BBC's negative reporting on India

[Voldemort]

Is there a distinctive 'Indian English'?

Is there a distinctive "Indian English"? Yes, according to a hashtag that's been trending in the country - #IndianEnglish.

"Open the windows and let the atmosphere come in."

"Today is my Happy Birthday."

These are a couple of examples being shared on the hashtag #IndianEnglish. Since it took off early on Thursday, it's been used around 20,000 times in India.

It was started by 22-year-old Ojas Korde, a masters student in public relations from Mumbai. "On Twitter, we take things lightly," he told BBC Trending.

Indians often translate directly from Hindi when they speak English, he says. "It sounds really funny."

Other examples shared on the hashtag include:

"*Giving directions* Go straight you will get a circle. Take a round turn from that circle"

"Please revert back"

"I hate sound pollution due to traffic. It's very horny" [a reference to the sound of horns honking]

"I have to travel out of station" [away from home]

"I've invited our backside neighbour for dinner" [from the back of the building]

Many of the most-shared tweets are images of street signs, shops and the like, with dubious spelling and grammar (many have been collated here).
A tweet with an image of a toilet sign which says "Jents and Leadies" One of the images being shared on #IndianEnglish

"Indians are great at making fun of ourselves," says John Thomas, a well-known former journalist in India.

The hashtag is not Indians taking pride in the uniqueness of Indian English, he says - far from it. Indians are highly class conscious, he says, and aspire to speaking "correct" English. "An ideal Indian of class should be able to recite Wordsworth as well as literature of his mother tongue."

That said, one tweet joked: "British messed our motherland we mess up their mothertongue #IndianEnglish"

BBC News - #BBCtrending: Is there a distinctive 'Indian English'?

 

[Voldemort]

Soutik Biswas
Delhi correspondent


Why India's sanitation crisis kills women

The gruesome rape and hanging of two teenage girls in the populous Uttar Pradesh state again proves how women have become the biggest victims of India's sanitation crisis.

The two girls were going to the fields to defecate when they went missing on Tuesday night.

Nearly half-a-billion Indians - or 48% of the population - lack access to basic sanitation and defecate in the open.

The situation is worse in villages where, according to the WHO and Unicef, some 65% defecate in the open. And women appear to bear the brunt as they are mostly attacked and assaulted when they step out early in the morning or late in the evening.

Several studies have shown that women without toilets at home are vulnerable to sexual violence when travelling to and from public facilities or open fields.

The evidence is glaring.

A senior police official in Bihar said some 400 women would have "escaped" rape last year if they had toilets in their homes.

Women living in urban slums of Delhi reported specific incidents of girls under 10 "being raped while on their way to use a public toilet" to researchers of a 2011 study funded by WaterAid and DFID-funded Sanitation and Hygiene Applied Research for Equity.

Women in one slum said when they went out in the open to defecate, local boys stared at them, made threats, threw bricks and stabbed them. Others said they faced "lewd remarks, physical gestures and rape when they relieved themselves in the bushes".

"We have had one-on-one fights with thugs in order to save our daughters from getting raped. It then becomes a fight that either you [the thug] kill me to get to my daughter or you back off," a helpless mother told the researchers, pointing out to the chilling frequency of such assaults.

By one estimate, some 300 million women and girls in India defecate in the open. Most of them belong to underprivileged sections of the society and are too poor to afford toilets. The two girls from Badaun, who reportedly belonged to the lower-rung of a group of castes called Other Backward Classes (OBCs), were among them and paid with their lives.

"This vicious, horrifying attack illustrates too vividly the risks that girls and women take when they don't have a safe, private place to relieve themselves," says said Barbara Frost, chief executive of WaterAid. "Ending open defecation is an urgent priority that needs to be addressed, for the benefit of women and girls who live in poverty and without access to privacy and a decent toilet."

Experts believe that India needs to scale up its war on sanitation with a special emphases on women.

It needs to build more private toilets with sewerage connections when space is available and shared toilets when space is scarce. Community toilets have worked in many places and flopped in others like the city of Bhopal, where, a study revealed, only half as many women as men used the toilets because of their distance from home.

This is not a problem in India alone: violence against women on the way to or from public toilets have been reported from countries like Kenya and Uganda. But for a country which aspires for superpower status, lack of toilets is an enduring shame.

On his stump, the new prime minister Narendra Modi of the Hindu nationalist BJP had promised, "Toilets first, Temples later". He needs to do that sooner to save lives of more women.

BBC News - Why India's sanitation crisis kills women

 

[Voldemort]

BBC News - India

Out of Top 7 Headlines on India, 3 are on rape.

 

[ladder]

BBC negatively reports anything and everything 'third world' except their own country, or in the future what will be left of that country.

Old colonial habits die hard.

But, that being said, we Indians should give importance where it is due and not reject everything as propaganda. We should address our own shortcomings.

 

[Voldemort]

Will India's Narendra Modi be a reformer?

Soutik Biswas
Delhi correspondent


India's prime minister-elect Narendra Modi has been compared to Deng Xiaoping, Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, Shinzo Abe, Tayyip Erdogan and Mahinda Rajapaksa.

Commentators have variously described him as assertive, dynamic, authoritarian and nationalist.

Many believe he's a genuine economic reformer. Others worry about his - and his BJP's - hard-line Hindu credentials and wonder whether it poses a threat to the idea of a pluralist India.

Mr Modi campaigned in the recent election on his record of making Gujarat one of India's fastest growing and business friendly states, and his on own reputation as a tough administrator and staunch Hindu nationalist. In return, voters rewarded him and his BJP with an unprecedented landslide win

 

[Cadian]

BBC negatively reports anything and everything 'third world' except their own country, or in the future what will be left of that country.

