Making life difficult

Freedom house puts India in “partly free”

Just couple of days ago, freedom house published its 2020 rankings for all countries including India. While freedom house shared how democracy in the world has weakened, India chose to take offense about it being called “partly free” .

India, leader in Internet shutdowns – Access Now (copyright)

The above illustration is shared by accessnow . The next big ones who have Internet shutdowns are Yemen – 6 and Ethiopia – 4. Such internet shutdowns have and will have sad repercussions as would share in another story as well.

Color-coding journalists

A story was broken by caravan magazine yesterday and which was followed by newslaundry which shows how the Govt. is looking to just drive some narrative, does not matter whether it’s true or false, it should just show that the Govt. is right and others are all wrong. As can be seen, almost all reporters barring a few have kept silent rather than refuting statements attributed to them or happenings which didn’t happen. And this goes to a much larger narrative and disinformation route taken by the Govt. which doesn’t have any semblance to the truth or reality as people know it. I would illustrate couple of examples below which shares that. In all my young and even adult-life I hadn’t seen a Govt. this much against its own people.

Omega Seiki puts a manufacturing plant in Bangladesh

Now Omega Seiki is an Indian vendor who chose or had to go to manufacture their electric vehicles in Bangladesh. Now while this is a slightly old story this was broken on social media recently. Everybody starting blaming both the vendor and saying we should break FTA (Free Trade Agreement) with Bangladesh, not knowing that despite the FTA, India has put tariff barriers between India and Bangladesh. I had to share research from Brookings to show where India has been losing. Of course, those who don’t want to see, wouldn’t see anything wrong in the picture.

Teen raped, asked to marry the accused when she turns 18

Now you may see the above headlines and feel it is ridiculous, but the fact is that these orders were put or given by Madras High Court couple of months back. This was then reported by both Livelaw and BarandBench respectively. Now to be truthful, this news didn’t make much noise as it should have, probably as I had shared previously that the Govt. wants to lower the marriageable age to 15 or even less. And this is despite all the medical evidence on the contrary, because it assuages this Govt’s “masculinity.” There is also the very recent case where the SC CJI asked the rapist if he is willing to marry a girl who was underage when she reaches maturity. Another one in which it seems martial rape is not a crime according to the CJI. So it seems these are the state of things in which India finds itself today. There are judges like Vrinda Grover who do question CJI but they are few and there are costs to them who ask questions.

Although, as shared this news was overtaken by other news and would have remained so, if not one of the leaders of the present Govt. , a Ramesh Jarkiholi, who hails from Belagavi region of north Karnataka was caught in a sex CD scandal basically asking sexual favors for a permanent Govt. job. He had made statements after the Madras High Court case applauding the judgement given by the judge. While, due to public pressure he had to resign, but not before stating that he had everybody ‘blue films’ including the Chief Minister of the State. And sad to report that six Karnataka Ministers rushed today or rather yesterday to put a petition in the civil court to restrain media from airing/printing/publishing any defamatory content against them. The court has granted a media gag against 68 media houses for the same. Sadly, the recent happening only reinforce what has been happening in Karnataka since a decade.

Update – 07/03/2021 – Seems yesterday another 10 odd ministers rushed to get the same order.

Seems different laws apply to politicians vis-a-vis others. A recent example of Rhea Chakravarthy, an actress and girlfriend of Sushant Singh who was hounded in his suicide case and many accusations made on TV but no evidence till date. From what we know as facts, Sushant committed suicide as he was not getting work due to cronyism in Bollywood. In fact, those who were behind it have white-washed themselves, deleted their tweets etc. and while the public knows, no accountability on them. In fact, there is and was so much that I wanted to share as to what has been happening to women, sadly and thankfully arre did the needful for me. They wrote an entire article which tells what the situation for women in India today is. And if you are wondering why I said, that is because when a site which was made exclusively for people to laugh and have a good time and get relief, when they start writing serious articles, you can be sure that things have gone horribly wrong 😦

