Superstorm Sandy cripples US East Coast, death toll rises to 40

New York: Millions of people were left reeling in the aftermath of the whipping winds and heavy rains of the massive storm Sandy on Tuesday as New York City and many parts of the eastern United States struggled with epic flooding and extensive power outages. The storm killed at least 40 people, including at least 18 in New York City, and insurance companies started to tally billions of dollars in losses.


Sandy, which crashed ashore with hurricane-force winds on Monday near the New Jersey gambling resort of Atlantic City, was the biggest storm to hit the country in generations. It swamped parts of New York's subway system and lower Manhattan's Wall Street district, closing financial markets for a second day. Businesses and homes along New Jersey's shore were wrecked and communities were submerged under floodwater across a large area.
More than 8 million homes and businesses in several states were without electricity as trees toppled by Sandy's fierce winds took down power lines. Across the region, crews began the monumental task of getting power back on. The storm reached as far inland as Ohio and caused thousands of flight cancellations. Cellphone outages also were widespread.
Parts of West Virginia were buried under 3 feet (1 meter) of drifting snow from the storm. Some East Coast cities like Washington, Philadelphia and Boston were spared the worst effects from Sandy and appeared ready to return to normal by Wednesday. But New York City, large parts of New Jersey and some other areas will need at least several days to get back on their feet.
"The devastation is unthinkable," New Jersey Governor Chris Christie said after seeing pictures of the New Jersey shore. The storm interrupted the US presidential campaign just a week before the November 6 election. The damage it caused raised questions about whether polling places in some hard-hit communities would be ready to open by next Tuesday.
Seeking to show he was staying on top of a storm situation that affected a densely populated region, the White House said President Barack Obama planned to tour damaged areas of New Jersey on Wednesday accompanied by Christie. The New Jersey governor, who has been a strong supporter of Republican presidential challenger Mitt Romney, praised Obama and the federal response to the storm. "New Jersey, New York in particular have been pounded by this storm. Connecticut has taken a big hit," Obama said during a visit to Red Cross headquarters in Washington.
Obama issued federal emergency decrees for New York and New Jersey, declaring that "major disasters" existed in both states. Power outages darkened large parts of downtown Manhattan. A large blaze destroyed more than 80 homes in New York City's borough of Queens, where flooding hampered firefighting efforts.
"To describe it as looking like pictures we've seen of the end of World War Two is not overstating it. The area was completely leveled. Chimneys and foundations were all that was left of many of these homes," New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg said after touring the area. Neighborhoods along the East and Hudson rivers in Manhattan were underwater, as were low-lying streets in Battery Park near Ground Zero, where the World Trade Center once stood. Lower Manhattan could be without power for four days.
One disaster modeling company said on Tuesday that Sandy may have caused up to $15 billion in insured losses. That would make it the third-costliest hurricane on record, behind hurricanes Katrina, which laid waste to New Orleans and the Gulf Coast in 2005, and Andrew, which devastated parts of Florida in 1992. That figure did not take into account residential flood losses or flooding of tunnels and subways, meaning ultimate insurance claims could rise higher still.
Campaigning on hold
Obama and Romney put campaigning on hold for a second day. The campaign truce was likely to be short-lived, as Romney planned to hit the trail again in Florida on Wednesday. Obama appeared likely to resume campaigning on Thursday for a final five-day sprint to Election Day. Obama faces political danger if the government fails to respond well, as was the case with predecessor George W Bush's botched handling of Katrina.
Obama has a chance to show not only that his administration has learned the lessons of Katrina but that he can take charge and lead during a crisis. All along the East Coast, residents and business owners found scenes of destruction. "There are boats in the street five blocks from the ocean," said evacuee Peter Sandomeno, one of the owners of the Broadway Court Motel in Point Pleasant Beach, New Jersey. "That's the worst storm I've ever seen, and I've been there for 11 years."
Sandy, which was especially imposing because of its wide-ranging winds, brought a record storm surge of almost 14 feet (4.2 meters) to downtown Manhattan, well above the previous record of 10 feet (3 meters) during Hurricane Donna in 1960, the National Weather Service said. Water poured into the subway tunnels under New York City. Bloomberg said the subway system, which normally carries over 5 million people each weekday, would likely be closed for four or five days.
"Hitting at high tide, the strongest surge and the strongest winds all hit at the worst possible time," said Jeffrey Tongue, a meteorologist for the weather service in Brookhaven, New York. Hurricane-force winds as high as 90 miles per hour (145 km per hour) were recorded, he said. "Hopefully it's a once-in-a-lifetime storm," Tongue said.
The US Department of Energy said more than 8 million homes and businesses in several states were without electricity due to the storm. "This storm is not yet over," Obama told reporters at the Red Cross as he warned of the dangers of continued flooding, downed power lines and high winds. Obama, possibly mindful that disgruntled storm victims could mean problems for his re-election bid, vowed to push hard for power to be restored.
The flooding hampered efforts to fight a massive fire that destroyed more than 80 homes in Breezy Point, a private beach community on the Rockaway barrier island in the New York City borough of Queens. New York University's Tisch hospital was forced to evacuate more than 200 patients, among them babies on respirators in the neonatal intensive care unit, when the backup generator failed.
Besides the deaths in New York City, others were reported in New York state, Massachusetts, Maryland, Connecticut, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Virginia and West Virginia. Toronto police also recorded one death - a woman hit by flying debris. Sandy killed 69 people in the Caribbean last week. US government offices in Washington were due to reopen on Wednesday after two days. Schools were shut up and down the East Coast but were due to reopen on Wednesday in many places.
US stock markets were closed on Tuesday but exchanges are expected to reopen on Wednesday. The storm weakened as it plowed slowly west across southern Pennsylvania, its remnants situated between Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, with maximum winds down to 45 mph (72 kph), the National Hurricane Center said.
As Sandy converged with a cold weather system, blizzard warnings were in effect for West Virginia, western Maryland, eastern Tennessee, eastern Kentucky and western North Carolina. Garrett County in Maryland had as much as 20 inches of heavy, icy snow that knocked out power to almost three-quarters of the area's 23,000 customers. "It's the biggest (October snowstorm) that I remember and I've been here 25 years," said area resident Richard Hill, who planned to huddle by his wood stove.
source by : IBN live.com

