The flight of industry to India
A. Mayaz, Dhaka
The flight to India was a recent headline in a British daily, outlining a great wave of layoffs facing the British population as payday for their colonial past catches up with them. Two hundred years after British industrialization had pretty much destroyed Indians manufacturing potential by banning the import of cotton products, history is completing a full circle. As a result of British colonialism English grew to become India's primary language.Today it has with great historic irony become one of its major assets. It is English that the Indians have by now mastered, that is bringing about this reversal, as technology allows customer service over the telephone to be remote; in this case as remote as halfway across the world. Large public sector companies like British Railways, HSBC Bank, British Telecom, Standard Chartered, Reuters, to name a few, are moving their customer Call Centers to India. What started as a trickle could develop into and deluge as over 30,000 executive jobs in the financial and insurance sector could move to India in the next five years, according to Evening Standard. The prediction from the US is even bigger. The majority of the 3.3 million jobs they expect to lose by 2015 will come to India. The now famous Toxic Fleet heading across the Atlantic to a small port in the UK called Hartlepool, Teesside, started earlier this summer and is now competing with the Royal Scandal for coverage. What is shocking is that the usual plot of Toxic waste dumping from the industrialized countries into poor underdeveloped ones was changed this time. Shipbreaker Able, UK was unable to resist the temptation of big bucks and signed a deal with the Americans on July 28th for 13 rusty, derelict US Navy ships carrying highly toxic material such as PCB and Asbestos to be dismantled in England. The deal was done in secrecy even though it contravenes International regulations on transporting dangerous goods. It has now emerged that the Americans even offered baksheesh to the British company shape of two new 'oilier' vessels that can be sold on an incentive not available to US companies. Eighty similar ticking bombs would follow if this deal went through smoothly. Thanks to the Environment Agency (EA) and others like the Friends of the Earth, the deal is now on hold as per the High Court's ruling even as the first couple of ships approach English shores. On the other side of the Atlantic five years ago Bill Clinton had ruled it illegal to scrap such ships in the poor countries after some accidents and deaths. As you might have guessed by now, George Bush pushed the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to lift the ban for this contract. How could Blair refuse permission?
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