Karnataka Chief Minister Siddaramaiah yesterday urged British Prime Minister Theresa May to review the new immigration policy and relax visa rules for Indian techies and students pursuing higher studies in Britain.
“I request you to review the new policy and restore the £20,800 salary threshold under the intra-company transfer, as the movement of skilled technology workers should be seen as a trade priority than an immigration issue,” Siddaramaiah told May at a bilateral meeting.
Under the new visa rules the British Home Office recently announced, skilled IT workers applying for visa under the tier-2 intra-company transfer (ICT) category would be required to meet £30,000 salary threshold after November 24.
Noting that temporary placement of skilled people in Britain provided a major economic boost, with negligible impact on net migration, Siddaramaiah said the vibrant IT industry in the state relied on an effective immigration policy in Britain without barriers.
Siddaramaiah also prevailed upon May to grant time-bound visas for Indian software engineers to work on projects in Britain and return to India.
“Our IT professionals and software engineers are not looking for immigration visas but for projects, which are global operationally,” said state Industries Minister R V Deshpande.
Siddaramaiah also told May that 15% of British firms in India were located in Karnataka employing 23,000 people.
The British firms are in ICT, aerospace, health and life science sectors in the state capitalising on the bright talent.
The chief minister also sought investments from British firms in renewable energy and in developing smart cities in the state.
Karnataka has skilled workforce, technical expertise and an industrial ecosystem for aerospace, automobiles, IT, biotech, pharma and life sciences.
The state recently signed an agreement to set up a 400-acre British Health City at Dharwad in the state’s northwest region.
Several Karnataka-based firms, including Infosys, Wipro, TCS, Dynamatic Technologies, Biocon and Microlabs expand their operations and generate hundreds of jobs in Britain.
The first day of May’s visit - her first bilateral trip outside Europe since taking office - was overshadowed by the visa issue, but the prime minister was on a charm offensive as she arrived in India’s tech hub, wearing a gold and green sari as she visited the Someshwara Temple.
She was joined at the temple by Hindu priests who presented her with fruit, a flower garland and a piece to silk to give as an offering to the deity.
Accompanied by a delegation of around three dozen business leaders, May also met with local start-up entrepreneurs and visited a factory run by Dynamatic Technologies, which operates two facilities in Britain.
Earlier in the day, she was met by hundreds of excited flag-wearing children at a local primary school and watched a flypast by the Indian Air Force.
After meeting with her counterpart Narendra Modi on Monday, May said Britain would not “turn its back on the world” after leaving the EU but emphasised that new economic relationships had to benefit all sides.




Britain’s Prime Minister, Theresa May, walks with Hindu priests to offer prayers at the the Someshwara Temple in Bengaluru yesterday.


