Is Railways’ 2,000cr train food business on track?

DELHI: Pawan Kumar Bansal, the Union minister for Railways, announced just a few days ago a slew of measures to improve the food on trains. But it's clearly an uphill task for the network to reclaim the faith its passengers earlier had on the dishes served to them.

With meals that are just about palatable, limited menu options and a take-it-orleave-it attitude, the Indian Railways has not been known for its catering services for many years now. In fact, stories from old-timers — of iconic dining cars in trains like the Calcutta Mail and Deccan Queen— that served baked beans on toast for breakfast and had an impressive English style full tea service almost sound like fairy tales.

The value of having good food onboard is not lost on the Railways though. The estimated market for catering on trains is worth about Rs 2000 crore annually. Since the past few years, the ministry of railways has been trying desperately to consolidate its share of this lucrative business. But most of its schemes have fallen flat.

"There have been too many ad-hoc experiments," says a former member of the Railway Board. "For instance, the railways catering policy of 2010 took away catering services from IRCTC, a unit that was specially formulated to provide such services. And now, there is the decision to do away with pantry cars and instead set up base kitchens to provide packaged meals. What purpose will it serve unless quality is strictly monitored and enforced? "

Food industry observers agree the move to outsource food services to private players may be, on the face of it, a sound one since catering is not the Railways' core business. But it has not worked because of poor quality control and limited accountability on the part of the contractors. "The expectations of the travelling public with regard to food are much more now," says Vinayak Chatterjee, chairman of Feedback Infrastructure Services who served as a member of the expert group for modernization of Indian Railways. "The Railways urgently needs to put in place rigorously enforced service standards to derive quality from its contractors."

For that, the Railways will first need to clean up its tendering process. "A review of the present tender system for catering is absolutely essential," says celebrity chef Sanjeev Kapoor. "In my opinion it is heavily tilted in favour of people who have been providing these services for years. As a result, very few new people are able to get into the system and there is no competitive environment that can help deliver a memorable food experience."

While the Railways is still struggling to get its act in place, a number of private players have latched onto the demand for good food on trains by setting up web and phone-based delivery services. These deliver hot and fresh meals to passengers right at their seats when their train stops at designated railway stations. "It's a huge opportunity," beams Piyush Kasliwal of Mera Food Choice, a webbased service that caters to around 500-800 passengers daily through its tie-up with restaurants located near stations." Considering there are 14,000 trains with around 1000 passengers daily, our business can only grow further." Remains to be seen who chugs ahead in this rail race.

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/Is-Railways-2000cr-train-food-business-on-track/articleshow/18482543.cms

With test, N. Korea threat looks more real

With a defiant nuclear test, North Korea has shown it poses an increasingly credible threat but some doubt whether even the notoriously bellicose regime would ever use weapons of mass destruction.

North Korea said it had miniaturized a nuclear device -- critical to load a missile's warhead. Experts are assessing whether the test involved uranium, giving Pyongyang a new, easier-to-sustain method alongside its plutonium.

While much remains murky about North Korea's third nuclear test, analysts say North Korea succeeded in detonating a larger device, judging from the magnitude 5.1 seismic impact recorded Tuesday by nearby stations.

Columbia University seismologist Won-Young Kim said that the magnitude translated to a yield of 7.3 kilotons and showed, after lackluster tests in 2006 and 2009, that North Korea's nuclear weapons program "is really working."

Bruce Bennett, a senior defense analyst at the RAND Corporation, also said North Korea made a "pretty significant advance" from previous tests.

The yield would be roughly half that of the US bomb that killed 140,000 people in Hiroshima.

In December, North Korea put into orbit a small satellite on a rocket that fell near the Philippines.

The launch raised the prospect that North Korea, already able to hit US allies South Korea and Japan, could strike the US mainland.

The Institute for Science and International Security, a US think tank, said it would be no surprise if North Korea has miniaturized a nuclear device but doubted Pyongyang was able to deploy a warhead on an intercontinental missile.

But Bennett did not rule out that North Korea had lured a scientist from the former Soviet Union or elsewhere to build warheads.

"And so that raises a much more serious threat, even for the United States, at this stage," he said.

North Korea, famous for its shrill tone, said it carried out the test in self-defense due to US "hostility" and to "demonstrate the might of the Koreans before the US which looks down upon them."

It recently released a video -- incongruously set to Michael Jackson's "We Are The World" -- that appeared to show a missile attack destroying New York.

