provinceorstate:punjab

  • Sikh drivers are transforming U.S. trucking. Take a ride along the Punjabi American highway - Los Angeles Times
    https://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-col1-sikh-truckers-20190627-htmlstory.html

    By Jaweed Kaleem, Jun 27, 2019 -
    It’s 7:20 p.m. when he rolls into Spicy Bite, one of the newest restaurants here in rural northwest New Mexico. Locals in Milan, a town of 3,321, have barely heard of it.

    https://www.trbimg.com/img-5d12f8d2/turbine/la-1561524431-z6kcx6gnzm-snap-image
    Punjabi-operated truck stops

    The building is small, single-story, built of corrugated metal sheets. There are seats for 20. The only advertising is spray-painted on concrete roadblocks in English and Punjabi. Next door is a diner and gas station; the county jail is across the road.

    Palwinder Singh orders creamy black lentils, chicken curry and roti, finishing it off with chai and cardamom rice pudding. After 13 hours on and off the road in his semi truck, he leans back in a booth as a Bollywood music video plays on TV.

    “This is like home,” says Pal, the name he uses on the road (said like “Paul”).

    There are 3.5 million truckers in the United States. California has 138,000, the second-most after Texas. Nearly half of those in California are immigrants, most from Mexico or Central America. But as drivers age toward retirement — the average American trucker is 55 — and a shortage grows, Sikh immigrants and their kids are increasingly taking up the job.

    Estimates of the number of Sikh truckers vary. In California alone, tens of thousands of truckers trace their heritage to India. The state is home to half of the Sikhs in the U.S. — members of a monotheistic faith with origins in 15th century India whose followers are best recognized by the uncut hair and turbans many men wear. At Sikh temples in Sacramento, Fresno, Bakersfield and Riverside, the majority of worshipers are truck drivers and their families.

    Over the last decade, Indian Americans have launched trucking schools, truck companies, truck washes, trucker temples and no-frills Indian restaurants modeled after truck stops back home, where Sikhs from the state of Punjab dominate the industry.

    “You used to see a guy with a turban and you would get excited,” says Pal, who is in his 15th year of trucking. “Today, you go to some stops and can convince yourself you are in India.”

    Three interstates — the I-5, I-80 and I-10 — are dotted with Indian-American-owned businesses catering to truckers. They start to appear as you drive east from Los Angeles, Reno and Phoenix, and often have the words “Bombay,” “Indian” or “Punjabi” on their storefront signs. But many, with names like Jay Bros (in Overton, Neb.) and Antelope Truck Stop Pronghorn (in Burns, Wyo.) are anonymous dots on a map unless you’re one of the many Sikhs who have memorized them as a road map to America.

    The best-known are along Interstate 40, which stretches from Barstow to North Carolina. The road, much of it alongside Historic Route 66, forms the backbone of the Sikh trucking world.

    It’s a route that Pal, 38, knows well. Three times a month, he makes the seven-day round trip between his Fontana home and Indiana, where he drops off loads and picks up new ones. Over his career, he’s driven 2 million miles and transported items as varied as frozen chickens and paper plates. These days, he mostly hauls chocolate, rice and fruits and vegetables from California farms. Today, it’s 103 containers of mixed produce, with mangoes, bell peppers, watermelons, yellow onions and peeled garlic among them. All are bound for a Kroger warehouse outside Indianapolis.

    Across the street from Spicy Bite, dozens of arriving drivers form a temporary village of 18-wheelers in a vast parking lot by the interstate. Most are white. Nearly all are men. More are older than younger.

    But every now and then there are Sikhs like Pal, with long salt-and-pepper beards, colorful turbans and thick Indian accents. They head straight toward Spicy Bite.

    Lines can form out the door at the restaurant, which opened two years ago outside the Petro Stopping Center, a longtime mainstay for truckers headed east.

    Pal makes a point to stop by the restaurant — even just for a “hello” — when he sleeps next door. The Sikh greeting is “Sat sri akaal.” It means “God is truth.” In trucking, where turnover is high, business uncertain and risk of accidents ever present, each day can feel like a leap of faith and an opportunity to give thanks.

    Punjabi Americans first appeared on the U.S. trucking scene in the 1980s after an anti-Sikh massacre in India left thousands dead around New Delhi, prompting many Sikhs to flee. More recently, Sikhs have migrated to Central America and applied for asylum at the Mexico border, citing persecution for their religion in India; some have also become truckers. Estimates of the overall U.S. Sikh population vary, placing the community’s size between 200,000 and 500,000.

    In recent years, corporations have pleaded for new truckers. Walmart kicked up salaries to attract drivers. Last year, the government announced a pilot program to lower the age for driving trucks from 21 to 18 for those with truck-driving training in the military. According to the American Trucking Assn., the trucker shortage could reach 100,000 within years.

