NRIs Corner

It was a grassroot campaign by Indian-Americans, who literally flooded their lawmakers with emails, letters and faxes, that saw the Indo-US civil nuclear agreement pass through the Congress, says a new book on the unprecedented coming together of the community for the deal.

Leading Indian-American entrepreneur and activist Swadesh Chatterjee in his book ‘Building Bridges: How Indian-Americans Brought the United States and India Closer Together’, provides a first-hand account of the involvement of the influential community in getting the deal through the US Congress.

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon has appointed Abhijit Guha, a retired Indian Army Lieutenant General, to a high-level panel to assess UN peace operations.

Announcing the formation of the 14-member panel on Friday, Ban Ki-Moon said it would make a comprehensive assessment of UN peace operations. It would also assess the needs of the future and its recommendations would be sent to next year’s UN General Assembly (UNGA) session. Its mandate, he said, will include the changing nature of conflict, evolving mandates and capabilities for peacekeeping operations and performance.

Four Indian students representing two teams have won the eighth edition of the Tata Crucible Campus Quiz competition held here.

Rohan Naidu from Hyderbad and Shivam Bhardwaj from Patna, comprising the first team, won the first price of SGD 7,000 for National University of Singapore (NUS) yesterday.

Karan Prasad from Bangalore and Sainyam Gautam of Delhi, representing the second team from NUS, took the second prize of SGD 3,000 in the final round of the quiz.

More than 500 students attended the quiz final which saw eight teams from Singapore universities competing.

A Sikh rights group has criticised India’s decision to give Rs 5 lakh each to the next of kin of the 1984 anti-Sikh riots victims, saying compensation cannot be a substitute to the prosecution of the perpetrators.

Government has decided to give Rs 5 lakh each to the next of kin of 3,325 victims of the anti-Sikh riots triggered after assassination of the then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi.

The Sikhs for Justice (SFJ) group said the grant of the compensation cannot be a substitute to the “prosecution of 1984 genocide perpetrators”.

Two Indian-Americans have been arrested by the FBI on charges of siphoning off more than $5.8 million by using fraudulent debit card transactions.

Alpeshkumar Patel, 30, and Vijaykumar Patel, 39, were arrested for stealing millions of dollars by using reloadable debit cards from September 2013 to March 2014, police said.

The duo, not related to each other, is expected to be produced before a Newark court and faces an imprisonment up to 20 years and a fine of more than $250,000, if found guilty.

An Indian subsidiary in the US has received USD 21 million bank guarantee loan for manufacturing high-voltage towers at a Texas plant to be exported to Canada.

The Ex-Im Bank announced its guarantee of USD 21 million revolving loan facility yesterday to Jyoti Americas LLC for the export to Canada of lattice transmission towers to be constructed by US workers in Conroe, Texas, according to a media report.

NRI industrialist Lord Swraj Paul has called for granting Indian passports to expatriates who invest a certain minimum amount in industries in India and help ignite the engine of economic growth.

“We now have a one-party government (in India), and a prime minister who appears determined to make Indian expatriates feel welcome in their homeland. Encouraging expatriate involvement could help ignite the engine of economic growth,” Lord Paul said while speaking at the 14th London Global Convention on Corporate Governance and Sustainability.

A 40-year-old Indian-origin doctor, jailed for raping two patients during medical examinations in Australia, has been found not guilty of sexually assaulting a third woman.

Manu Maimbilly Gopal was sentenced to four years in jail on October 3 last year after a Supreme Court jury found him guilty of sexually assaulting two women after telling them they needed internal examinations during separate visits to the Sunbury Medical Centre here.

India has overwhelmingly won its re-election to the UN body on economic and social issues, garnering the highest number of votes in the Asia-Pacific group.

The 193-member UN General Assembly yesterday elected 18 members of the UN Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) to serve a three-year term beginning January 1, 2015.

India was competing in the Asia-Pacific group, in which election was held for three seats.

British Indian businessman Shrien Dewani reportedly got teary-eyed as he spend his fourth wedding anniversary in the Western Cape High Court standing trial for his wife Anni’s murder.

According to News 24, CCTV footage of him and his wife Anni presented in the court on Wednesday appeared to show two different sides to their relationship.

The first footage showed Dewani and Anni Hindocha entering a Strand mall to dine at a restaurant. The body language of the newlyweds gave the impression that all was not well between the pair.

NRI industrialist Lord Swraj Paul has called for granting Indian passports to expatriates who invest a certain minimum amount in industries in India and help ignite the engine of economic growth.

“We now have a one-party government (in India), and a prime minister who appears determined to make Indian expatriates feel welcome in their homeland. Encouraging expatriate involvement could help ignite the engine of economic growth,” Lord Paul said while speaking at the 14th London Global Convention on Corporate Governance and Sustainability.

An Indian-American physical therapist assistant has been sentenced to over four years in prison and ordered to pay USD 1.9 million in restitution for his role in a USD 14.9 million health insurance fraud scheme.

Jigar Patel, 31, a physical therapist assistant of Michigan was sentenced yesterday to 50 months in prison by US District Judge Terrence Berg for his role in billing federal health insurance programmes for home health services that were never provided.

A newly built Sikh Gurdwara has become target of anti-islamic slurs after it was vandalised and painted with obscene messages in Australia’s Perth city.

The multi-million dollar Gurdwara in Bennett Springs was painted with the words like “Aussie pride” and “go home”, ABC reported.

