The alleged ringleader of a massive kidney harvesting ring and believed to have ties to Canada is the subject of an international manhunt after Interpol issued a red notice warrant for him and one of his colleagues late Thursday.
Amit Kumar, 40, and Jeevan Rawat, 36, are the subject of red notices posted on the international policing organization's website.
They are wanted in India on counts of "illegal transplanting of kidneys, cheating and criminal conspiracy."
Police have alleged that Kumar is the ringleader of the kidney harvesting operation, and media reports in India quote police as saying Kumar has family in Canada and could have fled to this country.
Prem Prakash, the senior superintendent of Moradabad police, told The Hindu newspaper that Kumar has Canadian ties.
"It is only speculation that he has fled to Canada," he said. "He has relatives in that country as one of his wives is staying there with their kids."
Canadian officials could not immediately be reached for comment.
Indian police discovered the kidney harvesting ring in Gurgaon, where they allege 500 people had their organs forcibly removed over eight years.
Police allege the kidneys were then used to provide transplants to foreigners.
The Associated Press reported that while some donors willingly sold their kidneys for as much as $2,250, many were lured to operation sites, held at gunpoint and ultimately forced to undergo the procedure.
Mohammed Salim, who was rescued during a police raid, said he was promised paid construction work as well as food and lodging, but found himself held prisoner in a house where his kidney was removed against his will.
"I don't know how I will survive," Salim told The Associated Press from a hospital bed. "I am the only earner in the family and the doctors said I can't do heavy work."
There long have been reports of poor Indians illegally selling kidneys, but the transplant racket in Gurgaon is one of the most extensive to come to light - and the first with an element of so-called medical tourism.
The low cost of medical care in India has made it a popular destination for foreigners in need of everything from tummy tucks to heart surgery.
The ghosts of Gogol, Pushkin, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky will consort with modern day Russian writers for the next nine days at the 18th World Book Fair in New Delhi, rekindling the literary romance between India and Russia.
Over 200 top Russian publishers, authors and literary personalities are flying to New Delhi for the book fair starting Saturday. Russia presides over the show as guest of honour, marking the beginning of the yearlong celebration of Russian culture in India.
Sitting in the Petrovich Club, a stylish restaurant symbolising post-Soviet retro chic, Eduard Uspensky, a celebrity Russian writer and bestselling author of children's books, can barely conceal his excitement.
"I am really looking forward to going to India. Indians and Russians need to know their writers better," said the 70-year-old creator of memorable characters like Uncle Fedya and Crocodile Gena.
"It's a great idea to have Russia as a guest of honour at the book fair. Russian writers are popular in India, but they need to be discovered afresh," added Eugenia Vanina, head of Indian Studies at the Institute of Oriental Studies.
Vanina, a passionate admirer of Indian literature, especially Indian classics, recited a couplet from the Bhagvad Gita in chaste Sanskrit and then translated it into lilting Russian.
"But it should not end there," Vanina told a visiting IANS correspondent.
Yaroslav Kostyuk is also set to dazzle Indian bibliophiles with his miniature books measuring one centimetre to a few inches. "There is a certain artistry to putting together these microbooks. I will be talking about it in New Delhi," he said.
"We plan to take a large collection of Russian books, including reasonably priced translations of classics, to the Delhi book fair," said a manager at Biblio-Globus, the largest bookstore chain in Russia.
The publishing industry in Russia is booming with total revenues estimated to be anything between $4-8 billion.
Anatoly Lukyanenko, the creator of fantasy blockbuster Night Watch series of thrillers that revolutionised post-Soviet cinema, and Mikhail Veller, the bestselling author of page-turners like "The Legends of Nevsky Prospect" and "Everything about Life", will be some of the star attractions at the fair.
Playwright and novelist Yury Polyakov, a hot favourite with Russian television channels, is another contemporary Russian icon who is expected to grace the book fair.
Seminars, readings, quizzes, concerts of Russian folk instruments ensemble, Russian craftsmen, national costumes and painting competitions have been woven into a composite show that is set to rekindle interest in Russian art and literature in India.
Designed as part of the Year of Russia in India, which has a white stork against the background of the flags of the two countries as its logo, the Russia Hall will be a virtual window to Russian culture in all its myriad hues.
Besides books, there will be various sideshows with Russian cosmonauts expected to enthral Indians with their tales of space conquests. Rakesh Sharma, the first Indian cosmonaut to make space travel, will also be present at the fair.
It will be more than just spectacle. There will be a serious dialogue of ideas between Russian writers and contemporary Indian writers like U.R. Ananathamurthy, Githa Hariharan, Urvashi Butalia, Krishna Sobti and Vikram Chandra.
Children, many of whom have read delightful tales of Baba Yaga, the wicked witch, and the Firebird, have a treat in store for them. They can take part in Russian New Year's Tree Party with Father Frost and the Snow Maiden.
Around 1,300 publishers from 23 countries will be taking part in the mega book fair in New Delhi, which attracts millions of book lovers.
The Russian presence at the book fair will be reminiscent of the Soviet era when thousands of Russian books in cheap English and Hindi translations were freely available in India. The idea is to bridge the gap as the two countries are rediscovering each other anew, said Tatiana Shaumian of the School of Oriental Studies.