    “Punjabis are filling the gap,” says Raman Dhillon, a former driver who last year founded the North American Punjabi Trucking Assn. The Fresno-based group advises drivers on regulations, offers insurance and tire discounts, and runs a magazine: Punjabi Trucking.

    Like trucking itself, where the threat of automation and the long hours away from home have made it hard to recruit drivers, the Punjabi trucking life isn’t always an easy sell. Three years ago, a group of Sikh truckers in California won a settlement from a national shipping company after saying it discriminated against their faith. The drivers, who followed Sikh traditions by wrapping their uncut hair in turbans, said bosses asked them to remove the turbans before providing hair and urine samples for pre-employment drug tests despite being told of the religious observance. The same year, police charged a man with vandalizing a semi truck at a Sikh temple in Buena Park. He’d scribbled the word “ISIS.”

    Still, Hindi- and Punjabi-language newspapers in the Eastern U.S. regularly run ads promising better wages, a more relaxed lifestyle and warm weather as a trucker out West. Talk to any group of Sikh drivers and you’ll find former cabbies, liquor store workers or convenience store cashiers who made the switch.

    How a rural Oklahoma truck stop became a destination for Sikh Punjabis crossing America »

    “Thirty years ago, it was hard to get into trucking because there were so few people like us in the business who could help you,” says Rashpal Dhindsa, a former trucker who runs Fontana-based Dhindsa Group of Companies, one of the oldest Sikh-owned U.S. trucking companies. When Pal first started, Dhindsa — now a close friend but then an acquaintance — gave him a $1,000 loan to cover training classes.

    It’s 6:36 a.m. the next day when the Petro Stopping Center switches from quiet darkness to rumbling engines. Pal flips on the headlights of his truck, a silver ’16 Volvo with a 500-horsepower engine. Inside the rig, he heats aloo gobi — spiced potatoes and cauliflower — that his wife prepared back home. He checks the thermostat to make sure his trailer isn’t too warm. He takes out a book wrapped in a blue cotton cloth that’s tucked by his driver’s seat, sits on a bed-turned-couch and reads a prayer in Punjabi for safety on the journey: There is only one God. Truth is His name…. You always protect us.

    He pulls east onto the highway as the sun rises.

    Truckers either drive in pairs or solo like Pal. Either way, it’s a quiet, lonely world.

    Still, Pal sees more of America in a week than some people will in their lives. Rolling California hills, spiky desert rock formations, the snow-dusted evergreens of northern Arizona, the fuzzy cacti in New Mexico and, in Albuquerque, hot air balloons rising over an orange sky. There’s also the seemingly endless fast food and Tex-Mex of Amarillo and the 19-story cross of Groom, Texas. There’s the traffic in Missouri. After hours of solitude on the road, it excites him.

    Pal’s not strict on dogma or doctrine, and he’s more spiritual than religious. Trucking has shown him that people are more similar than different no matter where you go. The best of all religions, he says, tend to teach the same thing — kindness to others, accepting whatever comes your way and appreciation for what’s in front of you on the road.

    “When I’m driving,” Pal says, “I see God through his creation.”

    His favorite sights are the farms. You spot them in Central California while picking up pallets of potatoes and berries, or in Illinois and Indiana while driving through the corn and soybean fields.

    They remind him of home, the rural outskirts of Patiala, India.

    Nobody in his family drove trucks. Still, to Pal, he’s continuing tradition. His father farmed potatoes, cauliflower, rice and tomatoes. As a child, Pal would ride tractors for fun with Dad. Today, instead of growing food, Pal transports it.

    He wasn’t always a trucker. After immigrating in 2001 with his younger brother, he settled in Canoga Park and worked nights at 7-Eleven. After he was robbed at gunpoint, a friend suggested trucking. Better pay, flexible hours — and less dangerous.

    Three years later, he started driving a rig he didn’t own while getting paid per mile. Today, he has his own company, two trucks between himself and his brother — also a driver — and bids on shipments directly with suppliers. Nationally, the average pay for a trucker is just above $43,000. Pal makes more than twice that.

    He uses the money to pay for the house he shares with his wife, Harjeet Kaur, 4-year-old son, brother and sister-in-law, nieces and parents. Kaur threads eyebrows at a salon and video chats with him during lunch breaks. Every week before he leaves, she packs a duffel bag of his ironed clothes and stacked containers of food for the road.

    “I love it,” Pal says about driving. “But there are always two sides of the coin, head and tail. If you love it, then you have to sacrifice everything. I have to stay away from home. But the thing is, this job pays me good.”

    The truck is fully equipped. From the road, you can see only driver and passenger seats. But behind them is a sleeper cab with a bed that’s 6-foot-7 by 3-foot-2.