Gujarat poll vote projection: Modi lords over the state, Cong too far behind

New Delhi: For more than a decade, politics in Gujarat has been synonymous with Narendra Modi. With the Assembly elections due in a few weeks, the scenario seems to no different. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) strongman, who has ruled Gujarat with an iron hand since October 2001, has swatted all opposition with such ruthlessness that today there is no virtually no leader in the state capable of challenging him.


Modi has steamrolled the opposition, which is primarily the Congress, to win two back-to-back Assembly elections and 2012 looks no different. According to a pre-poll survey conducted by the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS) for CNN-IBN, Modi-led BJP is once again set to decimate the Congress and romp home with a thumping majority. The survey interviewed 3658 voters in Gujarat and found that almost 50 per cent of them were in favour of the BJP, while the Congress was way behind with just 36 per cent.

In the 2007 Assembly election, the BJP won 117 seats in the 182-member Assembly with a vote share of 49 per cent, which is likely to see a one percentage point gain in the 2012 poll. The Congress, on the other hand, has slipped two percentage points and will get only 36 per cent of the votes compared to 38 in the 2007 elections. The Gujarat Parivartan Party of Keshubhai Patel, a former BJP leader and Gujarat chief minister, is set to get a paltry three per cent of votes. Keshubhai Patel's party did not exist during the 2007 election. Other smaller parties will grab the remaining 11 per cent, down from 13 per cent five years ago.

In a two-cornered contest, a difference of 14 per cent in vote shares means that the race has been decided even before it started. And in Gujarat it is Modi all the way despite the conviction and sentencing of one of his former ministers in a 2002 riots case and the arrest of another in a fake encounter case.

The survey reveals that even though his close aides are feeling the heat of the law-enforcing agencies and the judiciary, Modi has consolidated his position as the Numero Uno in the state while the Congress has slipped, failing to counter an increasingly aggressive Gujarat chief minister.

Modi is helped in his mission to score a hat-trick of victories by the strong pro-incumbency sentiment, which is even greater than it was five years ago. The CSDS survey shows that 52 per cent of the voters are in favour of giving the BJP another chance to form the government, up from 48 during the 2007 poll. Modi's personal popularity is also intact with nearly half the respondents - 49 per cent - backing him for the Chief Minister's post. None of his rivals is even in the double digits when it comes to the chief ministership stakes.

In fact, the one big message from the survey is that Modi's popularity is at an all-time high. In 2002 when Modi helped BJP back to power in the backdrop of state-wide riots, only 37 per cent of the voters wanted him as the chief minister. But since then - barring 2004, when his popularity fell to 31 per cent - he has consolidated his position; in 2012, there is no leader who comes anywhere close to him.

