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Oz 'racism' and the ugly Indian student

RAKESH AHUJA2 August 2009, 10:27am IST

Canberra: Mobility of education services is one of the most positive by-products of globalization. There is no better example of this than Australia, which with just 21mn people has transformed itself into a mass exporter of education.

Australia opened its doors to foreign students roughly 15 years ago. More than 94,000 Indians study here, amidst an overwhelmingly Anglo-Saxon population with different values. The cultural fault-lines are now beginning to show.

The recent spate of attacks on Indian students cannot be explained by any one factor - outright racism, socio-economic competition or criminal opportunism. But one fact is uncontestable. Seduced by claimed commonalities such as cricket and the English language, Australia was unprepared for what it has wrought with the very best of (commercial) intentions in the Indian market.

The authorities' initial response to the attacks on Indian students reflected that confusion. Racial motives were rejected outright. Instead, Indian students were blamed for inviting violence by displaying their "wealth". But if race was not a contributing factor, why should Caucasian natives not be advised against displaying their technological paraphernalia in public places?

Racism does exist in Australia but it does not mean that society as a whole is racist. The Rudd government readily acknowledged the racist element in some of the violence. It quickly established a Task Force to examine the issues involved. That is no fig leaf. It is well-worn Australian practice to implement timebound recommendations.

In contrast, Indian TV's shrill coverage of attacks under the rubric of "Oz Racism" has been patently unbalanced. Above all, it has ignored one crucial issue: the lack of sensitivity towards local cultural norms by Indians studying in Australia.

Indian students here represent as good a microcosm of the nouveau riche Indian abroad as in any other country. Visible traits imported from home include a sullen unsmiling visage ; disdain towards serving staff (viewed as servants); lewdly ogling women; playing raucous Indian music on public transport; cooking pungent food without regard for neighour's sensitivities; littering; spitting - and let us not even mention the unhygienic practices in (male) toilets.

The Indian government is conscious of the consequences of such appalling behaviour. In the wake of the attacks, it enjoined students in Australia to "practice the right kind of behaviour" and, curiously' to "keep your homes clean".

Indian ghetto mentality actually reinforces these traits. It is not uncommon for 15 students to share accommodation rented for four. The impulse to be with 'one's own' is replicated in day-to-day activities. The outsider is excluded while the insider learns little about the Australian way of life. There is no catalyst for behavioural change.

On campuses, Indian students can be observed huddled together both inside and outside lecture halls. It is rare to see an Indian student with fellow native Australians' Chinese or Vietnamese.

Their motives for coming to Australia? Casual conversations with Indian students who dominate the taxi driving industry, offer fascinating glimpses into their goals. Education is definitely not one of them; permanent residency is. Another is the disturbing focus on race-orientated libidinous aspirations. There is no awareness of current developments in Australia, its history, culture or of multiculturalism. As for Aborigines' "black passengers" are best avoided!

The recent violence can be partly explained by ghetto-induced separateness and latent racism, but there are deeper reasons for the discordance between the Indian student and the Australian city. At its root is Australia's education export drive. For more than a decade, government funding for tertiary institutions has declined, forcing them to rely increasingly on foreign markets. In the process, they have compromised on educational standards to attract more students' including Indians with barely passable English.

The decline of Australian education standards has meant that it's increasingly drawing customers from Tier-II Indian towns - Ludhiana, Jalandhar' Bhopal, etc. They are often products of the so-called deemed institutions whose teaching infrastructure is highly suspect. This cohort is singularly ill-equipped to deal with Australia's vastly different cultural environment. In contrast to their cosmopolitan cousins in the US or the UK, the semi-urban Indian student carries only a provincial mindset and cultural baggage to Australia.

Moreover, coming from small towns and humble backgrounds, their focus is on vocational pursuits. More than 50% are enrolled in vocational courses. They have one objective: permanent residency at any cost. This eminently suits the stakeholders in the vocational education industry: the development of a pool of skills to meet current and future Australian labour shortages; foreign labour fodder at little or no cost to employers for 900 hours of work under the guise of vocational training; and a flood of business for education agents.

The Australian government is dealing with Indian student complaints. But it is not a one-way street. Indian students need to reassess their behaviour. They are subverting the opportunity for an education in their quest for permanent residency. They have no commitment to the country. Yet, they expect to be "protected". Can the police be everywhere? Their best bet is to modify personal conduct, understand local culture and develop networks beyond the ghetto.