Indo-Asian News Service
Just 10 days before Gurgaon police conducted raids to expose an international kidney transplant racket, it had given the green signal to the passport office to give the alleged kingpin Amit Kumar a duplicate copy of a "lost" passport.
This and many more tales of official malpractice and negligence have come to surface after a quick investigation by the ministry of external affairs (MEA) found that the passport office has issued Amit Kumar, alias Santosh Rameshwar Raut, four passports with three identities.
The net began to untangle after the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) wrote to the MEA's consular passport and visa division earlier this week to ask them to search for multiple passports issued to the fugitive mastermind of the multimillion-rupee scam, informed sources said.
On Jan 24, police personnel from Haryana and Uttar Pradesh jointly raided two premises owned by Amit Kumar in Gurgaon, based on a complaint of a labourer. Police estimate that the racket spread over seven states has conducted nearly 600 illegal kidney transplants, with most beneficiaries being foreign nationals.
So far, 11 people have been taken into custody. Amit Kumar is suspected to have fled to Canada.
The Indian investigation agency, though not officially involved in the case yet, had reportedly provided five names to MEA to start the search, mainly variations in spelling of Raut.
"We didn't find any trace of the names that CBI sent us. Further, we have issued passports to 10,321 Amit Kumars all over the country," an MEA official told IANS.
The first passport (X733275) was issued on a Bombay address to Santosh Rameshwar Raut for 10 years in 1985. The date of birth was entered as July 26 1953.
After this passport expired, he reapplied for an extension in 1995.
"According to records, Mumbai police had given an adverse report on his verification for the new passport," the official said. This was not surprising because Amit Kumar had already opened his history sheet when he was arrested in 1993 along with 12 other medicos for carrying out illegal kidney transplants in Kaushalya Clinic in northwest Mumbai.
However, despite Mumbai police's objection, the passport office issued him a new passport (U540761), which expired in 2005. It is likely that he used this passport to leave the country, sometime in 1995-96, to resurface in Turkey. He returned to India a few years later after a suitable cooling-off period.
Probably after his return home, Amit Kumar applied again for a fresh passport in 1997. But, this time, he made some changes in his particulars to don a new identity.
He spelled his name in the passport as "Ameet Kumar", with date of birth as July 26, 1958. The passport (A4384509) was issued on Jan 1, 1998 and was valid till Dec 31, 2007.
Then in 1999, Raut applied for a passport in the name of "Amit Kumar", making himself 14 years younger, by giving his date as July 26, 1967. He was granted the passport (Z047537) with a 20-year validity that ends in 2019.
"It is likely that he has been using this passport, as so far, we have unearthed this is his only current passport," said the official.
Interestingly, in September 2007, Amit Kumar applied for a duplicate copy, claiming that the original was lost. Here the involvement of Gurgaon police officers become suspect, since despite Amit Kumar's arrest by Gurgaon police in 2001, the police verification report that reached the passport office in January 2008 gave a no-objection.
"The files show that Gurgaon police's report reached the passport office on Jan 14 giving the go-ahead. The original report copy was taken back by the Gurgaon police once the kidney racket was splashed in the media. But we have its copies in the files," the official told IANS.
Now, the web becomes even more tangled with criss-crossing lines - it now transpires that the "doctor" had also applied for a fresh passport in 2003 as "Amit Purushottam". "But, the computer detected that the name of the father, Purushottam Kumar, and the date of birth was similar to an already existing record," he said.
However, government files show that after a notice was sent to the applicant, the status was changed from "fresh to replacement for lost passport".
"So, he was issued a replacement for an existing passport whose validity likely expired in 2007," the official told IANS.
While these four passports issued to three different names have different particulars, they have two similarities. All of them have the same date and month for the date of birth. "Secondly and most important, they all have the photograph of the same person."
Indo-Asian News Service
Blood flowing in the drain outside D-5 and residents of the posh colony just outside the national capital finding the goings on inside the bungalow suspicious but not bothering enough to report. It could be Noida where 19 children from Nithari village were mutilated, but it is not.
It is Gurgaon, where a multimillion rupee international kidney racket was busted last week, unravelling not just how poor labourers were being incited with money to part with their kidneys but also how an indifferent people helped the unscrupulous thrive - and survive.
The similarities are eerie, starting with the address D-5.
In the satellite town of Noida, Moninder Singh Pandher allegedly used his house D-5 with his domestic help Surinder Koli to lure children, who were sexually abused, killed and whose body parts were found in the drain just behind the house.
In Delhi's other satellite town, Gurgaon, another horrific crime was unfolding. Also in a D-5 house - DLF Phase One's D-5/29 guesthouse and a residential-house-cum-hospital in Sector-23, where Amit Kumar alias Santosh Rameshwar Raut, the kingpin of the kidney scam, and his gang were luring the poor and the desperate with money to extract their kidneys from them.
Here too, people were quoted as saying how blood was flowing in the drain and how there was also a strange smell, and sometimes even pieces of flesh. In both cases - two of the biggest exposés in recent times - the apathy of the people led to the rackets flourishing.
Outside the Sector-23 posh three-storey residence-cum-hospital in Gurgaon, people may have noticed the swabs of cotton, blood-stained clothes, bandages and empty medicine packets/pouch thrown in two adjacent vacant plots.
But they never blew the whistle.