Still, US policymakers and experts largely agree that the totalitarian regime's main intention is not to start a war but to ensure its own survival and, in the process, extract concessions.

Heather Hurlburt, executive director of the left-leaning National Security Network, said that the latest test showed little new about the North Koreans unless it becomes clear that they switched to uranium.

Hurlburt saw the test in the context of young leader Kim Jong-Un as he navigates his relationship with the powerful military and sets the tone with incoming leaders in key neighbors China and South Korea.

"There is an inordinate amount of really problematic rhetoric and occasional provocations toward South Korea, which are not acceptable. But that's dramatically different from the idea that they would do something as clearly suicidal as attack the United States," she said.

Hurlburt said that the United States needed to show solidarity with its allies and ensure consequences for North Korea such as sanctions, but in the long term also consider positive incentives if Pyongyang changes course.

But Nicholas Eberstadt, a scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, suspected that North Korea wanted to turn the tables and gain the capability to deter US actions, rather than the United States holding the deterrent.

"All of the talk about how this is to get the United States and others to the negotiating table, or about signaling, I think really misunderstands what's going on here," Eberstadt said.

"Outsiders seem not to understand what the North Koreans have been trying, sometimes very vividly as if they were talking to stupid children, to impart to us -- which is that they are preparing to fight and win a limited nuclear war in the Korean peninsula."

North Korea thrust itself onto the agenda hours before President Barack Obama delivered his State of the Union address, in which he proposed further cuts in nuclear weapons around the world.

Lawmakers of the rival Republican Party said that North Korea's test showed problems in Obama's approach. Some Republicans have pushed for the United States to redeploy nuclear weapons to South Korea, which were withdrawn in 1991.
http://ph.news.yahoo.com/test-n-korea-threat-looks-more-real-161611214.html

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Lunar New Year Ushers in the Year of the Snake

Starting today, more than 1.5 billion people around the world will celebrate the Lunar New Year—a time for gathering with family, honoring ancestors, and eating! The holiday is celebrated at the beginning of the year in locations that utilize the lunar calendar, and this year marks the Year of the Snake, one of the 12 animals in the Chinese zodiac.

In China, the Lunar New Year is celebrated as the Chinese New Year, or “Spring Festival,” and is one of the most important Chinese holidays. Instagrammers are sharing photos from the 2013 festivities, including traditions like giving children lucky money in red envelopes, hanging lanterns, setting off fireworks, and performing the iconic dragon and lion dances.

http://blog.instagram.com/post/42714934510/lny

Protest never ends at Indian nuclear plant

KUDANKULAM, India - An indefinite struggle continues against the Kudankulam nuclear power plant in the southern Indian state Tamil Nadu despite a government crackdown on protests.

Idinthakarai, a village in Tirunelveli district of Tamil Nadu, has become the hub of a mass agitation which started on August 16, 2011. Hundreds of men, women and children from a group of 12 villages are leading a campaign to stall operation of the nuclear plant. The public agitation intensified after the disaster at the Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan.

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/OB05Df01.html

Baby-making push in Singapore

The Singapore government is renewing its efforts to have its citizens produce more children, with incentives alongside warnings that, absent more babies, the economic growth the grown-ups want will be hard to achieve. For now, a condo and country club membership offer a more alluring prospect than the cost of a creche and private childcare.

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Southeast_Asia/OB06Ae01.html

Japan boosts defence spending 'in response to China'

The proposed 100bn yen (£710m) boost to Japanese defence spending announced on Tuesday - which in the first instance will go on anti-missile defences and the modernisation of a small number of fighter jets - looks to be a sure sign that the country's new more conservative government is set on bolstering its armed forces in response to an ever-more assertive China.

For the past decade or so Japanese defence spending has actually been gradually falling.

But Japan's strategic outlook has nonetheless been changing in fundamental ways ever since 2010, when the then government's defence plans spelt out that the potential threat from China was looming ever larger on Japan's radar.

Indeed the centre of gravity of the Japanese defence debate has been shifting for some time - pressing up against the constraints imposed by its post-war constitution.

Its armed forces are slowly becoming more expeditionary in nature.

Japanese warships have, for example, been involved in anti-piracy operations off the Horn of Africa.

And last year, for the first time since World War II, Japanese troops were involved in training other countries' armed forces, with Japanese military engineers being involved in Cambodia and East Timor.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-20957487