In a knee-jerk reaction, education providers now propose pre-departure programmes to educate prospective students about "how things really work in Australia". That is not enough. It is not merely a question of what students should expect, but also, what is expected of them.

The writer has lived in Australia since 1961. He was Australia's deputy high commissioner to India in the '90s

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How much oil do Opec countries really have?

How much oil do Opec countries really have?

DNA Vivek Kaul Monday, August 3, 2009 3:51 IS

World over, oil is a major source of energy. But naysayers predict it maybe not too long before we run out of this all-important fuel. However, since the mid-80s, the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (Opec) has been acting as a swing oil producer of the world. Meaning, Opec produces only that much as to fill the gap between the global oil demand and production by non-Opec countries.

Over the years, the swing production arrangement resulted in Opec having a lot of idle capacity, which helped Opec to gain control over oil prices. Whenever the inventory level of oil stocks in industrialised nations, particularly the members of Organisation of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) went up, Opec reduced output.

This artificial scarcity that Opec manages to create did not allow oil prices to fall.
The same idle capacity has been used to pump extra oil into the market to prevent dramatic price rises during times of unexpected supply interventions. Most of this idle capacity is in Saudi Arabia, the largest member of the Opec.

"This encouraged the belief that Opec could always be relied upon to make up the difference between non-Opec supply and global demand, whatever the circumstances. Economists, oil analysts and government officials all succumbed to the reassuring view that the 'call on Opec' could expand almost indefinitely," writes David Strahan in his book The Last Oil Shock -- A Survival Guide to the Imminent Extinction of Petroleum Man.

"The view persists that Opec can continue to plug the gap between failing non-Opec supply and growing demand for decades to come. Production forecasts from Shell, Exxon, the International Energy Agency (IEA) and the US Department of Energy's statistical arm (the Energy Information Administration, or EIA), all assume that most demand growth from now on will be satisfied by a massive increase in Opec production."

The agencies come up with such an optimistic forecast based on the publicly available information on Opec. "The publicly known 'facts' about Opec are these: its eleven members have proved reserves of more than 900 billion barrels of oil, 75% of the world total; the key Middle Eastern countries are still relatively well explored and have the potential for huge new discoveries, with Saudi Arabia alone claiming 150 billion barrels of 'yet-to-find'," Strahan writes.

However, the writer doubts that these numbers reflect anything but reality. "In all likelihood, none of these statements is accurate and all could be wildly misleading...The reason is simple. One of the key criteria for deciding an individual country's quote within Opec is its current level of production and this gives all members an incentive to inflate the numbers they report," the author explains.

He further quotes Henry Groppe, an energy consultant as saying, "If you can get the others to believe your production is greater than it is, if there's a bigger pie to be allocated, then you're going to get a bigger piece of it, and if Opec as a whole needs to cut back, then you can just reduce paper production."

This logic, however, only explains the production inflation part of it -- i.e. Opec countries claim to produce a lot more than they actually produce. But what about the reserves? Do these countries actually have the kind of reserves the publicly available data suggest they have?

Strahan says, "In the mid to late 1980s...Opec was discussing a proposal to change the criteria by which quotas were allocated to include the size of each country's reserves.

The new rule was never actually introduced, but the prospect that it might be, seems to have galvanised Opec countries into suspiciously large revisions. In 1985, Kuwait's proved reserves...leapt by almost half, from 64 giga barrels (billion barrels) to 90 giga barrels, and in 1988 they rose again to 92 giga barrels.
The same year, Abu Dhabi's proved reserves almost tripled to 92 giga barrels, matching Kuwait exactly, and then Iran raised the bidding by one, increasing its proved reserves from 49 to 93 giga barrels, while Iraq more than doubled, from 47 giga barrels to around 100 giga barrels, and Venezuela also jumped by over 100% from 25 giga barrels to 56 giga barrels.

Finally in 1990, Saudi Arabia raised its proved reserves by a whopping 88 giga barrels, from 170 to 258 giga barrels. So in the space of five years, Opec reserves had risen by 305 billion barrels, despite the fact that no significant discoveries had been made."
Such big increases in reserves most independent observers find difficult to believe. Even more suspicious is the fact that these reserves remained constant for years to come.

"More suspicious yet, many of the new reserve figures subsequently remained unchanged for many years despite the fact that Opec countries were producing billions of barrels every year," writes Strahan.

Given these facts, Opec has lesser reserves than it claims to have and hence is "no longer the swing producer, but pumping full-bore, just like everybody else."
The moral of the story is that the world actually has a lot less oil than it believes it does.

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