"I have been supplying newspaper at the house for the past three years, but ignored the signs. Once I asked the guard, but he feigned ignorance," said newspaper vendor Swapan Jana.
Wing Commander M.M. Marwah, a Sector 23 resident, said: "It is shocking news for all Gurgaon residents. Police had once raided and sealed the house a few years ago, but we don't know how they (accused) managed to get it reopened.
"We firmly believe that senior police are involved in the scam."
Asked why the Residents Welfare Association (RWA) didn't take any initiative despite suspicion that something was amiss, Marwah said: "We never had any interaction with the owner and at that time the RWA was also not fully operative."
The lethargy in reporting the matter resulted in hundreds of people losing a kidney and a massive scam that thrived for at least three years.
The story was not too different in DLF, where the clients stayed in a guesthouse and where also neighbours knew something was wrong but remained mum.
"I have seen many foreigners - mostly above 40 - staying in the guesthouse. But they never interacted with anyone. The big iron gate of this three-storey mansion was only opened for a few select people and the three servants kept to themselves," Satbir Kumar, a driver in the nearby house, told IANS.
"Before the police raids, we had always thought an international sex racket was flourishing in the house," Kumar said.
Like Nithari, where the accused enjoyed police protection and continued their macabre killings, the kidney scamsters always maintained a healthy relationship with police.
"Saab, we used to often see a gun-toting police official moving in and out of the guesthouse with a healthy man, who is now identified as doctor Amit Kumar. We were scared of reporting what we thought was a sex racket due to the movements of police officials there," a guard, sitting next to the D-5/29 residence, said on condition of anonymity.
"Gurgaon police officials even threatened us not to give any statement to the Moradabad police when they swooped down on the bungalow last week."
The threats and the plain indifference colluded towards a colossal exploitative racket, which threatened lives in Gurgaon. And took them in Noida.
Indo-Asian News Service
At least for a while, the World Wide Web wasn't so worldwide.
Two cables that carry Internet traffic deep under the Mediterranean Sea snapped, disrupting service Thursday across a swath of Asia and the Middle East.
India took one of the biggest hits, and the damage from its slowdowns and outages rippled to some U.S. and European companies that rely on its lucrative outsourcing industry to handle customer service calls and other operations.
"There's definitely been a slowdown," said Anurag Kuthiala, a system engineer at the New Delhi office of Symantec Corp., a security software maker based in California. "We're able to work, but the system is very slow."
While the cause of the damage was not yet known, the scope was wide: Traffic slowed on the Dubai stock exchange, and there was concern that workers who labor for the well-off in the Mideast might not be able to send money home to poor relatives.
Although disruptions to larger U.S. firms were not widespread, the outage raised questions about the vulnerability of the infrastructure of the Internet. One analyst called it a "wake-up call," and another cautioned that no one was immune.
The cables, which lie undersea north of the Egyptian port of Alexandria, were snapped Wednesday just as the working day was ending in India, so the full impact was not apparent until Thursday.
There was speculation a ship's anchor might be to blame. The two cables, named FLAG Europe Asia and SEA-ME-WE 4, are in close proximity.
Egyptian officials said initial attempts to reach the cables were stymied by poor weather. Repairs could take a week once workers arrive at the site, and engineers were scrambling to reroute traffic to satellites and to other cables.
The Egyptian minister of communications and information technology said Internet service in that country had been restored to about 45 percent and would be up to 80 percent by Friday, the state news agency reported.
The snapped cables -- which lie on the sea floor and at some points are no thicker than the average human thumb -- caused problems across an area thousands of miles wide. Bangladesh, Pakistan, Egypt, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait and Bahrain all reported trouble.
But in India, which earns billions of dollars a year from outsourcing, the loss of Internet access was potentially disastrous. The Internet Service Providers' Association of India said the country had lost half its capacity.
TeleGeography, a U.S. research group that tracks submarine cables, said the disruption cut capacity by 75 percent on the route from the Mideast to Europe.
Such large-scale disruptions are rare but not unheard of. East Asia suffered nearly two months of outages and slow service after an earthquake damaged undersea cables near Taiwan in 2006.
In the Mideast, outages caused a slowdown in traffic on Dubai's stock exchange late Wednesday. The exchange was back up by Thursday, but many Middle Eastern businesses were still experiencing difficulties.
There was concern for millions of South Asians who send money home. They do everything from construction to child care for the wealthy and are paid little by local standards -- but their income is often a lifeline for poorer families back in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka.
"The system is a bit slow today, but we have not experienced a total breakdown," said Sudhir Kumar Shetty, who runs Abu Dhabi's UAE Exchange, a money transfer firm.
The major test will come Friday, the first day of the month, when thousands of foreign workers are expected to descend on the company's 53 branches to send money home.
With two of the three cables that pass through the Suez Canal cut, Internet traffic from the Middle East and India intended for Europe was forced to reroute eastward, around most of the globe.
In India, the Internet was sluggish, with some users unable to connect at all and others left frustrated by spotty service.
Analysts said India had built up massive amounts of bandwidth in recent years and would likely recover without major economic losses. Larger companies with sophisticated backups appeared equipped to weather the outages well -- but smaller firms said they could lose business if full Internet access was not quickly restored.