Asking Tesla to come to India and at the same time ambivalent on battery

Recently, Mr. Nitin Gadkari, a prominent minister of the present Govt. invited Tesla and gave all sorts of incentives to start a manufacturing plant here in India. And while it seems that Tesla has accepted, looking at the Vodafone case, hopefully Tesla does make such contracts where if something goes wrong and they need to sue the Govt. they can do it in States or elsewhere. The way the Govt. acted in the Vodafone case had been a dampener to any MNC investments so far. Although to be fair to both Tesla and GOI, the basic models even if they are manufactured in India will go to less than 1% of the population. The cheapest Tesla Model Y which retails in the U.S. for USD 40k would be around INR 30 lakh. And this is their cheapest car to date. I do know there are rumors of the 25k but that is probably 2-3 years away as shared by Tesla China President Tom Zhu in an interview shared on YT.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aH5leMWFBxI

There are couple of interesting comments being made. The fact that China is going to fully open its automobile market to western companies shows how confident China feels about their own vendors. And I’m not much impressed about Tesla as I am about the tiny car revolution happening in China. India, if it wanted to, could learn many lessons from China. Even the electric buses they had started in 2010 itself where people in our auto industry thought it was all a fad. Sadly, we are missing most of the technology and if and by the time Tesla starts a production line, dunno where we could get our lithium. India hasn’t been as aggressive as other countries when it comes to securing raw natural resources in other countries, as some other countries have. 😦

Even besides that, it has been tough when you have so many people who still believe that ICE vehicles (Internal Combustion Engines) are better than EV’s and even if they know they choose to believe the propaganda. Couple of months ago a young UK girl who had died due to asthma, an inquest found that air pollution was a factor. The girl’s name was Ella Adoo-Kissi-Debrah. This is the first case where the doctor ruled air pollution as a chief factor in a person’s death. Probably first of its kind of ruling anywhere in the world. I also shared TCO studies between BEV and ICE vehicles done by people who are considering an electric vehicle but those studies seem to fall on deaf ears.

Starlink

This is another of Elon Musk’s ventures and would be a money spinner for sure in around the globe. While Starlink has asked TRAI for permission, I don’t think they will get it. There is also Bharti Global’s Oneweb which probably has a better chance of getting permissions. The reason is censorship. As shared above, India is now a leader in Internet shutdowns and do see this trend only accelerate rather than go the other way around. For people who don’t remember, remember how satellite phones were made illegal even though only businessmen could afford it. And this was just 5 years ago.

As shared Oneweb would have better shot as they would accept all Government directives without a second thought. Unless Starlink gives a binding to the Govt. to be a willing partner when it wants to have internet shutdowns, it will not work. Now how Elon approaches that is to be seen and known. FWIW, you can’t access Starlink webpage on BSNL broadband. My broadband provider gives at the most 300 kbps and sometimes, at late nights or early mornings, around 500 kbps.

Farmer Protests

Lastly, farmer protests have entered 100 days. In the interim, Vivek Kaul, an economist took stock of the Bihar APMC to see if things have really worked as the Govt. supporters were telling. The investigation and the results didn’t inspire the confidence as the Govt. said. The sad part is though, that nowadays nobody, at least those in power as well as those who are supporters are keen to read, understand and even argue otherwise. They are all happy with whatsapp knowledge. Till date 200+ people have died in the farmer protests. All mainstream media houses have stopped talking about farmers in the hope that they will disappear. At the end of the day the Govt. wants that the corporates should win at whatever the cost.

Rape, aftermath, GST

While I do not usually like to start with bad news, but seems bad news is the flavor of the month. We seem to be going downhill one day after that. So let’s see what happened. First there is this piece which came in Washington Post and then there was the travel advisory for women travelling by their lonesome from UK and USA . It probably applies to women, even couples for sure . I am sure it was not an easy decision to come to but they had to as they as citizens come first for them. In between my last blog post and this, couple of more horrific things happened. The first thing we came to know is the burning of the Unnao rape victim which happened on Thursday i.e. 2 days from now when I am blogging. Apparently, she had gone to give her statement in a court hearing when the 5 people burned her. It does raise questions about the quality of protection being given to her. Just to be clear, there were no reports of any of the policeman coming to any harm which makes it all the most curious.

The second horrific incident were when the 4 accused in the Hyderabad rape case were ‘encountered‘ . Curiously in this case as well, except for some slight injuries to the policeman there were no injuries. This was when there were 10 policeman accosting the 4 accused. The 4 accused have supposed to taken away all the guns, how we don’t know and still didn’t manage to fire on one of them. It raises and raised too many unanswered questions. Because of these killings, we will never know the answers. What if it turned in investigation that these were not the culprits or there was a fifth or a sixth person who was not named. There was also lot of celebration of this ‘encounter’ which seems that we are still a medieval state rather than a 21st century state. Of course when you have majoritarian narratives such as ‘Hindu Khatre mein hain‘ driving election campaigns rather than anything else than all sorts of things are possible. This is when the country is going through its worst economic history, probably parallel to 1991 although that one was more externally driven while this was is more due to internal factors rather than externals.

