduction in poverty among these groups or states did had not happened in India in the earlier periods according to a previous study for the period 1998-1999 to 2005-06, she said.

UNDP Administrator Adam Steiner said that when governments start looking carefully at who the poor are and where they are, the analysis leads to programmes that help the poorest of the poor, whether by ethnicity, religion or geography, and results like those in India can be achieved.

Traditional poverty measures – often calculated by numbers of people who earn less than $1.90 a day – shed light on how little people earn but not on whether or how they experience poverty in their day-to-day lives, according to UNDP.

On the other hand, MPI takes into account health, education and living standards in areas like access to clean water, sanitation, nutrition and primary education, with those lacking in at least a third of these defined as multi-dimensionally poor.

According to the income-based measurement, only 270 million Indians are considered poor but according to the MPI standards a far larger number – 364 million — were categorised as multi-dimensionally poor in 2016.

(IANS)

At least 44 people were killed when a passenger ferry carrying hundreds capsized in Tanzania’s Lake Victoria, officials said.

The accident took place on Thursday between two islands in Lake Victoria, the largest lake in Africa, which straddles the borders of Tanzania, Uganda and Kenya, reports CNN.

The exact number of those on board wasn’t immediately known because the ferry was overloaded, according to media reports.

Reports varied but the ferry may have carried between 400 and 500 people.

By Thursday night, 37 people had been pulled out of the water by emergency teams during a rescue operation, which was halted because of poor visibility.

Regional Commissioner John Mongella told Tanzanian television channel ITV that emergency teams would continue their search on Friday morning.

Boat disasters are frequent on Tanzania’s waters, where ferries often exceed their capacity.

Some 200 people were killed after an overloaded vessel hit strong winds off the island of Zanzibar in the Indian Ocean in 2011.

The boat had a capacity of 620 passengers but was carrying over 1,000 people.

(IANS)

Pakistan’s new Prime Minister Imran Khan has written a letter to his Indian counterpart Narendra Modi, the Foreign Office said here Thursday, seeking to re-start the bilateral talks on key issues “challenging the relationship” including on terrorism and Kashmir.

In the letter dated September 14, the cricketer-turned-politician, who became the prime minister last month, proposed a meeting between Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi and his Indian counterpart Sushma Swaraj on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in New York this month.

“Building on the mutual desire for peace between our two countries, I wish to propose a meeting between Foreign Minister Makhdoom Shah Mahmood Qureshi and External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj, before the informal meeting of the SAARC foreign ministers at the sidelines of the upcoming UN General Assembly in New York,” Khan wrote.

Pakistan and India have an “undeniably challenging relationship”, he said, while responding to Modi’s letter to him on August 18. In the letter to Khan, Modi conveyed India’s commitment to pursue “meaningful” and “constructive” engagement with Pakistan and emphasising the need to work for a terror-free South Asia.

Pakistan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ Spokesperson Mohammad Faisal said on Twitter: “PM (Imran Khan) has responded to PM Modi, in a positive spirit, reciprocating his sentiments. Let’s talk and resolve all issues. We await formal response from India”.

In the letter to Modi, Khan wrote: “We, however, owe it to our peoples, especially the future generations, to peacefully resolve all outstanding issues, including the Jammu and Kashmir dispute, to bridge differences and achieve a mutually beneficial outcome”. The Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) chief thanked Prime Minister Modi for his “warm greetings” and best wishes on his assumption of charge as the Prime Minister of Pakistan.

The two ministers (Qureshi and Swaraj) could explore the way forward, Khan said, adding that the SAARC Summit in Islamabad “will offer an opportunity for you to visit Pakistan and for us to re-start the stalled dialogue process”.

Ties between India and Pakistan nose-dived following a spate of terror attacks on Indian military bases by Pakistan based terror groups since January 2016. Following the strikes, India announced it will not engage in talks with Pakistan, saying terror and talks cannot go hand-in-hand.

Amid heightened tension with Pakistan over Uri terror attack in which 18 soldiers were killed, India had pulled out of the SAARC Summit to be held in Islamabad in November, 2016. The summit was called off after Bangladesh, Bhutan and Afghanistan also declined to participate in the meet.

PTI

New Delhi The NIA will produce Nashidul Hamzafar, an alleged Islamic State (IS) sympathiser who was deported from Afghanistan to India on Tuesday, in a Kerala court later on Thursday, an official said.

The National Investigation Agency (NIA) will seek Hamzafar’s custody for questioning, the official said.

Hamzafar was arrested by the NIA after his deportation and produced in a Delhi court on Wednesday.

According to the NIA official, the alleged IS sympathiser had travelled to Afghanistan along with 21 others to join the terror organisation.