"Telecom and bandwidth are the bedrocks of the IT (information-technology) industry," said Ajit Ranade, the chief economist at the Aditya Birla Group, an international manufacturing and services company. "If something happens to the bedrock, obviously the IT industry will suffer."
Many larger U.S. companies said the effect was minimal, partly because the data routes that head east from Asia, under the Pacific Ocean, were intact.
Citigroup Inc. spokesman Samuel Wang said some of his company's customer-service system was affected, but only minimally. He said the bank relied on backup systems and was "back to business as usual."
Intel Corp. said its Indian operation, which employs about 3,000 people and is focused on research and development, has a system with many safeguards built in.
"When one of the nodes goes down, the network is able to reroute itself," said Rahul Bedi, who heads Intel's South Asia business operations.
Mustafa Alani, an analyst at the Dubai-based Gulf Research Center, said the outage should be a "wake-up call" about the need to better protect vital infrastructure.
"This shows how easy it would be to attack" vital networks, such as the Internet, mobile phones and electronic banking and government services.
Wednesday's damage wasn't terrorism -- but it could have been, he said, adding that "when it comes to great technology, it's not about building it, it's how to protect it."
Credits:AP
Once considered a prominent nephrologist, Santosh Rameshwar Raut alias Amit Kumar, the alleged mastermind behind the kidney transplant racket, became a notorious and hounded medico in 1993. That, however, did not deter the freedom fighter's son from amassing a fortune that runs into billions of rupees and building a formidable network to shield him from the law.
It is perhaps that same network that has prevented the police from nabbing Amit, as details of the multi-million-rupee kidney racket come to light. While Gurgaon, the posh Haryana town on the outskirts of the national capital, is where he was running the illegal transplant 'hospital' from, his connections saw him reach out to clients in many countries.
A graduate of ayurvedic medicine from Akola, near Nagpur in Maharashtra, Amit, now in his early 50s, was first arrested in 1993 with 12 other medicos, including some from government hospitals, in a Mumbai police raid on Kaushalya Clinic in Khar, northwest Mumbai.
During his association with Kaushalya clinic, the police reckon, Amit carried out over 300 kidney transplants that roughly worked out to Rs.450 million ($12 million.)
That was his first brush with the law.
The following year, in August 1994, the Mumbai Police's Crime Branch raided the clinic again following complaints of his involvement in a thriving kidney transplant racket, said a former member of the raiding party, Suhel Buddha.
The raids at that time followed complaints by three poor labourers from Hyderabad that Raut and his team had cheated them. He had promised to pay them Rs.60,000 each for a kidney, but short-changed them.
Police found him living in the posh Gulmohar area at Juhu - part of Mumbai's Glamour Crescent that stretches from Bandra to Andheri.
"He secured bail and was back to his practice. Barely two months later, his premises were again raided by the police in a separate case," recalls Buddha, who left the police force some years back and is now executive vice-president, STAR TV.
Following this raid, alarm bells began to ring. One patient, who had undergone a kidney transplant, did not get the obligatory post-operative care and died in the clinic, Buddha added.
According to another police officer, Manohar Dhanawade, who was part of the special squad that raided him in 1993, Raut came to Mumbai in the mid-1970s and ran a private consultation clinic in Khar before joining the Kaushalya Clinic.
"It was here that Amit made his impact with scores of foreign patients in need of kidneys and who were ever so willing to offer vast amounts to save their lives," Dhanawade told IANS.
Amit - who was assisted in the racket by his brothers, Jeewan and Ganesh, who were not medically qualified but probably acted as agents to procure gullible kidney donors and needy patients - was once again released on bail.
At the first available opportunity, Amit jumped bail and disappeared - only to surface in Turkey around 1995-96. He returned to India a couple of years later, and Buddha suspects the reasons were the same.
The lure of money was just irresistible.
Despite the meticulous efforts to book Amit, there were many in the police department who allegedly defended him in return for a hefty compensation, officials admit privately.
Nabbing him was difficult as he moved around and operated under false identities and procured fake passports.
Amit proved elusive even the National Capital Region - Delhi and its environs - where he ran his unlawful activities.
Gurgaon Police Commissioner Mahender Lal said Delhi Police had arrested Amit in 2001 after a case of illegal kidney transplant was registered against him at the Nizammudin police station.
A year later, a similar case was registered against him and an associate in Guntur district of Andhra Pradesh.
A few years down the line, Amit shifted his base to Gurgaon, a rising IT hub on the outskirts of the Indian capital. Amit along with his brother Jeewan and associates, Upendra Aggarwal and Saraj Kumar, formed a well-oiled ring by including drivers and his servants who worked as agents.
"It was also not clear what methods he adopted to change his identity regularly since that would require an official gazette notification," said one police officer.
In the early 1990s, while a donor got a measly Rs.50,000-100,000 (depending on his physical condition) for a kidney, the middlemen made a whopping Rs.350,000, the operating doctor and his team netted a clean million rupees that included the post-operative costs.
Amit's father Rameshwar Raut, now 93 years old, has disowned his son after he brought disgrace to the family.
"I had a misunderstanding with him and we have parted ways. Everyone in my village knows about my integrity. I am a freedom fighter and everybody knows this. He has made a mistake and put me to shame. One should never lie come what may. He was a big liar," Raut said in Mumbai.