GST

Apart from demonetization which was a huge disaster to the country, GST is perhaps one of the biggest badly implemented ideas in the country. Whereas, in other countries it is used as only as a single tax to be levied to the end-user stage, here it was put at very stage which instead of making it easier to use, made it much harder to use. While I had been numbed by seeing quite a few MSME units shutting down due to GST issues and mostly attributing to slow-down rather than blaming demonetization and GST, I was till surprised and shocked to find Reserved bit, a makerspace shutting down the end of the month. While Siddesh, Nisha had attributed a bit towards GST, they also shared they should have done more. While I have been to reserved-bit a few times and did find it engaging quite a bit, getting there was always an issue for me. The GST refund issue has been an eye-sore for everybody but neither the center or the state did anything for it, of course both being in BJP’s hands all this while, this is in my state Maharashtra, one of the more progressive states. The entire process of GST has been anal and had been in popular media for a while now but nobody seeks or shares any proper answers. Why, it even crashed last month and the month before that and before but nobody raises a voice.

The FM being as arrogant as ever. In such situations how startups are supposed to survive ? There were some reliefs given to start-ups but they were too small and still have a sting in their tale to be anywhere effective. Having retrospective taxes is another thing that people are afraid of and that is the reason you are not seeing people investing in new ventures. As it is, there is demand-slowdown or to put it perhaps more boldly perhaps, a demand recession while food inflation is at all-time high. While our FM wants to blame everything on externalities such as global slow-down but won’t answer as to why China is still growing faster than us without using questionable stats. which we are accused of. This is when they are 7 times larger than us in economy size and having a war with U.S. (economically) This is when conventional wisdom holds such that as you become a bigger economy your rate of growth decreases quite a lot as you need more economic muscle to move like for e.g. the United States or the Japanese . This is when they are far more efficient economies and have a larger tax-gdp ratio vis-a-vis compared to India. There is also the savings bit where India excelled which was wiped by demonetization and even now from the moves of Central Govt. savings are failing India which is and was one of the backbones of our economy.

For all their failings, people forget to honor Chidambaram and Manmohan Singh to make it easy to file Income Tax Returns. Of course the present regime has been making it more and more invasive but that’s story for another day. All in all a sad note to end the day on 😦

No country for women – rehashed

This is not the first time I am writing about it, sadly I had written it twice before in the preceding months. But the scenario instead of changing for the better is changing for the worse. Sharing a screenshot shared by somebody today on social-media.

Indian Express page inside page screenshot Page 9, Decamber 1, 2019 Reportage of Rape only.

The most recent gruesome addition to the list was that of a 26 year-old veterinarian. From the various news reports it was a pre-planned rape and murder of the woman. What was startling to me when I read the report that it seems people still either don’t know or police officers who should know and inform people do not inform people of their rights such as zero FIR . Maybe some RTI activist can find out how many people have used zero FIR or not and make efforts to popularize the concept and its utility. If people are courageous enough, they can even live-shoot video when asking a police officer or constable to file a zero FIR . The other part is I do hope the police do investigate and do the DNA matching so they have conclusive proof other than the statements which the rapists may later claim as being under duress. The views of police is almost Victorian in nature irrespective of whether it’s an officer or a lower hawaldar/constable on the beat.

While there have been many attempts to try and figure out solutions, it somehow always falls short. There was the ‘Occupy streets by women’ movement in 2017 and so many small and major attempts but almost all have fallen short. Simply put, neither the society, nor the police or the judiciary seems to have any answers. I probably had shared about India’s Daughter , a documentary which shared an insight into the rapist’s mindset. Except for the juvenile, all the other rapists who had confessed to the crime shared their opinion on why the rape happened and most of it was victim-blaming or victim-shaming. The producer Leslee Udwin at the time she made and released the documentary shared that she herself had been raped. The statements made by various BJP leaders as well as some from the opposition were so in favor of the men who had committed the rape were such that they had to finally ban the documentary as lot of hypocricy was being unveiled.