He was arrested by the counter-terror probe agency after he landed at the Indira Gandhi International Airport here from Kabul after his deportation.

In 2017, Hamzafar a resident of Wayanad district in Kerala, was detained by the Afghan security agencies for illegally entering the country to join his associates in the IS.

This is the first extradition of an alleged IS sympathiser from Afghanistan.

A Special Court here where Hamzafar was produced on Wednesday granted the NIA a two-day transit remand.

Hamzafar will be produced before the Special NIA Court in Ernakulam in Kerala that had earlier issued a non-bailable warrant against him.

According to the NIA, the case relates to a criminal conspiracy hatched by the accused from Kasaragod district, along with his associates, since Ramadan 2015 with the intention of joining and furthering the objectives of the Islamic State terror group.

At least 14 accused persons from Kasaragod had left India for their work places in the Middle East between mid-May and early-July in 2016 before travelling to Afghanistan, where they joined the IS.

Hamzafar was part of the conspiracy as he interacted with the other absconding accused like Abdul Rashid Abdulla and Ashfak Majeed through encrypted social media messages.

Abdulla and Majeed were known to Hamzafar through his college mates Shihas, Firoz Khan and Bestin Vincent, a NIA official said requesting anonymity.

According to the NIA this is a big breakthrough in the case as earlier the agency had only second hand information about the Kerala youth group which had gone to Afghanistan to join the IS.

This arrest would reveal much more about who all were involved in radicalising the youths in the state. The NIA said that Hamzafar was in touch with the leaders of the group.

The official said that Hamzafar had left India on October 3, 2017 and travelled to Muscat, Oman before going to Iran and then reached Kabul where he was detained.

(IANS)

The number of deaths and attacks attributed to terrorism significantly decreased in 2017, according to a new report by the US State Department.

“The total number of terrorist attacks worldwide in 2017 decreased by 23 per cent” compared to 2016, while “the total deaths due to terrorist attacks decreased by 27 per cent”, CNN quoted the Department’s Coordinator for Counterterrorism, Nathan Sales, as saying on Wednesday.

Sales said the “overall trend was largely due to dramatically fewer attacks and deaths in Iraq”, where a US-led military coalition has helped eject the Islamic State (IS) terror group from much of the country.

However, despite these battlefield successes, US officials have warned that the IS was still well positioned to make a comeback in the region.

The report also warned that terror groups were beginning to become more “dispersed and clandestine” and have made themselves “less susceptible to conventional military action”.

While Sales said that some 100 countries experienced terrorism in 2017, the vast majority of those attacks took place in a relatively small number of nations.

“Fifty-nine per cent of all attacks took place in five countries. Those are Afghanistan, India, Iraq, Pakistan and the Philippines,” Sales said while adding that “Seventy per cent of all deaths due to terrorist attacks took place” in Afghanistan, Iraq, Nigeria, Somalia and Syria.

The annual congressionally-mandated report once again labels Iran as the lead state sponsor of terrorism, with Sales saying that Iranian-backed Lebanese Hezbollah has been linked to attacks and weapons stockpiles in Europe and South America, reports CNN.

The report also said that in 2017 Pakistan had not done enough to curb terrorism, saying that Islamabad “did not restrict the Afghan Taliban” and other affiliated terrorist groups like the Haqqani Network “from operating in Pakistan-based safe havens and threatening US and Afghan forces in Afghanistan”.

It said the Pakistani government also “failed to significantly limit” two other terrorist organisations, Lashkar e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammad, “from openly raising money, recruiting and training in Pakistan”.

(IANS)

Saudi-led coalition involved in a war in Yemen announced on Wednesday the interception of a missile shot towards border city Jazan.

The coalition spokesperson, Col. Turki Al Maliki, said in a statement on Saudi Press Agency that with the fresh attack, the number of missiles shot by Houthis militias towards the kingdom reached 198. Most of those missiles targeted the cities on the south border of Saudi Arabia, Xinhua reported.

He said that the Saudi air forces intercepted and destroyed the missile that was shot from Saada governorate in Yemen without reporting any injuries. He renewed his accusations of the involvement of Iran in such attacks by supplying the Houthi rebels with weapons and missiles.

(IANS)

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe won the ruling Liberal Democratic Partys (LDP) leadership election on Thursday, securing a historic third term that will effectively extend his time in power by another three years.

Abe comfortably beat his only contender, former Defence Minister Shigeru Ishiba, by securing 553 out of a total 807 votes, reports The Japan Times.

He won 329 out of the 402 valid ballots cast by LDP MPs and 224 out of the remaining 405 votes allocated to party branches in each prefecture based on the number of members age 18 or older who have paid party fees.