Even though a nationwide manhunt has been launched for Amit, police suspect the worst. Some are certain that he has bribed his way out of India through Nepal or Bangaldesh before proceeding to Canada.
According to unconfirmed reports, it is believed that Raut and his brothers are worth approximately Rs.10 billion, but nobody knows where the trio could have stashed such huge funds.
In the latest exposé, a complaint by a labourer, Vidya Prakash Jatav of Purva Mahavir Village in Meerut, blew the lid off Amit's activities.
Mumbai police officials aver that Amit's racket was extremely well organised, secretive and tight-knit involving touts ranging from doctors in prestigious hospitals to cabbies and travel agents.
It is this cloak of secrecy and deception for nearly 15 years that has allowed Amit to thrive. He may have made good his escape this time around but the complete story behind the organised illegal trade in human organs still remains a mystery.
Indo-Asian News Service
Over 1,090 Indian children under five years of age die every day battling pneumonia, less talked about but fatal disease that is common across the country.
Nineteen percent of the total under-five mortality in India is due to pneumonia, according to the latest 'State of the World's Children Report' by United Nations Children fund (Unicef). The illness claims the lives of 399,000 children in India every year.
"Pneumonia is a silent killer. It kills more children than malaria, AIDS, measles and injuries together do," said Marzio Babille, head of children's health at Unicef India.
The report has revealed that every year 2.1 million children in India do not survive to celebrate their fifth birthday.
Of all the children who die, 19 percent die due to pneumonia, 17 percent due to diarrhoea, eight percent due to malaria, four percent due to measles and three percent each due to AIDS and injuries.
"The country has done a good job in many areas, but a lot of focus is required on the pneumonia front," Babille said, adding: "It's a forgotten killer of children".
Pneumonia is an inflammatory illness of the lungs. It can result from a variety of causes, including infection due to bacteria, viruses, fungi or parasites. It can also be caused by chemical or physical injury to the lungs.
The disease affects the lungs' capacity to absorb oxygen from air. Symptoms include cough, chest pain, fever and difficulty in breathing.
Another global report published by WHO has said that more than half of all pneumonia cases worldwide occur in the Asia-Pacific region. Of the 133 million childhood pneumonia cases around the world, India accounted for 44 million and China accounted for 18 million.
According to health ministry officials, India has not devised a potent strategy to tackle this health menace.
"The country needs to have a nationwide drive against pneumonia. The drive should be modelled after AIDS, polio and TB immunisation drives," an official told IANS requesting anonymity.
He said pneumonia vaccine circulation in the country is less than 10 percent as against over 70 percent in South Korea and over 40 percent in Hong Kong.
He, however, said that the National Rural Health Mission has taken note of the situation and efforts are on "to boost the vaccination programme".
The Asian Strategic Alliance for Pneumococcal Disease Prevention (ASAP), a conglomerate of experts from 20 countries, recently met in Seoul and expressed their concern over the problem.
Said Nitin Shah, ASAP member from India: "Nearly 50 percent of these under-five pneumonia deaths are caused by pneumococcal pneumonia. Creating awareness of pneumococcal disease would be a great initiative."
Pneumococcal pneumonia causes lung and ear infections and could also lead to meningitis - a brain fever that could be fatal.
In its report, Unicef said: "Since a large proportion of severe pneumonia cases in children of the developing countries are bacterial in origin, they can be effectively treated using inexpensive antibodies at home."
Indo-Asian News Service
Eight Indian American high school students, five of them girls, have been named among 40 finalists for the Intel Science Talent Search 2008 contest.
Avanthi Raghavan, Shravani Mikkilineni, Hamsa Sridhar, Shivani Sud, Isha Jain, Vinay Venkatesh Ramasesh, Ashok Chandran and Ayon Sen get at least $5,000 in scholarships and a laptop. They will next compete for 10 scholarships - including the top award of $100,000 - in March in Washington, DC.
The eight talented students were selected Wednesday from over 1,600 individual entrants for the nationwide competition, often called the "junior Nobel prize", administered annually by the Washington based Society for Science & the Public.
"A high proportion of Indian American finalists speaks well for the community, and we welcome their participation," Rick Bates, spokesperson for the organisers, told IANS.
The project Ashok Chandran, 17, of Nesconset, New York, submitted for the competition, studied the link between smoking and breast cancer. He tested the hypothesis that nicotine would alter mammary cell gene expression, creating a cellular environment akin to that of a breast cancer cell.
Isha Himani Jain, 17, of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, has identified a cellular mechanism underlying bone growth spurts in zebra fish, similar to the way children's bones grow. She had also won, in October, a $100,000 scholarship topping the Siemens Competition in Math, Science and Technology for the same study, which has been published in a journal.
Avanthi Raghavan, 17, of Orlando, Florida, submitted a project studying the mechanisms of protein transport critical to the survival and virulence of the malaria parasite, which accounts for over two million deaths every year.
The project of Shivani Sud, 17, of Durham, North Carolina, focuses on identifying stage II colon cancer patients at high risk of recurrence and the best therapeutic agents for treating their tumours.
Hamsa Sridhar, 18, of Kings Park, New York, developed a low cost optical tweezers system that uses laser light to trap and suspend microscopic particles.