From 2012, till date there probably would be a dozen or more apps. which are designed to help somehow never work. There have been few women cab services, driven by women for women but that too has not scaled. The couple I know of are kaola kabs based out of Bangalore and women cabs in Delhi . The problem with Kaola is that they don’t have night services when most of the rapes occur and when they are needed, about womencabs maybe somebody who may have used the services could perhaps share their their experience. There have been many experiments, right from 2012 onwards but more often than not, most have been more or less a failure. The problems stem from many systemic and societal problems. The problem is not just of women but men too. Places which are unsafe for women are unsafe for all vulnerable groups, whether it is children, the elderly and anybody else who is not a bully. This simple understanding somehow fails to connect or be understood by people. We had this happen everywhere, whether in Bollywood or whether they are women cops or the judiciary. The situation for women is the same everywhere. And before somebody accuses me of India-bashing even though I live here. We know the same happens in all countries, surprisingly more in European countries where I expected human rights to be a savior but it seems they have their own fights to win. I guess if you are a predator you can find your prey no matter what your race or orientation is as shared by a victim recently.

Sex Education

While we can’t take the excuse of Sex education, the short video does illustrate the views of most people. If they don’t want to be responsible about children’s understanding and influence about sex especially in the nuclear families most are, then who will ?

https://www.invidio.us/watch?v=feQocm2TSBc

I had to look back at how I had helped Dr. Shome in her book where we had gone back and forth on her book on sex education titled ‘Let’s talk about guys, girls and sex’ which is there on Amazon, Kindle and elsewhere. My discussions as well as discussions with others, she had shared when last we met that she had material for at least another 2 books if she decided to go that way. The problem even with that such books do not make for casual reading and nor would either most parents or schools will attempt to have discussions around a book like that.

Mobile application for women safety

There are attempts to make a mobile application but I don’t see how any mobile application can help when it’s society’s issues at large. I am guessing funding is also going to be a big issue as well as transportation of people from place X to Y itself carries a cost other than costs and expenses incurred at various places.

Ancedote

I can share an anecdotal tale I heard from a gentleman couple of years ago, and like many stories or incidents this one also didn’t make the newspaper. A few years ago, I had gone to a friend’s place who was staying at Baner, at a somewhat secluded place. We used to meet for talking about FOSS, sharing foss, eating, drinking and sleeping at his place at night and next morning having a chai before using public transport to come back. We used to do this once a month or once two months till he shifted to Bangalore. Anyways, one night after partying I didn’t sleep well and went outside to the bus station quite early, around 0600 hrs or something like that. There used to be quite a few cycle rickshaw shops ( similar to food carts that you see in the west but somewhat more rundown.) The thing about Baner and the area I was in, this was factory area so most factories have 3-4 shifts so most of these food carts (called thelas in the vernacular) make brisk business. Unlike other times, instead of 3-4 food carts, I saw only one and also a bit of eerie silence. After a bit of talking, cajoling the owner, came to know that a naked woman had come and created a scene and other thela walas had run away. Whether she was mentally unstable or had she been raped was not known. Even the police jeep for some reason didn’t want to take her as they suspected they may blame the policeman. Even he had run away but as he was old he couldn’t tow the food cart so he simply ran away because in his twilight he didn’t want to get into any such complication.

The reason I shared the above is, in such a scenario how are men supposed to act and react, I don’t know. Whether it’s just fight or flight or some other behavioral patterns that should be incultated by men in such a scenario ?

Anthillhacks

FWIW, there is anthillhacks happening in Bangalore. For people interested in hacking or doing something like above, this may be a good chance to connect with like-minded people and have some sort of rough prototype out or at least hash out much more face-to-face rather than using the web. I had been a part of this just as have been part of similar things in the past and my experience has been swell. Unfortunately travel budget is an issue this year otherwise for sure would have been part of it. Hopefully people enjoy and also blog about their experiences while staying there.

Unbelievable

This will be short as I have been having a touch of cold and flu over the last week. As I shared, I moved to mastodon from twitter and quite a number of people have moved on mastodon and many other instance which run mastodon. The best thing IMHO was that –
a. I came to know the wide range of projects that fediverse is attacking or working on. While I’m not going to dwelve much into fediverse in this blog post, maybe some future blog post either here or on itsfoss.com might be used to share some of the features which I thought were far better than twitter and the possibility of people challenging the status quo, especially since if you have a bit of experience servicing a web-server. It is very LAMPisque in nature, except of course they use postgres ( much better choice and probably much more scalable) although they are still trying to fix and figure out response times and such, being a non-corporate, non-ad service, they rely on people’s donations.

