Vedanta - a man is known by the company he keeps

The more I learn of the Indian mining major, Vedanta, the more I am convinced that it is a company whose designs and values are suspect. There are many such companies in India, of course, but the Vedanta group has set, by itself, a rather dubious standard of 'rape and run'. The group companies include Sterlite, Madras Aluminium, Bharat Aluminium and Vedanta Alumina.

Over the last few months I have been exposed to a fair amount of data, videos and photographs put together by a number of civil rights groups, committed non-profits and intrepid individuals and am convinced of the abuse of this management's power and money in its operations in Orissa and elsewhere in India. I have seen and read extensively of collosal, shocking air pollution with fly ash, of thousands of people affected by multiple skin diseases, of the use of State police to force poor people to vacate large areas of lands that the group wants acquired for mining, expansion or new development and of mass destruction of tree cover. This is the classic example of the company that Micheal Moore termed the alter ego, in some sense, of the psychopath - single minded pursuit of profits to the detriment of all else.
The final nail in the coffin was the decision of the Orissa Government to 'sell' a sacred hill for mining bauxite, to this company, a decision that regrettably was endorsed by the Supreme Court, which has often taken the side of environment and traditional heritage in its history. This hill - the Niyamgiri hill - is sacred to the Kondh people and they have fought a courageous battle that, in many ways, is only beginning.

Very interestingly, this is one environmental battle that is being fought in the financial services sector: a number of investors - mutual funds, charitable trusts, pension funds - are either dumping their Vedanta stock after learning of the company's activity or refusing to buy. These include Norway's Government Pension Fund (also called the oil fund), the Church of England, Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust and the Martin Currie Investment Trust.
Hence, here's a request: please read to learn about Vedanta. If you don't like what you see, and you manage a fund, do the right thing. Write to the Mutual Fund Managers you know or those who manage some of your money about this company, requesting them to avoid buying or holding onto the stock of a criminally negligent company.

The Cost of Driving Your Car

If you are contemplating buying your second car, for the home, the better half or possibly a grown up child, read this carefully. When an airconditioned taxi cab (with a chaffeur) is offered to you @ Rs. 15 per kilometre (Meru or Easy Cabs, for instance), you shudder. This is expensive, if used regularly. Much better to buy a vehicle instead.
Lets do some micro economics here:
Assume now, that you are purchasing a mid range car, say one that costs Rs. 6 lakhs and runs on petrol, giving you an efficiency of about 12 km per litre. Assume further that the car will run about 10,000 km a year. These are fair & realistice assumptions. Remember that this is the second car for the family.
Fuel cost per kilometre (including engine oil) : Rs. 5 (just a third of the cab)
Over a five year period, though, there are the following:
Daily washing, quarterly servicing and (inevitable) repairs, battery & tyre replacement and tinkering costs : Rs. 100,000, or about Rs 2 per km
Insurance : Rs. 50,000, Re 1 per km
Loss of interest (post-tax!) on the amount invested in the car : Rs. 3 per km
Loss on sale of car after 5 years (@ Rs. 3 lakhs) : Rs. 6 per km. The more expensive the car, the higher the loss per km.

Total cost of ownership : Rs. 17 per km. The saving to you by using a cab covering 50,000 km over a five year period is Rs. 1 lakh.
Throw in a personal chaffeur and the cost reaches Rs. 23-Rs. 26 per kilometre.

I use this argument against a second car, rather than the first, only because a single car may be seen as vital for, say, a medical emergency and hence not subject to critical economic analysis.
The moral: public transport is not just eco-friendly, it is common economics as well.

Costa Rica: happy and green

I first met Carmen from Costa Rica in UC, Berkeley in 2001. What struck me most about this teenager was just how much she laughed all the time in the month long program she attended alongwith me and about thirty others. In Costa Rica, though, (as I read in a recent BBC report) her laughter and ready sense of humour is hardly an exception.
Costa Rica is a remarkable country. It has no army. Successive governments have poured money into books, not bullets, with the result that the country is almost fully literate.
It is the first developing country to state its aim of being carbon neutral by 2021, in part through the mass planting of trees. In the 1980s, about 20% of its land area was covered by forests. Today, about half of Costa Rica is has rich tree cover. About 90% of its energy supply comes from renewables.

Is being green also being happy ? Much as I would want the correlation established, Costa Rica is the only real example I can find, the correlation established in a report published by the New Economics Foundation, which has combined three variables - what people say about their life satisfaction, their longevity (very high at 78 years ) and their ecological footprint.

Sociologists and some others have extended this argument, making facts that are equally relevant and proven elsewhere (read Malcolm Gladwell's 'Outliers'). They say that, in addition to greenness, longevity can be connected to happiness which in turn is because of strong social networks of friends and familiers and a high level of tolerance of social divisions and opinions. A popular piece of philosophy in Costa Rica says no argument or quarrel should last more than three days.
We have a lot to learn from this beautiful country.