Ayon Sen, 17, of Austin, Texas, investigated the natural processes by which the ocean transports heat. He developed a MATLAB software interface for deep-water ocean current velocity data and integrated it with surface water velocity data from satellite altimeters.
Vinay Venkatesh Ramasesh, 18, of Fort Worth, Texas, submitted a chemistry project involving algorithms to accurately determine molecular thermodynamic properties of large molecules, such as proteins.
Shravani Mikkilineni, 17, of Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, studied the computation of continued fraction expansions of the square roots of positive integers.
The competition, now in its 67th year, has been sponsored by the Intel Corporation for the past 10 years.
Winners of the competition have gone on to receive over 100 of the world's most coveted science and math honours, including six Nobel prizes.
Indo-Asian News Service
This is where he walked his last steps before collapsing with a peaceful "Hey Ram" on his lips, forgiving even in death his assassin. Sixty years after that day "when the light went out of our lives", Mahatma Gandhi's spirit forces introspection at the sprawling white bungalow in central Delhi now named Gandhi Smriti.
The lane where the house stands is now called Tees January Marg after that Jan 30, 1948 when the world's greatest apostle of peace was felled by a bullet fired by Nathuram Godse. The house is 5, Tees January Marg. A mere address that is so much more for the nation.
And as India observes Wednesday as Martyrdom Day, children at Gandhi Smriti, or Gandhi Memories, look inwards to see what Mahatma Gandhi really meant to them. Even amidst the buzz of getting ready for the function that will be attended by President Pratibha Patil and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.
"Do I follow Gandhi's thoughts? Yes and no! I don't use abusive words against anybody," says Sheetal Panwar, a Class 8 student. "But, I do lie," admits her classmate Sajal Jain, shamefacedly, "and I do fight, but not with punches."
Hauling their bags, the two students of St Paul's in south Delhi school are looking at the small canopy marking the exact area where Gandhi fell at 5.17 p.m. on Jan 30, 1948.
The two are among the many schoolchildren in the complex, where marigold garlands hang from fences, strings of little bulbs line paths and awnings of white cloth billow in the chilly breeze.
As they walk in the weak sunlight, children in a dozen different school uniforms sit in clusters, sharing their food or talking animatedly. Meanwhile, workers run from one end to another, looking busy, sometimes armed with a can of paint or hauling a cart, laden with wooden boards or potted plants.
About 1,500 school students are rehearsing Gandhi's favourite hymns for the prayer meeting to mark the 60th anniversary of the assassination.
For others, this is where Gandhi moves out of textbooks to become a real figure, who lived - and made a difference.
Inside the two-storey whitewashed building, 54-year-old Hannah Thomsen, a Danish tourist, moves from one wall panel to another, reading quotes from Gandhi.
"I first thought, is this a school?" laughs Thomsen. She and her husband have come to take a look at the place because "like Hans Christian Andersen is identified with Denmark, for us, India means Gandhi".
On the covered walkway beside the extensive lawns, Tia Shuyler and her family read the story of the 1942 Quit India movement.
Her father, William Shuyler, points to his daughter as the "prime motivator" for getting them to Gandhi Smriti on the last day of their India sojourn.
"I had studied about Gandhi in my school, but it was really in context of his spirituality, where he is grouped along with Martin Luther King Junior and Mother Teresa," says Tia, 23, a student of political science from the US. "I was more interested in learning about his political views."
During her first visit to this country, Tia has often been asking herself what the Mahatma would think of modern India. "In fact, when I saw the traffic here, I asked my mother, what would Gandhi think about it."
She feels it is time for another Gandhi. "I am very glad that he was in India, but we need somebody like him right now in America."
As news came in that terrible day, India's first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru said over All India Radio: "Friends and comrades, the light has gone out of our lives and there is darkness everywhere..."
He then went on to say in an unforgettable, moving speech: "The light has gone out, I said, and yet I was wrong. For the light that shone in this country was no ordinary light. The light that has illumined this country for these many years will illumine this country for many more years later, that light will still be seen in this country and the world will see it and it will give solace to innumerable hearts."
The warmth of that light still shines, as is evident from just a walk through Gandhi Smriti.
Indo-Asian News Service
The first information report (FIR) of Mahatma Gandhi's assassination, which has been lying at a police station in the Indian capital for 60 years, has got a new lease of life.
The FIR copy has been translated into Hindi and stored in computer records to maintain its longevity even though the original written in Urdu is now laminated and lies in the dusty racks of the Tuglak Road police station.
Senior Delhi Police official Rajan Bhagat said FIR records concerning Mahatma Gandhi's assassination had been preserved in their software records to maintain longevity.
"Although we have a laminated copy of an FIR, we still cannot ignore the fact that these papers have to be preserved for the future," Bhagat told IANS.
Gandhi was assassinated on Jan 30, 1948, at Birla House here. He was shot at point blank range by Nathuram Godse, a political activist from the Hindu Mahasabha.
The case was reported at the Tughlak Road police station by one Nand Lal Mehta, a resident of Connaught Place.
For a long time, the government had felt the need to secure the FIR document of Gandhi's assassination. Interestingly, the central government has requested Delhi Police to hand over the original FIR to the National Archives.
"Gandhi was someone whom the world knows and admires. He is a figure of historical importance and a world leader. Therefore, we are keen to keep the original, " said a senior official of the culture ministry.