    Pal likes to connect the TV sitting atop a mini-fridge to his phone to stream music videos when he’s alone. His favorite songs are by Sharry Maan, an Indian singer who topped charts two years ago with “Transportiye.” It tells the story of a Sikh American trucker who longs for his wife while on the road. At night, the table folds down to become a bed. Pal is just missing a bathroom and his family.

    The life of a Sikh trucker is one of contrasts. On one hand, you see the diversity of America. You encounter new immigrants from around the world working the same job as people who have been truckers for decades. All transport the food, paper and plastic that make the country run. But you also see the relics of the past and the reminders of how you, as a Sikh in 2019, still don’t entirely fit in.

    It’s 9:40 a.m. on Saturday when Pal pulls into Bowlin’s Flying C Ranch rest center in Encino, N.M., an hour past Albuquerque and two from Texas. Here, you can buy a $19,999 stuffed buffalo, Baja jackets and fake Native American moccasins made in China in a vast tourist stop attached to a Dairy Queen and an Exxon. “God Bless the U.S.A.” by Lee Greenwood plays in the background.

    It reminds Pal of the time he was paying his bill at another gas station. A man suddenly shouted at customers to “get out, he’s going to blow up this place!” “I will not fight you,” Pal calmly replied. The man left. Those kinds of instances are rare, but Pal always senses their danger. Some of the most violent attacks on Sikhs this century have been at the hands of people who mistook them for Muslims or Arabs, including the case of a turban-wearing Sikh man in Arizona who was shot dead by a gunman four days after the Sept. 11 attacks.

    For Pal, suspicious glances are more common. So are the truckers who think he’s new to the business or doesn’t speak English. None of it fazes him.

    “Everybody relates to us through Osama bin Laden because we look the same,” he says, driving across the plains toward the Texas Panhandle. “Or they think because my English sounds different that I am not smart. I know who I am.”

    Every day, he wears a silver bracelet that symbolizes a handcuff. “Remember, you are handcuffed to God. Remind yourself to not do bad things,” Pal says. It reminds him to be kind in the face of ignorance and hatred.

    At a Subway in Amarillo a few hours later, he grabs his go-to lunch when he’s taking a break from Indian food: a chicken sandwich on white bread with pepper jack, lettuce, tomato and onion. At home, the family is vegetarian. Pal relishes chances on the road to indulge in meat. He used to depend solely on his wife’s cooking. Today, he has other options. It’s a luxury to switch from homemade meals to Punjabi restaurants to fast food.

    Trucking has helped Pal find his faith. When he moved to the U.S., he used to shave, drink beer and not care much about religion. But as he got bored on the road, he started listening to religious sermons. Twelve years ago, he began to again grow his hair and quit alcohol; drinking it is against the faith’s traditions. Today, he schedules shipments around the temple calendar so he can attend Sikh celebrations with his family.

    “I don’t mind questions about my religion. But when people say to me, ‘Why do you not cut your hair?’ they are asking the wrong question,” Pal says. “The real question is, why do they cut their hair? God made us this way.”

    It’s 4:59 p.m. when he arrives in Sayre, Okla., at Truck Stop 40. A yellow Punjabi-language billboard advertises it as the I-40 starts to bend north in a rural region two hours from Oklahoma City.

    Among the oldest Sikh truck stops, it has a 24-hour vegetarian restaurant, convenience store, gas station and a housing trailer that functions as a temple — all spread over several acres.

    Pal has been coming here for more than decade, since it was a mechanic shop run by a Sikh former trucker who settled on the plot for its cheap land. When he has time, Pal lingers for a meal. But he’s in a rush to get to Joplin, Mo., for the night so he can make his drop-off the next day.

    He grabs a chai and heads to the temple. Resting on a small pillow upon the altar is the Guru Granth Sahib, the Sikh holy book. An audiotape plays prayers on a loop. A print of Guru Nanak, the faith’s founder, hangs on the wall.

    Pal prostrates and leaves a few dollar bills on the floor as a donation for upkeep. He prays for God to protect the temple, his family and himself on the 891 miles that remain until he hits the Indianapolis suburbs.

    “This feels like a long drive,” Pal says. “But it’s just a small part of the journey of life.”

    #USA #LKW #Transport #Immigration #Zuwanderung

  • Les femmes dans la ville

    Partout dans le monde, les #violences faites aux femmes sont massives et récurrentes. La majorité des #agressions ont lieu dans la sphère privée mais les femmes sont loin d’être épargnées dans l’#espace_public, où elles sont touchées de façon disproportionnée. Tour du monde des initiatives qui visent à rendre les villes plus justes et plus sûres.


    https://www.arte.tv/fr/videos/RC-015858/les-femmes-dans-la-ville

    #femmes #villes #genre #géographie_culturelle #urban_matter #ressources_pédagogiques
    #gadgets #Rapex #arts_martiaux #transports_en_commun #Pink_Rickshaws #Anza (fondation) #patriarcat #harcèlement_de_rue #No_estoy_sola #Frauen_Werkstatt (Autriche) #espaces_sûrs #sécurité #toilettes #No_toilet_no_bride (Inde) #vidéo #film

    • Women in northern India said, ‘No toilet, no bride,’ and it worked

      For about 12 years, young women in the northern Indian state of Haryana have been telling suitors, “No loo, no ‘I do!’” And according to a recent study, the bargain is working: Toilet ownership has significantly increased as men scramble to attract brides in a marriage market where discrimination has made women scarce.