Security cameras of the Gurdwara were also damaged.

“We are from India, particularly from Punjab, we have got no relation with any other religion. We are Sikhs and our religion is totally different from any other religion,” said the pastor Satjit Singh.

Most Indian-Americans vote for the Democratic Party and contest elections on that platform. Bucking this trend, an Indian-American is contesting for the Illinois House of Representatives as a Republican.

Krishna Bansal is contesting from the 84th district in a state in which the Democrats hold sway. Illinois is President Barack Obama’s home state.

India is home to the second largest proportion of high-earning expatriates in the world after China and ahead of countries like Switzerland, Russia and Hong Kong, says a HSBC survey.

According to the seventh Expat Explorer survey commissioned by HSBC Expat, 18 per cent of expats working in India draw a salary of USD 250,000 or more every year while in China 29 per cent expats earn a similar annual salary.

The proportion of expats drawing similar salaries is 17 per cent in Switzerland and 16 per cent each in Russia and Hong Kong.

A group of investors in a Mauritius- based realty fund of ICICI Venture have sought damages totalling $103 million for losses suffered by them, but the asset manager termed the allegations as “totally baseless and malicious”.

ICICI Venture also countered the claim of damages, saying the aggrieved investors accounted for a small percentage of those invested in the fund and they had refused to take an ‘cash exit option’ although returns were never guaranteed.

An Indian-origin taxi driver has been jailed in Britain for a sex attack on a young woman passenger while she was drinking.

Nottingham Crown Court heard that Dhanraj Singh, 24, and a father of two, is a Bhangra dancer and singer. He was due to fly to Mumbai to film a music video after topping the Asian music charts, the Nottingham Post reported Tuesday.

An Indian-origin family of four has been found dead at a home in Britain’s Bradford city in a suspected murder and suicide incident.

The deceased were Jatindra Lad, 49, his wife Daksha, 44, and their two children, Trisha, 19, and Nisha, 16. Jatindra was found hanging, Daily Mail reported

West Yorkshire Police are guarding the property in Bradford’s Clayton area, and say they are not looking for anyone else in connection with the deaths.

Officers of the West Yorkshire Police were called in to the house Monday evening and they found the bodies.

An Indian, allegedly tortured and held hostage in Bahrain by five Bangladeshis for a paltry BHD800 ransom (about $2,000), was rescued with the help of his co-worker, an Indonesian woman, in an undercover police operation.

The five Bangladeshi carpenters are now standing trial in connection with last year’s abduction of the 28-year-old Indian in Isa Town, about eight kilometre from capital Manama.

The Indian was a cold store worker with the 30-year-old woman, who was a housemaid. She first alerted their boss to the fact that he was being held hostage, Gulf Daily News reported.

Indian-American community in the US has launched a campaign demanding a postage stamp on Diwali festival by next year, saying it is the only major festival on which US Postal Service has not issued a stamp.

Indiaspora, an organisation of influential Indian-Americans, has launched a website, urging the community members to write to their lawmakers and the USPS Citizens’ Stamp Advisory Committee to issue a Diwali Stamp during the festival in November 2015.

An Dubai-based Indian-origin doctor has been conferred the prestigious Mahatma Gandhi Pravasi Samman for his contributions to healthcare.

Vinod Gauba, 36, who has worked with the less fortunate and visually impaired, was presented with the award earlier this month by Baroness Verma at the House of Lords in London.

He was awarded for his pioneering role in the field of ophthalmology.

The ‘Mahatma Gandhi Pravasi Samman’ is presented to 20 recipients selected from over 30 million Non-Resident Indians or people of Indian origin for exceptional achievements in various fields.

A 50-year-old Indian man, who was residing illegally in the US has been sentenced to 15 years in prison by a US court for conspiracy and attempting to provide material support to Lebanese group Hezbollah.

Patrick Nayyar, was sentenced in Manhattan federal court yesterday by US District Judge Robert Sweet for crimes related to the support he attempted to provide to Hezbollah, which has been designated as a foreign terrorist organisation by the US.

Nayyar was convicted in March 2012 after a seven-day jury trial, US Attorney for the Southern District of New York Preet Bharara said.

An Indian-origin businessman from Britain accused of arranging the murder of his wife in South Africa, met a gay escort three times.

Shrien Dewani, 33, is accused of ordering the murder of his wife, 28-year-old Anni Dewani, who was shot on the outskirts of Cape Town in November 2010.

On Monday, during Dewani’s ongoing trial at the Western Cape High Court, Cape Town, the Birmingham-based escort, Leopold Leisser, had started to describe three sexual encounters with Dewani when the Briton’s barristers objected, saying the evidence was irrelevant, The Guardian reported.

The Gandhi Global Family (GGF), an organisation spreading ideology of Mahatma Gandhi across the world, today batted strongly for the strengthening of people- to-people ties between India and US.

“There is a need for strengthening of people-to-people contact between India and US,” GGF vice-president S P Varma, who headed a delegation to US on invitation of the Zion Evangelistic and Care Ministries based in Chicago, said on his return here today.

A total of 416 Indians died in Kuwait during the last eight months with heart attacks being the most common cause of death, Indian officials said.

According to the Indian embassy in Kuwait, average life expectancy of Indian nationals who died in Kuwait was found to be barely at 44.4 years – 41.6 years for people employed in domestic sectors and 45.1 years in private sector.

In males average age at death was found to be 44 years, as against 46.7 years for females.