It’s death by breath in Delhi and we grin and bear it


There’s no smoke without fire. In Delhi we say there’s no smog without fire. The fire and the smog have combined to turn Delhi into a gas chamber. Death by breath is our destiny. It’s like every man, woman and child here is smoking 23 cigarettes a day, say those who keep track of statistics on smoke and smoking.
Farmers in states surrounding Delhi are between crops and the only way they know how to get rid of the stubbles after one harvest is to burn them. Like everything else in the evolutionary cycle, farming too has come a long way from the days when farmers themselves shouldered the ploughs. But the Indian farmer, especially the one in the northern parts of the country, is still doing many things the old fashioned way. 
The slash-and-burn agriculture may be still in vogue in the Amazon basin but the burning is done over several months and there is no major human habitation around to suffocate. The Indian capital and its surrounding districts in neighbouring states, collectively called the National Capital Region (NCR), is altogether a different story. 
The Census Commissioner estimates the NCR population to be in the region of 28mn. (At the turn of the millennium it was 14mn.) Americans are fond of statistics more than anything else and if the NCR were to be in the US, someone could have calculated the total collective air intake of the people of NCR in a day. I am sure it could run into several million cubic feet! Imagine inhaling all that smog.
But then again the statisticians tell us that crop stubble burning contributes less than 20% of the smog factor. (How these people calculate such things is certainly beyond me!) The farmers in Punjab, Haryana and Uttar Pradesh, the three states that share boundaries with Delhi, are difficult customers when it comes to discipline and even if several of them have been issued notices and even fined for their burning desires, stopping them from doing this is almost an impossible task.  
While the acceptable limit of pollutants in the form of suspended particulate matter and such should not be more than 100, parts of Delhi and its neighbourhoods like Gurgaon notched up scores 14 times that number. Apart from the crop stubble burning, most other factors contributing to Delhi’s ill-health are home-made, so to say.
If the farmers lack awareness and wherewithal to eschew the burning, there is no such issue with the citizens of Delhi. But the environmentalists will testify that the recent festival of Diwali, when the citizens indulged in gay abandon bursting crackers that even released deadly poisonous gas into the air, had contributed significantly to the present state of affairs. The residents of the capital know what they are doing is wrong, but still they do it. Add to this the pollution spewed by two thermal plants, diesel fumes of nearly 75,000 trucks that pass through Delhi on a daily basis and the dusty nature of the earth in these parts and you have the full recipe.
It is not as if nobody was aware of the lurking danger. Delhi had been doddering for the past few winters and this year it simply went under. As with everything else in India these days, politics played its crucial destroying part in the fight against air pollution too.
Last winter the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) government of Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal had introduced an odd-even traffic policy for private vehicles with much fanfare. Experts had warned that such a move was not exactly the right prescription for Delhi’s problem and that the positive impact would be negligible vis-à-vis the effort and financial implications.
But Kejriwal found that the policy put him in media spotlight and he wanted as much of it as he can get. Millions of rupees were spent on implementing an ill-conceived and under-prepared policy without any regard to the extreme difficulties that thousands of citizens had to put up with. In the end, the government’s own statistics showed pollution levels had hardly come down during the two-week period in January and April this year when the policy was in action. 
The AAP government had also announced a slew of measures to keep the pollution in check but almost all of these remained on paper. For example, on December 5, 2015, Kejriwal had declared that all government-maintained roads in the capital will be swept clean on a regular basis with the help of vacuum cleaning trucks and that Euro-6 vehicle emission norms will come into effect from 2017, a full two years earlier than envisaged by the federal government.
The government issued tenders for the vacuum cleaning trucks, but no one was interested and the project died a natural death. Deputy Chief Minister Manish Sisodia has now said the project would be revived with renewed vigour but there is no guarantee it will not meet with a similar fate once again.
As for the vehicle emission norms, the AAP’s proposal is yet another head-in-the-cloud announcement as the petroleum companies are not in a position to provide the sort of fuel required for Euro-6 until 2019. This was amply made clear by the federal government but Kejriwal was in no mood to listen.
For three full days, as the smog built up to dangerous levels, Kejriwal was busy agitating against the federal government in the name of India’s military personnel. A retired soldier had consumed poison and died in the wake of delay in receiving his increased pension. When Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi decided to make it an issue against Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Kejriwal did not want to be left behind. So he plunged headlong into a protest and was detained for several hours by Delhi police, an action that created further ado, forgetting that there were more pressing problems like pollution that the citizens were facing.
And now when matters have gone out of control, Kejriwal has resorted to his usual rant against the governments in Punjab, which is ruled by a coalition of Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the Akali Dal, and in Haryana, which is under the BJP. Unfortunately for Kejriwal, he can’t directly blame Modi for the smog, so he is doing the next best thing, blaming his party’s governments. And the ultimate double-speak of all: in poll-bound Punjab the AAP is defending stubble-burning by farmers.
If politics has not helped ease the situation, the judiciary also has tended to take things easy, contributing, albeit inadvertently, to let the situation get out of hand. The country’s top court has agreed to hear a petition by the Environmental Pollution Authority. At the same time, there are hundreds of cases related to pollution and environment pending in several Delhi courts. One particular case concerning an arterial road in the middle class residential colony of Vasant Kunj has been hanging fire for close to five years even as thousands of vehicles drive through every day spreading dust and fumes of unimaginable proportions. 
The situation in Delhi is more than grim. And there is no quick solution to it though the government has closed schools - some 1,800 of them - and is shutting down power plants and stopping construction work. But that has not stopped Indians - or at least those living outside the capital - to indulge in some breath-taking humour. 
One message on my mobile phone showed the caricature of a bus belonging to “Fresh Air Tours & Travels” headed for Delhi with what looked like foreign tourists and a deadpan conductor announcing: “The moment we enter Delhi, oxygen masks will automatically drop down from above your seat…” We all learn to grin and bear it, don’t we?