      Through radio spots, billboards, posters and painted slogans on buildings, the “No Toilet, No Bride” campaign, launched by state authorities in 2005, encourages women and their families to demand that male suitors build a private latrine before they will agree to marriage. According to the study, published last month in ScienceDirect, private sanitation coverage increased by 21 percent in Haryana among households with boys active on the marriage market from 2004 to 2008.

      However, the study also found that the low-cost social marketing campaign was only successful because it was able to take advantage of “one of the most severely skewed sex ratios on earth.”

      Like most of northern India, Haryana values males much more than females. Even before birth, males often receive far better care, while females face a high risk of selective abortion because of their gender. Once born, girls continue to face discrimination through constraints on health care, movement, education or employment. However, they also face much higher risk of violence due to the widespread practice of open defecation.

      Globally, 1.1 billion people today defecate in open spaces, such as fields, but the problem is especially concentrated in India, where 626 million people do so. To maintain some semblance of privacy and dignity, women and girls usually take care of business under cover of darkness, making them more vulnerable to harassment, rape, kidnapping and wild animal attacks. According to the study, about 70 percent of rural households in Haryana did not have a private latrine in 2004.

      Recognizing the urgent need for sanitation, the Indian government launched a community-led “Total Sanitation Campaign” in 1999. But Haryana state authorities, inspired by the work of a local nongovernmental organization, saw a unique opportunity to achieve a public policy goal (sanitation) by exploiting deeply rooted social norms (marriage) and marriage market conditions (a scarcity of women).

      “Despite widespread and persistent discrimination, heightened competition on the male side of the market has shaped the overall bargaining environment” and increased women’s bargaining power, the study said.

      The benefit has been felt most deeply not only by the brides, but also the sisters and mothers of the grooms who can enjoy the safety, convenience and health benefits of a latrine in their home as well. And after years of the information campaign, brides do not even have to make the demand themselves in some cases. Men have begun to recognize that saving up to build a latrine is a standard prerequisite to marriage.

      “I will have to work hard to afford a toilet,” Harpal Sirshwa, a 22-year-old at the time, told the Washington Post in 2009. “We won’t get any bride if we don’t have one now. I won’t be offended when the woman I like asks for a toilet.”

      Based on government household surveys, the study reported that 1.42 million toilets were built between 2005 and 2009. Of those, 470,000 were built by households below the poverty line. The numbers may not overshadow those of other sanitation campaigns and randomized control trials in India, but the “No Toilet, No Bride” campaign is comparatively very cost-effective.

      Unfortunately, in marriage markets where there is not a significant scarcity of women the study found that “No Toilet, No Bride” had little to no effect. However, in regions like northern India where the sex ratio is skewed, the campaign has already begun to expand into neighboring states, Punjab and Himachal Pradesh. In February, 110 villages took it one step further by requiring grooms obtain certificates verifying their toilets before they can marry.

      “Open defecation is not only an unhygienic habit, but also it often leads to crime against women,” Yahya Karimi, who oversaw the decision, told Times of India. “So, unless a groom has a toilet at his house, he won’t get a bride.”


      http://www.humanosphere.org/global-health/2017/05/women-northern-india-said-no-toilet-no-bride-worked

  • « L’Inde secouée par une fraude bancaire géante !! » L’édito de Charles SANNAT
    https://www.crashdebug.fr/international/14538-l-inde-secouee-par-une-fraude-bancaire-geante-l-edito-de-charles-sa

    Mes chères impertinentes, mes chers impertinents,

    Nirav Modi, le célèbre diamantaire, se serait enfui en laissant derrière lui une ardoise de près de 1,8 milliard de dollars à la Punjab National Bank (PNB), la deuxième banque publique indienne.

    Il a utilisé pas moins de 200 sociétés écrans pour recevoir les fonds de la fraude et les blanchir sous forme de terrains, or et autres pierres précieuses.

    Un diamantaire très connu !

    « L’affaire de la Punjab National Bank, cible d’une fraude de 1,8 milliard de dollars, braque le projecteur sur la corruption au sein du système bancaire public et du secteur diamantaire en Inde.

