Loomnie

… is the title of a new book by Lucy Norris of the Department of Anthropology, University College, London.

The blurb:

In today’s globally connected marketplace, a wedding sari in rural north India may become a woman’s blouse or cushion cover in a Western boutique. Lucy Norris’s anthropological study of the recycling of clothes in Delhi follows garments as they are gifted, worn, handed on, discarded, recycled, and sold once more. Gifts of clothing are used to make and break relationships within middle-class households, but a growing surplus of unwanted clothing now contributes to a global glut of textile waste. When old clothing is, for instance, bartered for new kitchen utensils, it enters a vast waste commodity system in which it may be resold to the poor or remade into new textiles and exported. Norris traces these local and transnational flows through homes and markets as she tells the stories of the people who work in the largely hidden world of fabric recycling.

Click for more information on the book.

The country realises that it is now a migration destination.

H/T Bunmi

This picture was sent to me by Kiran.

(click to enlarge)

I just read this on the World Bank CommGap blog:

In India, petty corruption is pervasive – people often face situations where they are asked to pay bribes for public services that should be provided free. 5th Pillar distributes zero rupee notes in the hopes that ordinary Indians can use these notes as a means to protest demands for bribes by public officials.

It works this way: whenever some public servant demands a bribe before rendering service, they are given one of those notes as a form of protest. The origin of the idea?

According to Anand [president of 5th Pillar], the idea was first conceived by an Indian physics professor at the University of Maryland, who, in his travels around India, realized how widespread bribery was and wanted to do something about it. He came up with the idea of printing zero-denomination notes and handing them out to officials whenever he was asked for kickbacks as a way to show his resistance. Anand took this idea further: to print them en masse, widely publicize them, and give them out to the Indian people. He thought these notes would be a way to get people to show their disapproval of public service delivery dependent on bribes. The notes did just that. The first batch of 25,000 notes were met with such demand that 5th Pillar has ended up distributing one million zero-rupee notes to date since it began this initiative. Along the way, the organization has collected many stories from people using them to successfully resist engaging in bribery.

As a loud form of protest, it has apparently worked. But as soon as the novelty of the idea wears off, and the shock of being presented with such a note is, well, no longer a shock, I suppose things will return to business as usual.

Read the whole post here.