Raghunath Meena, deputy director (records) at the National Archives, said the organisation was yet to receive the original FIR relating to Gandhi's assassination.
Indo-Asian News Service
Sixty years after he was assassinated, Gandhi lives. Not just in textbooks and speeches but also through his autobiography "The Story of My Experiments with Truth" which continues to sell an incredible 200,000 copies a year.
As the world Wednesday marks his 60th death anniversary and remembers the man who lived and died for his mantra of nonviolence, hundreds of thousands of people are still buying his autobiography to try and get an understanding of the man who went from becoming Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi to simply the Mahatma - or the great soul.
"Love for Gandhi and his ideology has not faded even 60 years after his death. Every year we sell about 200,000 copies of his autobiography," said Jitendra Desai, managing trustee of Navajivan Trust, copyright owner of all his works.
"His autobiography was a bestseller, is a bestseller and will be a bestseller in the coming years," Desai told IANS.
Interestingly, Kerala accounts for nearly half of all the copies sold in India.
"Nearly 100,000 copies are sold only in Kerala every year, followed by Tamil Nadu. The credit goes to the high literacy rate as compared to north Indian states like Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh and Bihar," added Desai.
The first edition of Gandhi's autobiography was rolled out by the trust in 1927 in Gujarati. It is now available in Assamese, Bengali, English, Hindi, Oriya, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Kannada, Urdu and Punjabi.
Indian language versions of the 452-page work are offered at Rs.30. The hardbound version costs Rs.120.
The book is widely sold across the globe as well with various publishing houses possessing copyrights. China and Russia are among the exceptions, Desai said.
The royalty from global sales goes to the Navajivan Trust according to Gandhi's wishes.
"His family has not at all profited from the royalty. If they publish something regarding Gandhi they give the money to the trust," Desai said, adding that the Navajivan Trust gives 35 percent of royalty money to the Hari Sevak Sangh, which looks after the welfare of the underprivileged.
Given the enormous popularity of Gandhi's autobiography, it is evident that the youth are following Gandhism more than perhaps their elders did, say experts.
"The youth is finding Gandhi's principles more relevant today to combat modern day problems like violence. For instance, thousands of young boys and girls are working with me in spreading the message of peace," said Nirmala Deshpande, a noted Gandhian and a social activist.
Vinod Tyagi, a reader in Delhi University and a former member of the Gandhi Bhawan Committee, agreed: "Apart from his autobiography being a bestseller, the overwhelming response from students to the newly introduced course - Reading Gandhi - says it all."
"The truth is that we hesitate in utilising Bapu's ideologies practically, but the youth do not," added Anil Dutta Mishra, director of the National Gandhi Museum.
He said Bollywood had contributed in a big way in revitalising people's interest in Gandhi.
"Director (Richard) Attenborough's 'Gandhi' increased his global visibility, while films like "Maine Gandhi Ko Nahin Mara", "Lage Raho Munnabhai" and "Gandhi My Father" keep the interest of the audience alive."
Indo-Asian News Service
Sixty years after his death a portion of Gandhiji's ashes, stashed away by Madalsa and Shriman Narayan, the daughter and son-in-law of Jamnalal Bajaj, will be immersed at Chowpati Beach in Mumbai.
Although I will be thousands of miles away in the United States the memories of 60 years ago will be refreshed and the day will be as poignant as Jan 30, 1948.
In 1969 when the world celebrated Gandhiji's 100th birth anniversary many of us who had lived in Sewagram Ashram, Wardha, with Gandhiji were invited for a reunion. The person who organised this event was Shriman Narayanji who was then the governor of Gujarat. He shared with us a story of his experience with Gandhiji which emphasises an aspect of Gandhiji's philosophy that is all but forgotten today.
Sometime in the early 1930s when Shrimanji received his doctorate from the London School of Economics he returned to India full of enthusiasm to change and rebuild the economy of India according to western standards. When he told his parents how impatient he was to begin work his father said: "You cannot begin to do anything until you receive Gandhiji's blessings. So, if you are in a hurry to begin working you had better go as quickly as possible to Sewagram Ashram and get Bapu's blessings."
This will be a piece of cake, Shrimanji thought, and still bubbling with enthusiasm Shrimanji arrived in Sewagram and relentlessly poured his enthusiasm into Bapu's lap and said: "Now give me your blessings so I can get to work."
"Not so fast," Gandhiji said. "If you want my blessings you will have to earn them. Tomorrow morning you will join the group and clean the ashram toilets."
These were not the modern water closets. The ashram toilets were primitive with buckets to collect urine and faeces. The buckets had to be carried into the fields and emptied into holes, washed and replaced for use. It was the meanest kind of work that is responsible for untouchability in India. Gandhiji wanted to teach us the dignity of labour. Shrimanji was aghast but did not argue. He had no enthusiasm for this kind of work but to satisfy Gandhiji's whim he had to do it. After the morning ordeal and a refreshing bath he rushed back to Gandhiji and said: "I've done what you asked me to do. Now give me your blessings."
"Not yet," said Gandhiji. "You will get my blessings only when you satisfy me that you are capable of cleaning toilets with the same enthusiasm as changing the economy of the country."