    Il faisait régulièrement la une des magazines de mode, et ses diamants paraient les plus grandes actrices. Mais s’il est aujourd’hui au centre des médias, les raisons sont nettement moins (...)

    #En_vedette #Actualités_internationales #Actualités_Internationales

  • NHS admits doctors may be using tools made by children in Pakistan | Global development | The Guardian

    https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2018/jan/29/nhs-admits-doctors-may-be-using-tools-made-by-children-in-pakistan

    hildren as young as 12 are making surgical instruments in hazardous conditions in Pakistan, prompting fears that the tools could be used in the NHS, the Guardian has discovered.

    In Sialkot, Punjab, where 99% of Pakistan’s surgical instrument production is centred, illegal child labour was witnessed in at least a dozen small workshops.

    Boys are paid less than $1 (70p) a day to cut, drill, bend and polish steel pieces into gleaming surgical tools for export.

    #enfance #esclavage_moderne #sweatshop #pakitan

  • Distressed Pakistani asylum seekers rough it out in #Sri_Lanka
    COLOMBO:

    A Sunday mass is under way at a small chapel in the western Sri Lankan city of #Negombo. The building is decked out in multicoloured bunting for Christmas. Interestingly, the worshippers are singing hymns and psalms, not in Sinhalese, not in Tamil, not in any other dialect of the island nation, but in Urdu.
    Four Catholic bishops visiting from Pakistan are leading the mass for the families of the Christian asylum-seekers from Punjab and Sindh. These families have been in limbo since they landed in Sri Lanka years ago.


    http://tribune.com.pk/story/1267469/distressed-pakistani-asylum-seekers-rough-sri-lanka

    #réfugiés_pakistanais #Pakistan #asile #migrations #réfugiés #réfugiés_chrétiens #limbe

  • Ports America Signed to Nova Scotia Mega-Port Project – gCaptain
    https://gcaptain.com/ports-america-recruited-to-nova-scotia-mega-port-project


    Sydney Harbor, Nova Scotia

    U.S. terminal operator Ports America and #Sydney_Harbour Investment Partners have announced an agreement for the promotion, development and management of the proposed Novaporte deepwater mega-port in Sydney Harbour, #Nova_Scotia capable of accommodating the world’s largest ships.

    Sydney Harbour Investment Partners, or SHIP, is a private company with exclusive development rights to the approximately 500 acres at the Port of Sydney. Now with the support of Ports America and a specially formed development group, they plan build a dedicated, semi-automated, deep-water marine container facility capable of handling 18,000+ TEU Ultra Large Container Vessels.
    […]
    Novaporte is a uniquely located deep water port able to handle the largest of the next generation of ultra-large container vessels,” said Peter Ford, Chief Strategy Officer at Ports America. “Geographically, it is the first stop for vessels on the Great Circle Route from Europe and Asia via the Suez. It has abundant land, an adjacent 1,200-acre logistics park and is located in a foreign trade zone. Add to that abundant power, road and rail, as well as a skilled work force, and you have the makings of an East Coast gateway for the next generation of super ships.

  • Islamic State v. al-Qaida
    Owen Bennett-Jones
    http://www.lrb.co.uk/v38/n21/owen-bennett-jones/islamic-state-v-al-qaida

    For Paul Rogers, violent jihadism is a symptom first and foremost of global inequality, a revolt from the margins by people who see no evidence that increases in total global wealth are a benefit to them. On the contrary, improvements in education and mass communication only mean that they can appreciate more clearly the extent of their disadvantage and marginalisation. In that sense they are not all that different from the Naxalites in India, the Maoists in Nepal and Peru and the Zapatistas in Mexico.

    There are other, on the face of it more surprising, non-religious sources of jihadi violence. The jihadists may have severely disrupted the international system of nation states, but they have had support in doing so from ‘enemy’ governments. The story of the United States and Saudi Arabia helping Osama bin Laden fight the Soviets in Afghanistan is now familiar. Iran supported Zarqawi in Iraq, tolerating his slaughter of Shias because he offered the most effective opposition to the US occupation of Iraq. Syria took the same view, allowing al-Qaida in Iraq’s fighters to slip across the border. One of Hillary Clinton’s leaked emails reveals that as recently as 2014 she believed Qatar and Saudi Arabia were providing ‘clandestine financial and logistic support’ to IS. Turkey also helped both organisations in Syria in the hope that they would oust Assad. Even Assad himself helped them. Calculating that the jihadists would not have the strength to oust him, he released them from jail, bought oil from IS and bombed the Free Syrian Army while leaving IS positions alone. Assad’s idea was to scare either the Americans or the Russians into defending his regime. Putin took the bait.

