NEW DELHI, India (CNN) -- The economic might of India may bring to mind technological savvy and overseas call centers. But to understand the Indian economy, a visit to a roadside dentist like Raj Kishore is more illuminating.
The Indian economy is fueled by independent workers such as Radha Kumar.

The Indian economy is fueled by independent workers such as Radha Kumar.
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"I can extract, I can fill up, I can scale, I can make dentures, I can make bridge metal or non-metal." Kishore said as he fitted dentures for a customer.

One thing he can't do is show a license to practice -- like many roadside dentists sitting on sidewalks awaiting customers.

While information technology and outsourcing has earned India the nickname as "the world's back office," the sector employs a fraction of India's population -- only 2 million of India's more than 500 million workers, according to NASSCOM, an IT and business process outsourcing trade organization.

So where do the majority of people work in India? The International Labor Organization and economists say as many as 95 percent of the workforce makes a living in what is known as the informal or unorganized sector.

"Roughly today about 50 percent of the production is from the unorganized sector," says New Delhi-based economics professor Arun Kumar, referring to jobs and services that exist without a storefront, union to represent the workers, or corporate structure.

Although things are changing and the economy has boomed in recent years, Indians are still emerging from poverty. Finding employment can be tough so people have literally created jobs out of sheer necessity, such as roadside dentist Kishore.

Kishore says he learned his trade from a dentist and a dental course but he does not have a degree in dentistry. He and those around him provide a service to customers who couldn't dream of affording a licensed dentist in an office.

That is just one of thousands of jobs that make up India's informal economy.
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Radha Kumari is a Mehandi artist. She uses henna to make intricate traditional designs on women's hands and feet. It's an old art that is steeped in tradition and is typically worn by brides the day before the wedding ceremony but is also popular during other Indian holidays and with tourists. She learned the trade from her sister at age 10 and started working as a teenager.

"I started doing this work because I was needy. I have no parents; my sister has done everything for me so it was very important for me to work," said Kumari, a mother of two, while she swirled henna on the hand of a customer.

She makes 25 to 50 rupees (50 cents to $1) per hand, she said. She and other henna artists are often "troubled" by city authorities or police who come to kick them off of the sidewalks or ask for bribes -- technically Kumari and others are breaking the law by setting up shop on government property.

City government authorities showed up while CNN was interviewing Kumari, causing the henna artists around her to pack up and run away.

It's a tough life. "If there can be anything better, I would definitely love to do it," she said. "Here there is no certainty. Today I'm allowed to sit here, tomorrow I may not be." But Kumari says it's better than nothing at all.

Experts say the informal economy helped keep India out of recession, since it is not tied to the global markets. While the ingenuity and entrepreneurial spirit has help the Indian economy growing, the largely unregulated workforce promises to have negative impacts on the Indian economy as well, as transactions are often in cash and difficult to trace and tax.
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But the working conditions and low pay leave millions living in poverty.

"Their conditions are very poor because they have no protective gear of any kind, they have no real social security of any kind," said Arun Kumar, an economics professor at Jawaharlal Nehru University. "They face a lot of hardship of all kinds in terms of their existence, where they stay, what do they do, their health conditions, et cetera."

William C. Thompson Jr. walked into Tuesday night’s mayoral debate a likeable man who is being outspent 16 to 1, and whose views and background are more than a bit of a mystery to many New Yorkers.
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William Thompson greeted his supporters before his debate with Mayor Michael Bloomberg on Monday night.

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Unfortunately for Mr. Thompson, he seemed to have exited in the same fashion.

Save for his accent, which carries the unmistakable cadence of his native Brooklyn, and for his insistent attacks on Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s flip-flop on term limits, Mr. Thompson, the city comptroller, resembled a painter who left too much of his canvas blank.

He grew up as the high-achieving son of a prominent politician and a teacher in Bedford-Stuyvesant, a neighborhood of elegant brownstones that now suffers a plague of foreclosures and homelessness. During his time on the Board of Education, he voted for two chancellors who concentrated on the poorest students and wrested power from corrupt local school boards. Test scores rose sharply in his final years there.

A viewer would have learned little to nothing of these facts. Mr. Thompson’s personal anecdote count Tuesday totaled zero.

The conundrum for Mr. Thompson is that he’s carved a three-decade career in public life by being a conciliator, a nimble-footed inside player herded board members to votes and — with one notable exception — really tried to avoid annoying former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani.

He lacked power to make most policy decisions and seemed allergic to crusades. All of which is perfectly defensible, but public powerlessness is not the stuff of compelling narratives.

On Tuesday Mr. Bloomberg attacked him, erroneously, for being “in charge” of the schools in the 1990s. Mr. Thompson scrunched his face, incredulous.

“I was in charge?” he said, turning to look at the mayor. “Nothing could be further from the truth.”

Mr. Bloomberg replied with just a hint of a Cheshire cat smile.

In fairness, neither mayor nor comptroller made the night electric; Mr. Bloomberg in particular tended to dole out energy a miserly watt at a time. The city is sunk into recession’s mire, unemployment tops 10 percent — black male unemployment edges toward 50 percent — and foreclosure threatens working class families, and the candidates made glancing mentions of all of this. (Neither candidate uttered the word foreclosure).

