Geography Directions: Census of 37% of the World

From our Geography Directions site reviewing Wiley-Blackwell’s Geography Compass review journal covering the entire discipline.  Keep up with cutting edge academic geography.  These articles may be useful for introducing students to the discipline or may be appropriate for upper division Geography classes.

Learning that China has recently completed its 2010 census of 1.3 million people and that India is in the midst of preparation for its February 2011 census of 1.2 billion people, I wanted to find out more about how one would go about counting what is in total, 37% of the world’s population. Keen to learn how this may be done, I read Len Cook’s article “The quality and qualities of population statistics, and the place of the census” in the journal “Area”. The article describes how population counts are the key to official statistical systems and the yardstick for many commercial and research surveys and analyses. In addition, the article describes how statistical offices around the world face an extensive range of challenges when counting their population, particularly because population flows have become much freer and the structure of families continue to evolve. Considering these issues, the article reviews how population counts have and will evolve over time in the UK and other countries.

In China , the decennial population Census was held between November 1 – 10, using an army of 6 million enumerators across the country. However, China has had special difficulties to overcome . Firstly, because of millions of illegal migrants, the so called “floating population”, and secondly because of the unauthorised births which were previously concealed due to the government’s stringent population policy. Some light should also be shed on the countrys’ skewed sex ratio at birth due to the preference for male offspring. There are officially about 120 male births to every 100 female instead of the global norm of 105. The official estimate of the sex ratio of the country’s 0- to-4 age group in 2008 was 123 males per 100 females.

The results of the census counts in China and India will be released at almost the same time in 2011 with India releasing their figures at the end of March and China at the end of April. Depending on the results a world population of 7 billion may be official by early next year.

To view the original article please visit the Geography Directions Blog.

Concept Caching: Social Contrasts in Mumbai, India

From our Concept Caching image cache that hopes to promote student spatial awareness by relating specific features on the Earth’s surface with their visual character and GPS coordinates. Through the site photographs and GPS coordinates demonstrate core concepts in geography.  Images are “cached” for viewing by core concept and by region.  Images are certainly useful for introducing visual content to students in all Geography classes.

The first successes for the microfinance industry came from India with the Grameen Bank.  However, as discussed in the post Geography Directions: NGOs and Microfinance, the industry has come a long way since those days, in particular through its integration into the neo-liberal framework of development that entangles NGOs, governments, donor agencies and on the ground expectations.  This image provides the visual companion for the areas most commonly served by microfinance NGOs in India: cities.  Indian cities, like Mumbai, are some of the most unequal places in the world.  At its heart, microfinance is intended to service the financially excluded and to help alleviate poverty.  However, as the post describes, the clustered geography of these microfinance NGOs into cities has likely contributed to several trends that may no longer best serve these intentions.

Geography Directions: NGOs and microfinance

From our Geography Directions site reviewing Wiley-Blackwell’s Geography Compass review journal covering the entire discipline.  Keep up with cutting edge academic geography.  These articles may be useful for introducing students to the discipline or may be appropriate for upper division Geography classes.

On 29 July 2010 The New York Times reported that one of the world’s largest microfinance organizations, India’s SKS Microfinance, was preparing to launch on the Indian stock market. Whilst not the first, SKS was one of the biggest, and it caused controversy because a US-based non-profit microfinance group invested in SKS, Unitus, had said it would close down its microfinance activities after the launch. Muhammad Yunus, winner of the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize jointly with the microfinance pioneer he co-founded (Grameen Bank), criticized the move as encouraging profit maximisation. The launch ultimately raised around $350m. Besides launching on the stock market, Indian microfinance institutions are also pursuing securitization, with micro-loans being pooled into marketable securities.

A 2010 article by Bipasha Baruah looks at the role of NGOs in microfinance. Baruah acknowledges the success of NGO microfinance in extending credit to financially excluded groups, particularly women, but points to problems of sustainability, with many smaller microfinance NGOs dependent on donor funding and government subsidies, partly because many provide social services such as rights awareness and literacy classes alongside microcredit. Particularly for these less financially focussed NGOs, attempts to provide links for the poor into the formal banking system can serve poverty reduction well, since this offers a much broader range of financial instruments, including savings accounts, which NGOs cannot legally provide. Baruah highlights doubts in the literature about the long-term impact of microcredit on income levels of the poor, whilst noting benefits in consumption smoothing and women’s control over household resources. Studies also show concentration of NGOs in urban and better-developed areas, with less activity in very rural and very poor areas, following a certain market logic which in some cases leads to competition between microfinance NGOs in relatively well-served areas, at the expense of covering areas with greater financial exclusion. Contradictions between financial sustainability and reaching the poorest may also appear, with NGOs in some cases “moving up the poverty scale” to focus on those more able to borrow and repay.

Beyond this, Baruah argues that “the use of microfinance carries implicit neo-liberal assumptions about how development should occur.” She highlights literature showing that borrowers often lack economies of scale, complementary inputs, key skills, or other requirements for succeeding in an often highly competitive marketplace with limited microcredit funds. Uncoordinated access to microcredit can often lead to an overexpansion of particular local industries, limiting the poverty alleviation benefits and making microcredit, in one commentator’s words, “a glorified form of subsistence.” Some NGOs have recognised these problems and attempted to support borrowers with various aspects of enterprise development, including information and training. Some NGOs also organise women to pool their labour or act as unions to demand increased wages and better working conditions, and Baruah suggests pressing for government employment programs to support the poorest, who are often unwilling to seek credit because they lack the other resources needed to use such credit effectively. Baruah concludes that overall microfinance “is firmly embedded within a neo-liberal framework that seeks to increase access to existing financial resources without really challenging the entrenched status quo of unequal power relations between different groups of people,” and that this is precisely why microfinance has enjoyed such great support from governments, NGOs and donor agencies.