    These policies generally turn sour. A direct line can be drawn from American support for the Afghan Mujahidin to 9/11. Iran’s backing of Zarqawi may have helped Tehran gain influence in the power vacuum left by America’s withdrawal from Iraq, but the Iranians now find themselves having to raise militias to confront IS. Assad and Erdoğan both believed that, having used the violent jihadis to further their purposes in Syria, they could dispose of them when they were no longer needed. Whether that will be as easy as Ankara and Damascus hope remains an open question.

    There is another aspect to these machinations. Governments of all types reckon it is better to export violent jihadism than to experience it at home. The Saudis have been the most brazen advocates of this policy but before 9/11 many Middle Eastern governments complained that the UK offered sanctuary to Islamists in the hope that London would not be attacked. And papers captured in Osama bin Laden’s Abbottabad hideout revealed that the chief minister of Punjab, Shahbaz Sharif, offered al-Qaida a restoration of good relations with the Pakistan government in return for no attacks in his province.

    #apprentis_sorciers #mėdiocrité_meurtrière

  • HCR | Après des décennies au Pakistan, des réfugiés afghans se préparent au retour en Afghanistan
    http://asile.ch/2016/07/03/hcr-apres-decennies-pakistan-refugies-afghans-se-preparent-retour-afghanistan

    Le Pakistan cherche à rapatrier vers l’Afghanistan des réfugiés afghans parmi 1,6 million au total qui vivent dans le pays. Le HCR a réservé des fonds pour le rapatriement de 60’000 réfugiés.

  • Okara (Pakistan): Demanding land rights is not terrorism – Massive repression of the AMP peasant movement - Europe Solidaire Sans Frontières
    http://www.europe-solidaire.org/spip.php?article37792

    A massive repression of the most militant but peaceful peasant movement—the Anjman Mozareen Punjab (AMP)—is underway. Most of its leadership has been arrested under false anti-terrorist laws. Dozens are missing while over 50 remain behind bars. All have been declared “terrorists” by the Okara district police, working hand in hand with the Military Farms administration, which mainly serves military officers.

    The source of the problem is that while 14000 acres of land in the Okara district is owned by the Punjab government, it is occupied by the Military Farms administration. Since 2001 the tenants of the Military farms have refused to turn over half of their crops (bitai), which they and their families had been paying for over 90 years. How could ordinary people dare to say no to the military officers? But that is their real “crime.” They demand their land rights.

    #Pakistan #armée #terres #foncier #protestation #répression

  • Top 12 investors in Monsanto are also top investors in Facebook

    http://www.counterview.net/2016/01/free-basics-corporate-agenda-revealed.html

    Pointing towards how Internet in recent years has begun to change things for rural India, Shiva says, “Recently India has seen an explosion in e-retailing. From large corporations to entrepreneurs, people all over the country are able to sell what they make to a market that was earlier unreachable to them. Craftsmen have been able to grow their businesses, farms have found consumers nearby.”
    It is against this backdrop, says Shiva, “Zuckerberg wants not just a slice, but the whole pie of the basic economy of the Indian people, especially its farmers and peasants.”

  • BBC - Culture - Is this the perfect city?

    http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20151211-is-this-the-perfect-city

    By Jonathan Glancey

    11 December 2015

    Chandigarh, India’s most prosperous and greenest city, was born of dreams at the time of one of the country’s worst nightmares. In 1947, India gained its independence from Britain. As part of this process, the country was divided in two and some 14 million Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims were displaced. Ethnic tensions and rivalries led to up to around a million (estimates vary) brutal murders.

    In the Punjab region, the dividing line between the two states meant that the old capital, Lahore, was now a part of Pakistan. In 1949, Chandigarh was decreed. Not only would this be the capital of Indian Punjab, but it would be the very model of a modern city promising peace, democracy and a new social order free of bitter divisions.

    #inde #Chandigarh #architecture #Le_Corbusier

  • I Went to India and Saw the Future of Climate-Smart Farming - Facts So Romantic
    http://nautil.us/blog/i-went-to-india-and-saw-the-future-of-climate_smart-farming

    Damara Dhanakrishna/EyeEmEarlier this fall, I traveled to central Gujarat and northern Punjab, in India, to meet with rural farmers who were trying new techniques to combat climate change. Sitting under a mango tree, I spoke with 65-year-old Raman Bhai Parmar, who told me about his solar-powered irrigation pump that was whooshing with water, deep underground. Behind me, he said, a concrete tank was catching the water’s flow, holding it until the nearby fields of bananas and rice needed it again. Parmar’s solar pump is one of an entire system of adaptation measures being implemented in roughly 80 test sites, called climate-smart villages, across six Indian states. Currently 1,500 of these are planned: 500 in Haryana, 500 in Punjab, and as many as 500 others throughout the country. Much (...)