Old colonial habits die hard.

But, that being said, we Indians should give importance where it is due and not reject everything as propaganda. We should address our own shortcomings.

Yup. This approach applies to us too. We say "BBC about Russia - Bad or nothing".

 

[ninja85]

you forgot to mention about BBC reports about chandrayaan.

 

[Voldemort]

you forgot to mention about BBC reports about chandrayaan.

What about them? I was only highlighting negative reports.

 

[ninja85]

What about them? I was only highlighting negative reports.

it was negative.

 

[pmaitra]

Yup. This approach applies to us too. We say "BBC about Russia - Bad or nothing".

Have you seen this discussion?

http://defenceforumindia.com/forum/...acter-assassination-russia-western-media.html

 

[Voldemort]

it was negative.

Please find and post it if you can.

 

[Cadian]

Have you seen this discussion?

http://defenceforumindia.com/forum/...acter-assassination-russia-western-media.html

Yes, I have seen it.

One of the last entries: "The rebels said nine people died when the Ukrainian army shelled and bombed the village, but Ukrainian officials deny that their forces were in the area, blaming the deaths on the rebels." - BBC
BBC News - Russia and Ukraine 'agree steps' towards new truce

But "rebels" and local villagers say that it was definitely an airstrike! 10+ houses destroyed, More then 15 dead!

Not a single word about Kramatorsk, where Ukrainian army has shelled the city center with "Smerches" and "Uragans", damaging or destroying more then 100 houses!

Hundreds dead, thousand hundreds flee - total silence in West media. Informational blockade.

 

[Voldemort]

DIRTY RAILWAYS- As the sun starts to set over India's Udaipur railway station, a female voice on the tannoy system informing passengers of an incoming train fills the hot, humid air.
As the Mewar Express pulls up, there's a sudden, frantic rush.
Before it comes to a complete halt, male passengers throw in their luggage through the train's open windows before diving in themselves, while women in colourful saris and barefoot children hurry through the doors.
Within minutes, the train's unreserved carriages bound for Delhi 740km (459 miles) and 13 hours away are packed full of sweaty passengers with little room to walk.
Some are lucky to get a seat, others have to settle for the floor as the smell of urine lingers from one of the train's open toilets.
Used by around 23 million people each day and covering almost every nook and cranny of India, the state-controlled railways is considered the "lifeline of the nation".
But after decades of neglect, the network is in shambles.
Many problems
It's overcrowded, dirty and outdated and observers say successive governments, unwilling to take bold steps to address its long list of problems, have hampered the growth and development of Asia's oldest rail network.
But with a new administration under Prime Minister Narendra Modi who sealed a landslide victory in May's general election after campaigning on a platform of aspiration and economic reform, the hope is that it could soon change for the better.
To get the state-controlled Indian Railways back on track, analysts say hundreds of billions of dollars of investment is needed over the next decade.
India's railways are considered to be the 'lifeline' of the nation
"Apart from energy, transportation infrastructure is probably the biggest economic growth driver that India can depend on. If you want 7% growth, we have to improve our railways," said G Raghuram, a professor at the Indian Institute of Management in Ahmedabad city.
India's economic expansion has slowed markedly, growing by 4.7% in the 2013-14 financial year and marking the second year of sub-5% growth.
India railways in numbers
*.India runs 11,000 trains everyday, of which 7,000 are passenger trains
*.India has 108,706km of railway tracks
*.23 million passengers travel by trains in India every day
*.A third of India's rail routes are electrified
Already, the new BJP government, backed by a massive mandate, has put up prices. Last month, it hiked passenger fares by 14.2% and freight rates by 6.5% - a move welcomed by economists.
But there was a partial rollback on some increases on shorter trips following protests, even though Finance Minister Arun Jaitley said the government had "taken a difficult but a correct decision".
"India must decide whether it wants a world class railway or a ramshackle one," he added.
Despite the rise, rail tickets in India remain dirt cheap.
This is because freight rates - among the highest in the world - heavily subsidise passenger fares.
For the entire overnight ride on the Mewar Express, a ticket can be purchased for as little as 200 rupees ($3; £1.75), making it accessible to poorer passengers who cannot afford to travel by other modes of transport.
But the below-cost fares contribute to an annual loss of around $4.5bn (£2.7bn), while the high freight rates mean moving goods by road has become a more viable option.
"Indian Railways is kind of schizophrenic in that the machinery cannot decide whether it is working for profit or to please the public," said a railways bureaucrat who did not want to be named.
Many people die after falling off trains or while crossing tracks in India
India's railway has a poor safety record
In its election manifesto, the BJP has promised to improve the railways' poor safety record.
Each day, around 40 people on average are killed somewhere on the vast network. Many die after falling off trains or while crossing tracks. Others are killed in collisions, fires or derailments.
Over 40% of accidents occurred because of railway staff failure, according to a 2012 government panel report. It also noted that between 2006 and 2011 a rising number of accidents were due to sabotage.
Another poll pledge of the BJP is to introduce bullet trains linking India's major cities.
Last week, during a test run between Delhi and Agra, the home of the Taj Mahal, a passenger train clocked 160km (99 miles) an hour, setting a new national speed record.
The local media dubbed it a "semi-bullet" train because while fast by Indian standards, it only ran at half the speed of a Japanese Shinkansen (bullet train) which travels at 320km (198 miles) an hour.
Mr Modi - the son of a railway platform tea seller - has said he wants a train to run that fast between Mumbai and Ahmedabad in Gujarat state, but analysts believe this is unlikely to happen any time soon.

 

[Voldemort]

m.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-28156439

 

[ITBP]

Who cares what they say? Truth will prevail and will win.