His extended term in office signals the possibility that Abe, who has already been at the helm of the world’s third-largest economy for nearly six years in his second stint as Prime Minister, may become the longest-serving premier in Japanese history.

With his renewed leadership, Abe is likely to reshuffle his Cabinet in the coming weeks, reportedly as soon as early October.

Abe has credited himself with “restoring a decent economy” under his Abenomics policy and taking the Japan-US alliance to a stronger level.

He also repeated that it’s the “responsibility of the LDP” to revise the war-renouncing Article 9 of the Constitution to formalise the ambiguous status of the Self-Defense Forces – the nation’s de facto military – which he said “protects the peace and independence of Japan”.

(IANS)

In a huge relief to former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, his daughter Maryam Nawaz and son-in-law Muhammad Safdar, the Islamabad High Court on Wednesday suspended their prison sentences in a corruption case and ordered their release.

A two-judge bench comprising Justice Athar Minallah and Justice Miangul Hassan Aurangzeb gave the judgment on petitions filed by three challenging the July verdict against them in the Avenfield case, Geo News reported.

The reference pertained to the Sharifs’ purchase of four upmarket flats in Avenfield House, London. The three were convicted by an anti-corruption court in Pakistan of not being able to prove the source of assets used to purchase the properties.

Sharif, Maryam and Safdar had been sentenced to 11 years, eight years and one year respectively.

“We accept the petitioners’ pleas seeking a suspension in their sentences,” Justice Minallah said, adding that the National Accountability Bureau, Pakistan’s anti-corruption watchdog, was unable to prove a financial link between Sharif and the apartments in question.

Ordering their release, the judges directed the three to submit bail bonds worth Rs 0.5 million each.

The sentences will remain suspended till the final adjudication of the appeals filed by the petitioners, according to the report.

A large number of Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) leaders, including its President Shehbaz Sharif, leaders Pervaiz Rashid and Khurram Dastgir, were present in the courtroom and cheered as the judgment was announced.

Following the judgment, Senator Chaudhary Tanvir submitted bail bonds for the three at the deputy registrar’s office.

According to jail officials, they can be released on Thursday, provided the order was received prior to the expiration of lock-up time.

(IANS)

At its best, speeches at the recently concluded World Hindu Congress echoed the soaring spiritual ideals evoked by Swami Vivekananda in Chicago 125 years ago.

Even Mohan Bhagwat, Sarsangchanalak of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), focused essentially on the need for unity and patience among Hindus while fighting obstacles, of which, he said, there would be many. The burden of excavating implied accusations in Bhagwat’s speech fell to his critics.

At the plenary session, the moderator requested speakers to address issues of conflict without naming the speakers or their organisations in the interest of harmony. Other speakers sought to unite the followers of all the great religions that took birth in India — Hinduism, Sikhism, Buddhism and Jainism.

Some of the speakers from Bhagwat to Swami Swaroopananda of the Chinmaya Mission, framed the issues before Hinduism in a moral paradigm. Ashwin Adhin, the Vice President of the Republic of Suriname, began his speech in chaste Hindi, later quoting cognitive scientist George Lakoff: “Facts matter immensely. But to be meaningful they have to be framed in terms of their moral importance.”

The dissonances, between the spiritual and the mundane, were to emerge later on the fringes of the seminars which were part of the Congress. Many of the delegates appropriated to themselves the mantle of a culture besieged by proselytising faiths. There were speakers who urged Hindus to have more children to combat their ‘dwindling population’. Posters warned Hindus of the dangers from ‘love jihad’ (Muslim men ‘enticing’ Hindu women).

In one of the sessions on the media, filmmaker Amit Khanna noted that religion had always played a prominent part in Indian cinema, starting with the earliest mythologicals. “Raja Harishchandra”, the first silent film, he said, was made by Dadasaheb Phalke in 1913. He sought to reassure the audience on the future of Hinduism. “Over 80 percent of Indians are Hindus,” he said adding: “Hinduism has survived many upheavals for thousands of years. Hinduism has never been endangered.”

Other speakers, lacking spiritual and academic pedigrees, drew on an arsenal of simulated anguish and simmering indignation.

The nuances of history pass lightly over the ferociously devout and it took little effort to pander to an aggravated sense of historical aggrievement.

At one of the debates, the mere mention of Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first Prime Minister, elicited sniggers and boos. The speaker hinted at ‘Nehruvian socialism’ which had made the Indian economy a non-starter. He concluded with a coup de grace, to a standing ovation: “Nehru did not like anything Indian.”

The poet Rabindranath Tagore, who composed the Indian national anthem, had spoken of his vision of a country where the “clear stream of reason had not lost its way”. At some of the discussions, even the most indulgent observer would have been hard put to discern the stream of reason.