Unbelievable

I just started seeing Unbelievable which was produced and shown on netflix. While I probably need a week or two and would be staggering my viewing so that it doesn’t affect me emotionally as have been told by friends. I just viewed the first twenty minutes of the 1st episode and there itself, it seemed lot of things had gone wrong. Some of my observations –

a. What is not told is when the first call to 911 went, if it was told that the assault involved a young woman shouldn’t a lady officer have been sent to the scene to investigate. While I have heard that the cop defended the girl, perhaps it would have been better if a lady cop would have gone to the scene. She might have been a tad more empathatic and it probably would have been easier for the victim, in this case a young girl to share her experience.

b. When it was told it was rape, there were again two male detectives. Shouldn’t it be women handling this. I would have seen multiple advantages in having a woman detective here. Probably most women are able to have a good reading about other women. Probably women in law-enforcement much more so. She would also have been empathatic and usually girl/women are usually much more relaxed around other women. So for the detective it would also have helped her in the investigation for signs of ‘tells’ to know if the victim was lying.

c. No legal help for the victim – After the lead detective questions the girl again in the police station, he asks her to sign over the results of the tests of the testing from the lab as well as to write the statement again. Having an attorney there perhaps would have advised her as to what are her rights and whether she should or not either sign those documents or start writing by herself right in the police station which was stressful for her. As she does tell in the beginning of the interview, she has a headache. If such a statement was indeed needed by her, she should have been told to write in the confines of her home or where she was staying with her guardian. I know of so many times while I think of writing a blog post, there are so many ideas, when I start typing, half of them I simply have forgotten. Later, if I do even want to make a change or two, many a times the change itself would be so dramatic that I would have to re-write quite a bit of the blog post taking that additional info. which I had known but not voiced on the blog. So, when somebody like me who may miss formulations or ideas even when I’m not stressed, here is a young girl/woman who claims to have been raped/assaulted. Having had a lawyer even if she was not very sharp would probably told her of her rights and what she can or should not do in the cirumstances she is in. I probably will expand on it as I see more of the series either here itself or on other blog posts as I see more of it.

Hopefully we will meet in a more cheerful blog post 😦

India doesn’t need women or doctors

This is again going to be a long one hence I want to start by sharing some positive news first. Few days back, a vlogger Dhruv Rathee made a vlog review about Jatayu nature and park open in Kerala.

Now, why is it important and good. While it is a profitable initiative, it has been made by private money at the cost of INR 100 crores. It has been built which was a degraded barren land surrounded by forest. While one could argue that even such lands should not be disturbed and one perhaps might be right about that, the research I found seem to be inconclusive. I was looking at one study sometime back in which two adjacent plots of land were taken, both degraded, barren patches of land . One land was left alone while the other had some sort of stable, with animals in it, horses, pigs, donkey etc. and they left the land pretty much besides coming at intervals to see if the animal feed was good enough of them, veteniary medical checkups etc. At the end of couple of years, they checked the micro-nutrients of the soil to see which had more mico-nutrients. It was found out that the ones which had the animals was more fertile and had slightlly more/better ecosystem than the one which was left. IIRC, they published the result in some magazine like ‘Nature’ or some such peer-reviewed publication and other scientists were apply to replicate the results with varying degrees of success. While I remember the simplified version I am sure it is far more complex than I have described. One of the best things they have shared in the review, that the land has been leased from the State Govt. for a period of 30 years after which it will given back to the State of Kerala.

FWIW, Jatayu is the name of a mythological bird taken from Ramayana. Instead of wasting 3000 crores of taxpayer’s money for one single statue and instead invested in in health, education, safe drinking water, employment generation etc. it would have enriched not just the people benefiting from it, but also made x times productivity growth as it has been proved time and again that any improvement in people’s lives not just makes them better, but also enhances countries growth as well. I have given the number X as right now India has 0 people in its Statistical Commisson as the last two full-time membes resigned couple of years back. The only somewhat factual numbers that are in India are provided by CMIE which is a private institution and obviously doesn’t have neither the funds nor the reach that a Government body can. CMIE does share some interesting facts and figures but that probably is a story for another day. For those who might want to visit Jatayu can visit Jayatu Center website for the same. The image shared above is taken from keralatourism.org website and is copyrighted to them.