  • Représentation du territoire national et circulation des grains : le Système de distribution publique indien - Cairn.info
    https://www.cairn.info/revue-annales-de-geographie-2011-1-page-26.htm

    Plusieurs fois par an, aux moments des récoltes de blé, de riz, mais aussi de canne à sucre, les campagnes de l’Inde sont traversées d’un fourmillement de charrettes, de camions, de négociants en grains, de trains remplis de sacs de jute bourrés de céréales. Marchés « réglementés » au Punjab, huttes construites pour la pesée des grains au Tamil Nadu abritent portefaix, paysans, marchands, transactions multiples, commissions plus ou moins légales, couture à gros fil de sacs de 70 kg. Rien de plus normal, pourrait-on dire, dans un pays où l’agriculture est encore pratiquée par la moitié de la population active. Pourtant, une bonne partie de cette agitation ne reflète nullement les activités du commerce privé et les logiques classiques de l’offre et de la demande : il s’agit en effet, pour un cinquième parfois de la production de blé et de riz, de flux institués à l’instigation de l’État. Une bonne partie des acteurs privés travaille de fait pour constituer des #stocks_publics de sécurité, qui puissent être redistribués à des prix subventionnés à la population indienne. Le système fonctionne parallèlement comme un soutien aux agriculteurs dans les zones de surproduction, qui ont grâce à l’État l’assurance de prix garantis. Certains trains circulent ainsi sur 3 000 km, du Punjab au Kerala, selon des itinéraires rendus complexes par la saturation saisonnière des infrastructures de transport (Landy, 2006).
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    #grains #alimentation #sécurité_alimentaire #redistribution #agriculture

  • Représentation du territoire national et circulation des #grains : le Système de distribution publique indien

    Plusieurs fois par an, aux moments des récoltes de blé, de riz, mais aussi de canne à sucre, les campagnes de l’Inde sont traversées d’un fourmillement de charrettes, de camions, de négociants en grains, de trains remplis de sacs de jute bourrés de céréales. Marchés « réglementés » au Punjab, huttes construites pour la pesée des grains au Tamil Nadu abritent portefaix, paysans, marchands, transactions multiples, commissions plus ou moins légales, couture à gros fil de sacs de 70 kg. Rien de plus normal, pourrait-on dire, dans un pays où l’agriculture est encore pratiquée par la moitié de la population active. Pourtant, une bonne partie de cette agitation ne reflète nullement les activités du commerce privé et les logiques classiques de l’offre et de la demande : il s’agit en effet, pour un cinquième parfois de la production de blé et de riz, de flux institués à l’instigation de l’État. Une bonne partie des acteurs privés travaille de fait pour constituer des stocks publics de sécurité, qui puissent être redistribués à des prix subventionnés à la population indienne. Le système fonctionne parallèlement comme un soutien aux agriculteurs dans les zones de surproduction, qui ont grâce à l’État l’assurance de prix garantis. Certains trains circulent ainsi sur 3 000 km, du Punjab au Kerala, selon des itinéraires rendus complexes par la saturation saisonnière des infrastructures de transport (Landy, 2006).

    http://www.cairn.info/revue-annales-de-geographie-2011-1-page-26.htm
    #semences #agriculture #Inde
    cc @odilon

  • Pakistan’s Nawaz Sharif, not his army, the world’s most dangerous…
    http://www.middleeasteye.net/columns/pakistans-nawaz-sharif-not-his-army-world-s-most-dangerous-1643972215

    Sharif’s credentials as a supporter of the Taliban have also been an open secret, with active “ignorance” of the Punjabi Taliban. The south of Punjab is where most of the Saudi funding ties in with the most extreme groups that have been linked to the violence in Afghanistan and even Iraq and Syria. The Saud family own thousands of acres in southern Punjab, which are used for their food security and hunting grounds for falcons.

    An increasing sectarian rift in Pakistan has been seen since Sharif’s latest return to power in 2013, with attacks on the Shiite community reaching a new high in the past 12 months. The government has looked away at the plight of these communities in comparison to attacks on army schools and charities.

    Similarly, on the issue of the Syria war, Sharif’s extreme Wahabi nature has shown its true colours (his father reportedly followed a Salafist group, Ahl al-Hadith, which rejects claims it is synonymous with Wahabism). Sharif has seen the Syrian war as a Shiite-Sunni war despite most of the Syrian Arab Army officer corps being Sunni, Christian and Druze, yet Sharif, pressured by the Saudis, has falsely told the Pakistani political leadership that the war in Syria is an assault on Sunnis

    Syria and Pakistan have always been strong military allies with deep counter-intelligence ties. Pakistan has historically been one of the largest trainers of the Syrian Air Force, and also regular annual military exchange of officers and equipment sold to the Syrians. Yet this five-decade-old historic relation was put aside when, under heavy Saudi pressure, Sharif called for the Syrian government to step aside as it had lost credibility.