The image of a once great civilisation suppressed by a century of British rule and repeated plunder by invaders captured the imagination of many in the audience. Hanging above it all, like a disembodied spirit, was the so-called malfeasance of Nehru, the leader who had won the trust of Hindus only to betray them in the vilest manner.

These tortured souls would have been well advised to adopt a more holistic approach to Hinduism, and history, looking no further than Swami Vivekananda, who once said: “The singleness of attachment (Nishtha) to a loved object, without which no genuine love can grow, is very often also the cause of denunciation of everything else.”

Historians have informed us that Nehru preferred his father’s intellect over his mother’s tradition but he was never contemptuous of religion. While he undoubtedly felt that organised religion had its flaws, he opined that it supplied a deeply felt inner need of human nature while also giving a set of values to human life.

In private conversations some delegates spoke of how their America-born children had helped persuade them to drop their pathological aversion to gays and lesbians. Despite their acute wariness of perceived cultural subjugation, the irony was obviously lost on them that Article 377 of the Indian Penal Code,(which criminalises gay sex) recently overturned by the Indian Supreme Court, is a hangover from the Victorian British era-embodied in the Buggery Act of 1533.

In the face of the upcoming elections in the US, Congressman Raja Krishnamoorthi’s decision to speak at the conference was a political risk. With a newly energised political Left, even the perception of being linked with “fascist” or sectarian forces could be political suicide in the critical November elections. Despite vociferous appeals to disassociate himself from the Congress, Krishnamoorthi chose to attend.

“I decided I had to be here because I wanted to reaffirm the highest and only form of Hinduism that I have ever known and been taught — namely one that welcomes all people, embraces all people, and accepts all people, regardless of their faith. I reject all other forms. In short, I reaffirm the teaching of Swami Vivekananda,” Krishnamoorthi said.

Given the almost pervasive abhorrence of anything remotely Nehruvian among a section of the delegates, it was a revelation to hear the opinion of Dattatrey Hosable, the joint general secretary and second-in-command in the RSS hierarchy. Speaking on the promise of a newly-resurgent India, Hosable said in an interview to Mayank Chhaya, a local journalist-author-filmmaker: “A moment comes, which comes but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to the new — when an age ends, and when the soul of a nation, long suppressed, finds utterance.”

The quote is from Nehru’s famous Tryst with Destiny speech delivered to the Indian Constituent Assembly on the midnight of August 14, 1947 — proof, if any is needed, that the force of Nehru’s ideas can transcend one’s disdain of him.

A Dubai court has ordered for the extradition of British national and alleged middleman Christian Michel in the Rs 3,600 crore AgustaWestland VVIP choppers deal case, official sources said late on Tuesday.

They said the court pronounced the judgement on Tuesday after India had officially made the request to the Gulf nation sometime back, based on the criminal investigations conducted in this case by the CBI and the Enforcement Directorate (ED).

The full contents of the order against Christian Michel James (54) are expected to be known by Wednesday as the legal pronouncement is in Arabic and is being translated in English at the behest of Indian authorities, they said.

The order is being seen as a major shot in the arm to the agencies– Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) and ED — probing the case.

The ED, in its charge sheet filed against Michel in June 2016, had alleged that he received EUR 30 million (about Rs 225 crore) from AgustaWestland. The money was nothing but “kickbacks” paid by the firm to execute the 12 helicopter deal in favour of the firm in “guise of” of genuine transactions for performing multiple work contracts in the country, it had said.

Michel is one of the three middlemen being probed in the case, besides Guido Haschke and Carlo Gerosa, by the ED and the CBI. Both the agencies have notified an Interpol red corner notice (RCN) against him after the court issued a non-bailable warrant against him.

Michel has been extensively interviewed by the Indian media in Dubai in the past and both the agencies want him to join the probe to take the case forward.

The ED had also brought on record, in the chargesheet, that the three middlemen “managed to” make inroads into the Indian Air Force (IAF) to influence the stand of the officials into reducing the service ceiling of the helicopters from 6,000 metres to 4,500 metres in 2005. AgustaWestland became eligible to supply a dozen helicopters for VVIP flying duties after this change.

The ED investigation found that remittances made by Michel through his Dubai-based firm Global Services to a media firm he floated in Delhi, along with two Indians, were made from the funds which he got from AgustaWestland through “criminal activity” and corruption being done in the chopper deal that led to the subsequent generation of proceeds of crime.

On January 1, 2014, India scrapped the contract with Finmeccanica’s British subsidiary AgustaWestland for supplying 12 AW-101 VVIP choppers to the IAF over the alleged breach of contractual obligations and charges of paying kickbacks to the tune of Rs 423 crore by it for securing the deal.