A major factor behind Modi's rising graph is that the state under his stewardship has made rapid economic progress, and all the economic indicators are healthy. A majority of the voters credit the BJP for Gujarat's development, and even most non-BJP and non-Congress voters believe that Modi's rule has been development-oriented. The only blemish in his track record is that the condition of farmers and employment generation has been rated negatively by those surveyed.

Meanwhile, in a double whammy for the Congress, most Gujarat voters blame the Congress-led UPA government and not Modi’s regime for rising prices. On the issue of corruption, both the UPA and the state government are viewed as being guilty, but here too the Centre is the bigger villain. The satisfaction with Modi's performance as the chief minister is also higher than the satisfaction with Manmohan Singh's performance as the prime minister.

Sure, Modi fails to score higher than Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar, Madhya Pradesh's Shivraj Singh Chauhan, Raman Singh of Chhattisgarh and Odisha's Naveen Patnaik when it comes to the state governments' performance satisfaction. But still, his following is so huge that even though 43 per cent of the voters give a thumbs down to his style of speaking and campaigning, claiming that these are not consistent with Gujarat's culture, a huge majority of 67 per cent believe that the state’s honour and prestige has increased because of him.

The 2002 riots, which are still used by his opponents to target Modi, too, are no longer a major issue for most of the electorate. The majority among both Hindus and Muslims want to forget the 2002 riots. The desire to see riots' guilty punished is much less today than it was 10 years ago, both among Hindus and Muslims. While in 2002, 85 per cent of the Hindus wanted those found guilty of 2002 riots punished, the number has plummeted to dropped in 2012. What is more striking is that only 51 per cent of the Muslims now want the riot-guilty to be punished, down from 95 in 2002.

But one disturbing finding of the survey is that both Hindus and Muslims are not as optimistic about communal peace as they were five years ago, with a smaller 55 per cent believing that 2002 type riots can never happen again, compared to 69 per cent Hindus and 80 per cent Muslims in 2007. A majority of those surveyed also want Modi to apologise for the 2002 riots.

A look at the regional patterns shows that the BJP is well ahead of the Congress in all the regions of the state. In Saurashtra and Kutch (Kutch, Surendranagar, Rajkot, Jamnagar, Porbandar, Amreli, Junagadh and Bhavnagar districts) which account for 54 seats, the party is ahead of the Congress while Keshubhai's party is influential in only some seats.

North Gujarat (53 seats in the districts of Banaskantha, Patan, Mehsana, Sabarkantha, Gandhinagar and Ahmedabad) and South Gujarat (35 seats in the districts of Narmada, Bharuch, Surat, Dangs, Navsari and Valsad) are firmly in BJP's grasp and the Congress is able to challenge the party only in Central Gujarat that has 40 seats in Kheda, Ananad, Panchmahals, Dahod and Vadodara districts. But in Central Gujarat, too, the BJP is ahead of the Congress.

So while the results of the two-phase election will be known only on December 20, the Modi engine is powering ahead the BJP even as the Congress desperately tries to play catch up.

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India needs to dig deep to keep lights on

By Jo Winterbottom and Malini Menon

DHANBAD | Mon Oct 22, 2012 9:13am IST

(Reuters) - The slick mechanised operations at the Piparwar open-cast mine in eastern India, an ugly gash in the landscape bigger than New York's Central Park, could lead the casual observer to conclude that the country's coal industry is on a roll.

Piparwar, run by the state miner, produces some of the lowest-cost coal in India, just what's needed for a country struggling to get enough of the "black diamond" to fix a power crisis that recently plunged half a billion people into darkness and chokes economic growth.
With oil and gas output disappointing and hydropower at full throttle, Asia's third-largest economy still relies on coal for most of its vast energy needs. About 75 percent of India's coal demand is met by domestic production and, according to government plans, that won't change over the next five years.

The hitch is that India is running out of cheap open-cast coal from existing mines like Piparwar. Unless it starts investing now in underground mines, within a decade it will face a huge leap in energy import costs that could derail industrial projects, crimp economic growth and drive up inflation.

"With the ballooning demand for coal in India, open-cast mining has become the easy option, albeit at a great cost to the environment and society," said a senior executive at a power company, speaking on condition of anonymity.

"This easy option is likely to be exhausted within the next 10-12 years when the shallow seams amenable to open-cast mining dwindle."

For graphic on availability of indigenous coal: click link.reuters.com/hev43t

For graphic on India's coal mining projects link.reuters.com/pev43t

For video on power cuts hit millions: click r.reuters.com/caw43t

WRONG DIRECTION

Coal India Limited, the state-run miner that produces 80 percent of the country's coal, recognises the need to raise the amount that underground mining contributes to total output from just one tonne out of every 10.