    This shift in a historic stance towards Syria came about through direct pressure from the then-Saudi Crown, and now ruler, Prince Salman. Sharif has also had strong relationships with the Hariri family in Lebanon, and used the “old-school” Afghan-Arab jihadi network to facilitate Sunni groups in Lebanon to take on Hezbollah.

    The most disturbing element of the Sharif-Saudi alliance in Lebanon has been the arming of the Wahabi groups in Nahr al-Bared and Ain al-Hilweh Palestinian camps in Lebanon, which turned into an all-out skirmish in 2008-2009.

    Note : l’auteur est un syrien dont on pourra consulter des articles sur OpenDemocracy pour se faire une idée de ses opinions :
    https://www.opendemocracy.net/author/kamal-alam

  • On the ’#Cancer Train’ of #India's #pesticides - Al Jazeera English
    http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2015/01/cancer-train-india-pesticides-20151411811508148.html

    Singh blamed the so-called “green revolution” for polluting the soil, water and air “beyond repair”. This was a period during the 1960s of rapid agricultural development - earning Punjab the “bread basket of India” moniker - based on intensive farming that made extensive use of chemicals.

    “The rampant and mindless use of pesticides to give impetus to the green revolution is responsible for this harrowing situation in Punjab,” Singh said.

    But writer and social activist Avtar Gondare said the agricultural revolution was needed to feed India’s population of more than one billion people.

  • To conquer her land

    As a photographer my work currently focuses on projects in my own country that explores the role of marginalized rural women in India in armed conflict and in spaces that are mostly male dominated and their struggles and triumphs within them.

    The border between India and Pakistan is like its own world. Since partition this border has seen war, smuggling - people, arms, drugs, firing, jingoistic parades, killing, suicide bombing, fireworks, lonely tears and little moments of glory.

    In September 2009, India’s first women soldiers were deployed at the India-Pakistan border from Punjab to near the first line of control in Kashmir. I followed these women, from different parts of the country, castes, and backgrounds, cutting across gender and religion during their last days at home to the barracks, through training camp to active duty.

    Stationed on a critical border, they try to come to terms with their new responsibilities while patrolling barren lands. This transformation is intense; it is impossible to recreate or restore what they’ve left behind. Theirs is a country so vast that all lines seem to disappear, yet contains a deathly silence so white, haunting, and exact that it can create peace even in a land on the brink of war.

    More women in India are in the armed forces than ever before. Yet most of them are painfully alone. Military culture, which can be intimidating, has not been particularly tailor-made for women. The Indian woman in the forces is not only battling against the enemy, but also against a largely patriarchal society. Most of the women I photographed joined the forces to fight their present state of affairs as well as to find an escape from their dire rural livelihood. For these women, putting on a uniform was like coming out of their own skin. They saw it as a way of gaining some form of independence.

    In “To Conquer Her Land,” over the last 3 years I am trying to humanize these complex yet intricate issues of poverty, conflict, psychological warfare, caste, youth, gender, love, peace, the concept of home, an undefined idea of patriotism, strength of mind, and a level of stress previously unknown to them. Finally to be able to create an unflinching account of how these women come face to face with the truth of conflict and the realities of living the life of a young good soldier.

    #photographie #photo #India #frontière #Pakistan #genre #femmes #armée #conflit #patriotisme #nationalisme #soldat

  • Child brides blot tribal Pakistan - Al Jazeera English
    http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2012/10/2012101792934276587.html

    Child marriage - known as “swara” in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa province, “vani” in Punjab, “sang chati” in Sindh, and “vani” and “lajai” in Balochistan - are enacted in disturbingly large swathes of Pakistan and reinforced by customs that treat women as commodities.

    #child #marriage #Pakistan #women

  • Writing Like a White Guy by Jaswinder Bolina

    My father says I should use a pseudonym. “They won’t publish you if they see your name. They’ll know you’re not one of them. They’ll know you’re one of us.” This has never occurred to me, at least not in a serious way. “No publisher in America’s going to reject my poems because I have a foreign name,” I reply. “Not in 2002.” I argue, “These are educated people. My name won’t be any impediment.” Yet in spite of my faith in the egalitarian attitude of editors and the anonymity of book contests, I understand my father’s angle on the issue.

    With his beard shaved and his hair shorn, his turban undone and left behind in Bolina Doaba, Punjab—the town whose name we take as our own—he lands at Heathrow in 1965, a brown boy of 18 become a Londoner. His circumstance then must seem at once exhilarating and also like drifting in a lifeboat: necessary, interminable. I imagine the English of the era sporting an especially muted and disdainful brand of racism toward my alien father, his brother and sister-in-law, toward his brother-in-law and sister, his nieces and nephews, and the other Indians they befriend on Nadine Street, Charlton, just east of Greenwich. The sense of exclusion arrives over every channel, dull and constant.

    http://www.poetryfoundation.org/article/243072