No Country for Women

While I have written on this topic a few times before, each time an incident happens and I feel do we really deserve women ? Many a times when a woman (young or old) goes to the police she is asked to present evidence. Now a young woman who was persistently blackmailed, raped by a person of the ruling party, a ‘Swami’ , a nomenclature reserved for a seer who is supposed to be beyond temptation presented 45 videos of the gentleman to the police. She also leaked couple in social media so that the videos don’t disappear into thin air and she and her family doesn’t get killed as was attempted in Unnao rape case. It is only because the facts came in public that the MLA accused in the Unnao rape case got expelled from the ruling partt, In fact, even the killers in Nirbhaya Rape case , even they haven’t been hanged.

Paper Clipping of Chinmayanand Rape Case

The sad part part is that in this case, even after evidence she has been asked to produce two witnesses who would say that she has been raped. I haven’t ever heard a more bizarre story while siding with the seer who has claimed that she was extorting money from him. The list goes just goes on and on, there were 6 women journalists who claimed sexual harassment against MJ Akbar. The case is on-going in the Supreme High Court where it will be heard now after Dusshera holidays. The last hearing was done on 9th September and will start anytime after 20th October when the Supreme Court starts. And there are several more cases, like the Kathua case rape, the Muzaffarpur Shelter home case, the case goes on and on. Sadly, we don’t even have latest stats as there are no statisticians in Indian Govt. and the only report we have is the 2016 NCRB report which does show the trend that there is rising crime in India. It is party to joblessness which is rampant, and partly perhaps of our conservative mindset towards sex, sex-education .

There were two good movies made in India on the subject, one which sank in Bollywood without a trace called Khandaani Shafakhana which more or less only talked about erectile dysfunction and tried to make few jokes about it. There was Vicky Donor which talked about sperm donation which did good business a while back. The movie which touched my heart recently was though was the malyalam movie called Peranmbu starring ever-green star Mammooty. While I don’t speak Malyalam, you may get the movie on netflix or Amazon prime with english subs. While I don’t want to give the whole story of the movie, there is one scene in which Mammooty visits a woman so he can hire a male escort for his daughter and gets slapped. Many people, especially boys didn’t like that scene and said why he had to go there, but as a viewer if you see the movie from a father’s eyes he did what any sane father who loves his child will do. While at the end, they didn’t give any solution to the issue or it got censored, when you see the movie you can imagine the plight of such children’s fathers, relatives etc. It is sad when such movies which make you think aren’t even part of the national discourse then how are people to grow their consciousness, their humanity. When I hear of such incidents as above, I genuinely, does India really need women ? Shouldn’t women coming from other countries to India be given travel advisories stating that they should either have black belt in Karate or some defence techniques and carry a deadly weapon with them all times to defend themselves from us. It seems we, Indian men have no control 😦

No Country for Doctors

India doesn’t seem to be a country for doctors as well. In 2017, in BRD Hospital at Gorakpur 63 children died due to oxygen supply issues. For this, four doctors and couple of staff were held responsible for their deaths. Dr. Kafeel Khan, Dr. RK Misra, Dr. Purnima Misra, Dr. Satish, Gajanand Jaiwal (pharmacist), Uday Pratap Sharma (Junior Clerk). All of them were put into jail. Few days back, only the three doctors have been put out on bail, all the others are still in jail. Now one of the local newspapers, Janata Ka reporter had done detailed investigative story which shows that the problems or issues were at top. In fact when they were appraised of the facts, Dr. Khan and all the accused together actually somehow scrapped together 500 oxygen cylinders out of their own money. This is when it was found out that the doctors were not paid salaries of 2-3 months. In fact, it has been a perennial issue and because of that more than 50-60% of the hospital staff posts were vacant, due to lack of money. When you see such news and reports, you feel that why doctors should study medicine after paying such high fees and practise in India. They should migrate to US and UK as many of their brethren do. They get better wages, better social security. Neither IMA came to their rescue nor anybody else. It was only local people, the patients, people who knew them and struggled for it. IMA has its own share of issues and politiking but that is perhaps best suited for another date. No wonder that the number of doctors emigrating overseas has risen and people do not want to go to remote posts. When motivated cases like these can happen in cities, then what hope the doctor has of justice or anything in villages. In fact, most doctors nowadays in India have multiple heatlh conditions due to work-related stresses and other things. It is by no perchance that we are most depressed country on earth. Not really the validation we are looking for, right.