But the higher costs and lower output of deep mining - Coal India's chairman has said its existing underground mines are loss-making - are pushing it in the wrong direction.

Its plans for new mines target a contribution from underground of only about 7 percent.

That would be disastrous, argues D.C. Panigrahi, director of the Indian School of Mines in Dhanbad, a mining town in the heart of Jharkhand, the country's most productive coal state.

He says that unless Coal India cuts its dependence on open cast mining by around 5 percentage points per year, overall output will start to stagnate around the end of this decade.

If India is going to meet its output targets of 750 million tonnes by 2016/17 - a rise of nearly 40 percent from the current financial year - it needs to act soon. It takes on average six years from planning to production for an underground mine.

India used to mine most of its coal underground, just as the world's biggest producer, China, currently does for its huge output of more than 3.5 billion tonnes a year. But it was not getting enough out of the ground fast enough to meet demand.

"When everything was underground, the growth rate was less than 2 percent per annum. We needed more than 5-6 percent growth and that could only come from open cast," said Partha Bhattacharyya, a former chairman and managing director of Coal India.

Open-cast mining strips away topsoil, or "overburden", to expose the seams underneath. It is much more economical than underground mining, where up to 70 percent of the coal must be left to act as support for the tunnels and galleries.

But while India has ample coal reserves - at about 286 billion tonnes, they are the world's fifth-largest, according to BP - not all of that is accessible by simply removing topsoil.

LAND PROTESTS

The other problem with open cast is the need to buy vast tracts of land, far more than underground mines, whose shafts, winding gear and offices can be set up on as little as 2.5 acres (1 hectare).

"Getting the land is becoming more and more difficult in a democratic country like India," said Panigrahi.

Protests highlighting land rights and acquisition issues have stalled industrial projects across India, including the country's biggest foreign investment - a $12 billion steel plant in Odisha planned by South Korea's POSCO that has been on the drawing board since 2005.

In Dhadu village, about 75 miles (120 km) from Jharkhand's capital, Ranchi, Electrosteel Castings Ltd has managed to buy just 435 acres of about 2,800 acres it needs to set up an open-cast mine and steel plant.

It now faces further uncertainty, with the government threatening to take back the concession amid the fallout from a wider corruption scandal over the awarding of coal blocks.

"We've given away our land happily to the company. But now, it has been four years. Nothing has come up and we are getting old. Our youngsters are unemployed," said 70-year old Asim Mia, who along with his two brothers gave up 1.5 acres of land each for the North Dhadu coal block.

Jharkhand is one of India's poorest states, despite its rich natural resources, and locals worry that unrest and unemployment plays into the hands of Maoist 'Naxalite' activists, whose attacks on coal facilities and railroads have heightened tension in the area over land rights.

The government is planning a revamp of the country's colonial-era land acquisition laws that India Inc. worries could force it to pay four times the market price for land in rural areas. That could hit the cost of mining projects and slow the pace of fresh production coming online.

"SNAKES AND LADDERS"

About half an hour's drive from Ranchi, the criss-cross of railway lines and electricity pylons that map the state's rapid industrialisation gives way to protected forest land and the bright green shoots of this year's rice crop.

Some 30 percent of Jharkhand's land is designated forest, among the highest in India, posing yet another difficulty for companies in search of land for open-cast mines.

For every acre of forest purchased for industrial plans an acre of undeveloped land elsewhere, plus money for afforestation, need to be handed to the forest department, just one part of the complex process of securing state and federal clearance to develop forest land that one state government official described as "a game of snakes and ladders".

The average cost of open-cast coal for Coal India is about $13 a tonne, former CIL chairman Bhattacharyya says. For underground mines, the average cost is about $75 per tonne, according to analysts Wood Mackenzie, which makes many of them loss-making at current contract and market prices.

"Everything comes down to economics," said Wood Mackenzie's coal market analyst, Prakash Sharma.

"Companies try to look at the open-cast method first but when land acquisition becomes difficult, there's a compromise on mining costs and you opt for underground mining."

The economics will push India's power bill higher, and with it inflation: it is just a question of how much and when.

Already, surging demand for electricity generation means that Coal India's open auction prices are more than double those of its long-term deals and it has delayed sealing those commitments at lower prices.

Expensive imports partly fill the gap in demand and their contribution is set to grow, but buying from abroad currently costs up to 50 percent more.

In the most optimistic scenario envisaged by the government's Planning Commission, imports could be 182 million tonnes in 2016/17 from about 90 million tonnes in 2011/12.