By Robin de la Motte

To view the original article please visit the Geography Directions Blog.

Concept Caching: Informal Activities–India

From our Concept Caching image cache that hopes to promote student spatial awareness by relating specific features on the Earth’s surface with their visual character and GPS coordinates. Through the site photographs and GPS coordinates demonstrate core concepts in geography.  Images are “cached” for viewing by core concept and by region.  Images are certainly useful for introducing visual content to students in all Geography classes.

Currently, about 70 percent of India's GDP derives from informal economic activities. Those individuals, who indulge in marginal livlihoods and survival activities outside government regulations, comprise 65-75 percent of workers in urban areas and make up the bulk of the urban poor. Nearly two-thirds of these people are women. Most people who work in the informal sector are low-skilled, rural or small town migrants or those who, for any number of reasons, have fallen out of the formal sector. Barbering and ear cleaning are ancient professions, handed down from father to son through generations. The introduction of cotton buds or Q-tips has hurt the ear cleaning trade. The Federal Government is using barbers to disseminate information about HIV and AIDS because they believe that men are more likely to discuss intimate details of their sex-life with their hair cutter as opposed to family members or colleagues. The barbers keep a supply of governmment-issued condoms on hand. BA Weightman

In thinking about the possible connections that can be made to the post Geography Directions: Haptic Technologies and the Geographies of Touch, this image provides a bit of humor and perspective about haptic scales, technology, and the geographies of touch.  From the American viewpoint, where personal space is prized, the close contact shown in this image is a little astounding.  It exhibits a cultural difference in the way that bodies are managed and interact through touch.  Geographers that study the space of the body are in the vanguard of geographic research.

Concept Caching: European Imprints on the Streets of Mumbai, India

From our Concept Caching image cache that hopes to promote student spatial awareness by relating specific features on the Earth’s surface with their visual character and GPS coordinates. Through the site photographs and GPS coordinates demonstrate core concepts in geography.  Images are “cached” for viewing by core concept and by region.  Images are certainly useful for introducing visual content to students in all Geography classes.

This image submitted by Harm de Blij offers a visual complement to the descriptions of Indian economic, political, and socio-cultural landscapes that have been shaped by the period of British rule.  As discussed in the post Geography Directions: The British Impact on Indian Geography the impact of the British Raj was tremendous and persists in many of the urban landscapes of modern India.

Geography Directions: The British Impact on Indian Geography

From our Geography Directions site reviewing Wiley-Blackwell’s Geography Compass review journal covering the entire discipline.  Keep up with cutting edge academic geography.  These articles may be useful for introducing students to the discipline or may be appropriate for upper division Geography classes.

This past week, the Prime Minister completed an official visit to India, leading a large entourage of government, business, sport, academic, artistic, and cultural leaders. The visit to India was intended to strengthen long-standing bilateral ties between the two nations. By opening a new chapter in an intimate, if often tense relationship, Mr Cameron stressed the economic and cultural benefits that India and the United Kingdom share – a common language, government organization, social priorities, and investment in key industries. In an editorial for The Hindu, Mr Cameron summarized his position by stating that, “I know that Britain cannot rely on sentiment and shared history for a place in India’s future. Your country has the whole world beating a path to its door. But I believe Britain should be India’s partner of choice in the years ahead”.

Indeed, India of the twenty-first century is prime real-estate for global investment. With well over one billion constituents, a burgeoning economy, and a fledgling middle class, India is poised to become a global player. Why might Britain enjoy an advantage over other global powers in competing for Indian business? The answer may lie in geography.

From a human geographical perspective, the contemporary Indian Diaspora in Britain is tremendously important, providing lucrative commercial, social and creative models that have permanently altered the British cultural landscape. This immigration influx was reactionary in nature, a post-colonial response to eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth century British rule of the Indian subcontinent. The geographical impact of the British Raj was immense. In a century, India was transformed from a vast agricultural region, separated by dozens of feuding kingdoms, into a prized economic asset – ‘the Jewel of the British Crown’. As early as the 1770s the East India Company commenced cartographic surveys of India, Pakistan, and Ceylon (Sri Lanka). Reorganized under the Ordnance Survey Office, the Survey of India created a distinctive urban infrastructure, facilitated the development of the world’s most extensive railway network, and led to more efficient agricultural production and output. The developments of the India Survey were closely followed by the British public; an 1898 issue of The Geographical Journal complained that the annual issue of the Survey of India Report (12[6]: 606-607) had been inexplicably delayed, angering investors and observers alike. In 2007 The Geographical Journal reviewed an excellent treatise on the subject. Entitled Colonial and Post-Colonial Geographies of India (Saraswati Raju, M Satish Kumar and Stuart Corbridge, eds.), this text successfully analysed changing Indian geography through Western and Indian eyes. Owing to the Royal Geographical Society’s long association with Indian exploration and cartography, the Society’s journals provide ample discourse of Indian-British narratives, including Miles Ogborn’s “Writing Travels,” and Alison Blunt’s “Imperial Geographies of Home”.

By Benjamin Sacks

To view the original article please visit the Geography Directions Blog.