India

[LFC]

It's good to remember that India, the second most populated country in the world and set to surpass China as #1, has been increasingly more fascist. This is pure Putin / Xi / Netanyahu / Orban / etc.

Indian tax authorities raided the BBC’s offices in New Delhi and Mumbai on Tuesday, weeks after the country banned a documentary from the British broadcaster that was critical of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s alleged role in deadly riots more than 20 years ago.

BBC News reported on television that people had not been allowed to enter or leave the offices.

The raids come after the Indian government said it used “emergency powers” to block the documentary from airing in the country, adding that both YouTube and Twitter complied with the order.

The move polarized reaction in the world’s largest democracy. Critics decried it as an assault on press freedom, while Modi’s supporters rallied to his defense.

A BBC spokesperson told CNN that the organization was “fully cooperating” with authorities. “We hope to have this situation resolved as soon as possible,” the spokesperson said.

The two-part documentary “India: The Modi Question” criticized the then-chief minister of the western state of Gujarat in 2002 when riots broke out between the state’s majority Hindus and minority Muslims. It was broadcast in the UK in January.

More than 1,000 people, mostly Muslims, were killed in the violence and at least 220 more went missing, according to government figures. Almost 1,000 women were widowed, while more than 600 children were left orphaned, official figures showed.

Modi and his ruling ruling Bharatiya Janata Party rose to power in India in 2014, riding on a wave of Hindu nationalism in the country of 1.3 billion, where nearly 80% of the population follow the faith.

The BBC said Jack Straw, who was British foreign secretary in 2002 and features in the documentary, claims that Modi had “played a proactive part in pulling back the police and in tacitly encouraging the Hindu extremists.”

Modi has denied accusations that he failed to stop the violence. A special investigation team appointed by India’s Supreme Court in 2012 found no evidence to suggest he was to blame.

But the riots remain one of the darkest chapters in India’s post-independence history, with some victims still awaiting justice.

Last month, some university students in Delhi attempting to watch the banned film on campus were detained by police, raising concerns that freedoms were bring throttled under Modi’s government.

[LFC]

India has a serious problem with low/no quality "college" education that takes money and leaves young people without the skills to make them employable. We have that problem here to a degree but apparently it's rampant there.

Business is booming in India’s $117 billion education industry and new colleges are popping up at breakneck speed. Yet thousands of young Indians are finding themselves graduating with limited or no skills, undercutting the economy at a pivotal moment of growth.

Desperate to get ahead, some of these young people are paying for two or three degrees in the hopes of finally landing a job. They are drawn to colleges popping up inside small apartment buildings or inside shops in marketplaces. Highways are lined with billboards for institutions promising job placements.

It’s a strange paradox. India’s top institutes of technology and management have churned out global business chiefs like Alphabet Inc.’s Sundar Pichai and Microsoft Corp.’s Satya Nadella. But at the other end of the spectrum are thousands of small private colleges that don’t have regular classes, employ teachers with little training, use outdated curriculums, and offer no practical experience or job placements, according to more than two dozen students and experts who were interviewed by Bloomberg.

Around the world, students are increasingly pondering the returns on a degree versus the cost. Higher education has often sparked controversy globally, including in the US, where for-profit institutions have faced government investigations. Yet the complexities of education are acutely on show in India.

It has the world’s largest population by some estimates, and the government regularly highlights the benefits of having more young people than any other country. Yet half of all graduates in India are unemployable in the future due to problems in the education system, according to a study by talent assessment firm Wheebox.

Many businesses say they struggle to hire because of the mixed quality of education. That’s kept unemployment stubbornly high at more than 7% even though India is the world’s fastest growing major economy. Education is also becoming an outsized problem for Prime Minister Narendra Modi as he attempts to draw foreign manufacturers and investors from China. Modi had vowed to create millions of jobs in his campaign speeches, and the issue is likely to be hotly debated in the run up to national elections in 2024.

“We do face a challenge in hiring as specific skill sets required for the industry are not currently easily available in the market,” said Yeshwinder Patial, director for human resources at MG Motor India.

My company had an awful experience when it tried to use Indian software consultants. (We still are but with a different firm.) The code they produced was of lesser quality than what I was churning out in high school oh so many years ago. Some code showed a distinct lack of understanding of basic coding (I can't even call it software development) and some of the "bug fixes" were horrifyingly moronic.