Even under this best-case, Coal India would probably struggle to supply more than half of the extra demand created by new power generation capacity the government says is needed.

The power company executive believes time is running out.

"A severe power crisis is imminent if we do not shift our focus to underground coal mining," he said.

(Editing by Alex Richardson)

India in depth: Too soon for central bank rewards

India in depth: Too soon for central bank rewards

(The author is a Reuters Breakingviews columnist. The opinions expressed are his own)

By Andy Mukherjee

(Reuters Breakingviews) - It's too soon for the Reserve Bank of India to reward the government. Senior officials in New Delhi are hoping for a more benevolent monetary policy. Money markets, too, are increasingly expecting lower future interest rates. But by reducing rates at the next meeting on October 30, the RBI in Mumbai would be rewarding the government a little too soon for what have undoubtedly been some of the more politically courageous decisions it has taken in the last eight years.
If it cut rates, the RBI would also be taking highly avoidable risks. For one, premature monetary easing could make the inflation challenge worse. Consumer prices are still rising too quickly for comfort - about 10 percent year-on-year for prices paid by industrial workers. Evidence suggests they may not recede quickly.

Inflation in India is proving to be terribly stubborn. While producer prices are falling in China, Indian manufacturers passed on more than half the increase in their input costs to consumers in September, Nomura notes. That's a jump from the second quarter, when firms could only pass two-fifths of the cost escalation.

One source of this improvement in manufacturers' pricing power may be rural wages, which are galloping at the rate of 19 percent a year. That's partly due to very liberal "support" prices paid by the government to farmers for their crops.

But rural wages may also be rising because of a government job guarantee that pushes up the inflation-adjusted wage rate by 5.3 percent, according to researchers at Oxford and Sussex universities. The guarantee is inherently inflationary. And the monetary authority has no choice except to counter the price pressures by keeping interest rates high.

Nor can the central bank ignore the yawning trade gap. With last quarter's trade deficit ballooning to 11 percent of GDP on an annualized basis, India is effectively relying on money-printing in the West to finance its imports. Right now, this does not pose a problem: As long as ultra-loose monetary policy in advanced nations keeps prompting investors to scour for yield in emerging market securities and other risky assets, India will be safe. But a sudden bout of risk aversion will make excess demand in the country hard to finance.

If investors flee emerging markets and the rupee depreciates in response, the significant challenge Indian companies are facing this year in repaying their foreign-currency debt would become a bigger problem. The investment recovery the government is betting on would be further delayed.

Before pleading with the RBI to reduce interest rates, the government needs to do more. For instance, last month's decision to raise diesel prices by 14 percent and limit each household's access to subsidized cooking gas was a bold step. But food subsidies are running out of control, exceeding the fiscal year's target in just six months, according to a Business Standard report last week.

The government's strategy over the past couple of months has been to focus on so-called big bang reforms that have a powerful signalling value, such as the opening up of retail, aviation and insurance industries to greater foreign participation. It also shelved the draconian changes to the tax code that were introduced in the February budget.

But New Delhi has to go beyond managing sentiment. More substantive changes are needed, for instance in the way the government operates. Expectations are high from the proposed National Investment Board, which will be chaired by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. If the board is able to cut bureaucratic red tape and approves even half of the $25 billion in proposals that are stuck for want of environmental and other clearances, the economy will benefit from the multiplier effects of big-ticket investments.

Subsidies on food, fuel and fertilizers pose a more vexing problem. But the government can at least aim to eliminate leakage, corruption and waste by converting handouts to direct cash transfers. Small-scale pilot projects that seek to do this are already under way. They need to be ramped up.

Even if the RBI bows to pressure and cuts interest rates by a quarter percentage point now, that will be just a token move and won't help the economy much. Goldman Sachs economist Tushar Poddar's estimate of how the Indian monetary authority responds to output, expected inflation and the fiscal stance - yes, the central bank is very mindful of the budget deficit - shows there is little scope for aggressive rate cuts.

Curbing New Delhi's free-spending ways would create more room for the central bank to reduce the overnight policy interest rate from its current level of 8 percent. For now, though, there are few signs of fiscal belt-tightening; in the five months through August, the federal government's total expenditure grew 20 percent from a year earlier, faster than the 15 percent budgetary target for this year.

The RBI gave the government an undeserved present when it unexpectedly reduced its interest rate by half a percentage point in April - the first cut in almost three years, and one that didn't do its credibility to fight inflation much good. It's too early for the government to expect another reward.

(Editing by Peter Thal Larsen and Katrina Hamlin)

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