The moral of the story was that we must be willing to do any kind of work that is necessary and break the stranglehold of the master-servant relationship that persists in India even to this day. It is the feeling that those of us who are rich and educated are superior and those who are poor and uneducated are inferior that breeds arrogance in us, instead of the humility that Gandhiji sought to instil.
I am often asked in India and in the United States if Gandhiji's philosophy can be relevant today. My answer is that a philosophy that is based on Respect, Understanding, Appreciation and Compassion has to be relevant at all times. If we conclude that nonviolence is not relevant today we are saying in effect that the positive attitudes of Respect, Understanding, Appreciation and Compassion are not relevant. If that be so then we cannot claim to be a civilised society.
Over the years many have concluded that nonviolence is a "negative" philosophy because we insert a hyphen in the word and make it the opposite of violence. In reality it is the other way around. What we forget is that to practice violence we have to be arrogant, hateful, angry and capable of dehumanising people so that we can hurt and even kill them. These and more are negative emotions and attitudes that dominate our psyche to such an extent that we have now become victims of a Culture of Violence that controls every aspect of human life.
On the other hand, to practice nonviolence one has to be dominated by positive emotions and attitudes like love, understanding, respect, compassion and so on. It is only when we learn to respect people as human beings that we will be able to truly practice nonviolence. We cannot and should not be selective in whom we respect, it has to be unconditional and all pervasive.
For centuries human beings have been working to create peace and we fail more often than we succeed. The reason is that peace is not the absence of physical violence. No country can claim that they are at peace because they are not at war with anyone. Human nature has learned to practice violence in many ways - both physical and passive, or non-physical. It is the non-physical violence that is more insidious because we commit it knowingly and unknowingly and it leads to anger in the victim and the anger results in physical violence. Gandhiji's talisman was: "Ask yourself if the action you contemplate will hurt or harm someone."
The Culture of Violence has resulted in the erosion of relationships across the board. Everyone has become selfish and self-centred. If we have no relationships based on mutual respect, understanding and appreciation there will be no harmony. And, if there is no harmony in a home, office, neighbourhood, society or a nation there cannot be peace. When Gandhiji said: Peace begins with you he did not mean the selfish peace that we seek through 'sadhana' or meditation but the peace that we need to bring about through love and respect for all living creatures - whatever their economic, social or political standing in life.
Can we become the change we wish to see?
(Arun Gandhi is a grandson of Mahatma Gandhi and the founder of the MK Gandhi Institute for Nonviolence, New York. He can be contacted at arun@totalnonviolence.org)
Indo-Asian News Service
Marigold garlands hang from fences, strings of little bulbs line paths, awnings of white cloth billow in the chilly breeze. The leader exhorts the singers to raise their pitch an octave. In the run-up to the 60th anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi's martyrdom, it is busy at 5, Tees January Marg, where he was assassinated.
Hauling their bags, four students of St Paul's school walk companionably on the green lawns, looking at the small canopy marking the exact area where Gandhi fell at 5.17 p.m. on Jan 30, 1948.
"Do I follow Gandhi's thoughts? Yes and no. I don't use abusive words against anybody," says Sheetal Panwar, a Class 8 student. "But, I do lie," admits her classmate Sajal Jain, shamefacedly, "and I do fight, but not with punches."
As they walk in the weak sunlight, children in a dozen different school uniforms sit in clusters, sharing their food or talking animatedly. Meanwhile, workers run from one end to another, looking busy, sometimes armed with a can of paint or hauling a cart, laden with wooden boards or potted plants.
Sajal, Sheetal and their friends, along with over 1,500 school students, are in Gandhi Smriti to rehearse for the prayer meeting to mark the 60th anniversary of the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi Wednesday.
Besides schoolchildren rendering bhajans, violin maestro L. Subramaniam and his wife Kavita Krishnamurti will perform at the solemn function that will be attended by President Pratibha Patil and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh among others.
With the wind blowing hard, the rehearsal is moved indoors to a pavilion, where over a thousand children huddle together to practise the chorus.
Their voices rise and fall together in some of Gandhi's favourite hymns. "I did not know you could sing so well... with such feeling," says the director of the show, encouragingly. "Now, why don't I just raise the pitch by an octave," he suggests, drawing groans of protest.
Inside the two-storey whitewashed building, 54-year-old Hannah Thomsen, a Danish tourist, moves from one wall panel to another, reading quotes from Gandhi.
"I first thought, is this a school?" laughs Thomsen. She and her husband have come to take a look at the place because "like Hans Christian Andersen is identified with Denmark, for us, India means Gandhi".
On the covered walkway beside the extensive lawns, Tia Shuyler and her family read the story of the 1942 Quit India movement.
Her father, William Shuyler, points to his daughter as the "prime motivator" for getting them to Gandhi Smriti on the last day of their India sojourn.
"I had studied about Gandhi in my school, but it was really in context of his spirituality, where he is grouped along with Martin Luther King Junior and Mother Teresa," says Tia, 23, a student of political science from the US. "I was more interested in learning about his political views."
During her first visit to this country, Tia has often been asking herself what the Mahatma would think of modern India. "In fact, when I saw the traffic here, I asked my mother, what would Gandhi think about it."
She feels it is time for another Gandhi. "I am very glad that he was in India, but we need somebody like him right now in America."
Indo-Asian News Service