A reporter asked the candidates about a controversial fact of life in minority communities: Police each year frisk more than half a million young men, more than 80 percent of them black or Latino. The number of frisks has increased during the past decade, sweeping up hundreds of thousands of teenagers and college students. Police have arrested fewer than 5 percent of this number.

Mr. Thompson wants to curtail it. “We know it’s being overused,” he said.

Mr. Bloomberg conceded no problem. “I do think the police have struck a good balance,” he said soothingly.

Mr. Bloomberg is not much for emoting. He rolls his eyes, his voice cuts monotone and his touch is rarely common. But he came into the night with considerable advantages. He is a reasonably popular two-term incumbent (residents tend to like his policies more so than him), and he sits atop a great green bag of personal swag, having so far spent $65 million of his own money on this campaign.

Mr. Bloomberg, an independent, is unsentimentally promiscuous about party loyalty. But in his governing style, he looks an awful lot like a moderate Democrat, which complicates matters for Mr. Thompson, who as it happens is a moderate Democrat.

None of which is to suggest that Mr. Thompson has no line of attack — the decaying economy suggests opportunity. But the Thompson campaign has been curiously relaxed — last weekend he appeared at two churches, according to his schedule. He offered passionate words Tuesday night about the plight of middle-class New Yorkers.

But he offered no storehouse of stories of actual suffering to put meat on the bones of his attack.

Instead Mr. Thompson concluded as he began, by doubling down on a single bet: term limits. The election, he said, will be New Yorkers’ referendum on term limits. “And that we say: We are not for sale!”

In less than four weeks, he’ll find out if that is enough.

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The Inter-American Court of Human Rights has been asked to investigate whether Panama tortured an Ecuadorian citizen who was being held as an illegal immigrant, an official hemispheric human rights organization said.

Jesus Tranquilino Velez Loor was arrested November 11, 2002, and deported to Ecuador on September 10, 2003. During that time, he was held without receiving procedural guarantees, the right to be heard and the right to present a defense, said the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights.

"The case also involves the lack of investigation of complaints of torture presented by Mr. Velez Loor before the Panamanian authorities, as well as the inhumane conditions of detention under which he was held in several Panamanian penitentiaries," the human rights commission said in a release Tuesday.

The human rights panel, which is part of the 35-nation Organization of American States, said it referred the case to the court last week because Panama did not adopt sufficient measures to address issues raised in a previous commission report.

Velez Loor "was sentenced to a prison term for having repeatedly entered Panama illegally. ... Panamanian law provides that foreign nationals, who repeatedly enter Panama, without the necessary papers, will be imprisoned for two years and then deported," Panama said in a 2006 report.

Velez Loor admitted he had gone into Panama without proper papers or visas.

The commission said it received an e-mailed complaint from Velez Loor on February 10, 2004, "in which he claims to have undergone torture, forced isolation, and mistreatment at the hands of Panamanian police officers at two Panamanian detention centers without being given the opportunity to defend himself, without the benefit of any court of law, without being allowed to make a telephone call and while being deprived of all medical care."

Panama denied those allegations in the 2006 human rights commission report.

Officials at the Panamanian embassy in Washington did not return a telephone request Tuesday from CNN for comment on the latest development.

The human rights commission consists of seven members who act in a personal capacity, without representing any country, and who are elected by the OAS General Assembly.

From Kevin Flower
CNN
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(CNN) -- The United Nations Human Rights Council will hold a special session Thursday to reopen discussion of Israel's three-week offensive against the Islamic militant group Hamas in Gaza.
In his speech Monday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called the report an "absurd claim."

In his speech Monday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called the report an "absurd claim."

According to a statement from the council, the meeting request came from the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and is co-sponsored by 18 members of the 47-member body based in Geneva, Switzerland.

The council commissioned South African Judge Richard Goldstone to lead a fact-finding mission into the hostilities in Gaza that lasted from December 27, 2008, to January 18, 2009.

Goldstone's group issued a report last month which concluded that both Israel and Hamas had committed "actions amounting to war crimes, possibly crimes against humanity."

The council received the report September 29, but took no action, after a request by the Palestinian Authority to defer discussion for six months.

The Palestinian Authority government of Mahmoud Abbas came under withering criticism by Gaza Palestinians for the move.

Abbas defended his request in a televised speech Sunday and vowed to work "to punish everyone who was responsible for the hideous crimes committed against our children, our men and women -- especially in our dear Gaza."

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in a speech Monday at the opening session of the Knesset, called the war crimes charge "an absurd claim."
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"We will not agree to a situation where the [Israel Defense Forces] commanders and soldiers will be treated as war criminals after valorously defending the citizens of Israel against a loathsome enemy," he said.

Netanyahu said that if the report ultimately is referred to the U.N. Security Council or the International Criminal Court, it would deliver "a mortal blow" to the peace process.

There is an ongoing dispute about the number of people killed in the three-week military offensive that Israel called Operation Cast Lead.

The Gaza-based Palestinian Center for Human Rights put the death toll at 1,419 and said 1,167 of those were "non-combatants."

The Israeli military released its own figures earlier this year, claiming 1,166 people were killed, and 60 percent of those were "terror operatives."