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India’s outsourcing industry takes toll on workforce

NEW DELHI, India (AP) — The job came with a good salary, and good perks.

But, 26-year-old Vaibhav Vats will tell you, it was doing him no good. His weight had grown to 265 pounds and he was missing out on social life as he worked long overnight hours at a call center. Eventually, he quit.

You are making nice money. But the tradeoff is also big, said Vats, who spent nearly two years at IBM Corp.’s call center arm in India, answering customer calls from the United States.

Call centers and other outsourced businesses such as software writing, medical transcription and back-office work employ more than 1.6 million young men and women in India, mostly in their 20s and 30s, who make much more than their contemporaries in most other professions.

They are, however, facing sleep disorders, heart disease, depression and family discord, according to doctors and several industry surveys.

Experts warn the brewing crisis could undermine the success of India’s hugely profitable outsourcing industry that earns billions in dollars annually and has shaped much of the country’s transformation into an emerging economic power.

Heart disease, strokes and diabetes cost India an estimated $9 billion in lost productivity in 2005. But the losses could grow to a staggering $200 billion over the next 10 years if corrective action is not taken quickly, said a study by New Delhi-based Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations.

The outsourcing industry would be hardest hit, it warned.

Reliable estimates on the number of people affected are hard to come by, but government officials and experts agree that it is a growing problem. Health Minister Anbumani Ramadoss wants to enforce a special health policy for employees in the information technology industry.

After working, they party for the rest of the time … (They) have bad diet, excessive smoking and drinking, he said at a public meeting last month. We don’t want these young people to burn out.

The minister’s comments have since infuriated the technology sector, which says it has been unfairly singled out for problems that also exist in other professions.

The outsourcing industry has come under fire because the sedentary lifestyle of its employees combined with often stressful working conditions makes them more vulnerable to heart disease, digestive problems and weight gain than others. Some complain of psychological distress.

Most call center jobs involve responding to phone calls through the night from customers in the United States and Europe — some of whom can be angry and rude. It is monotonous and there is little meaningful personal interaction among co-workers. That can also be true of other jobs such as software writing and back-office work.

There are times when the stress is so overwhelming that they fail to cope with it. Then they come to us, said Archana Bisht who set up a counseling company, 1to1help.net, in Bangalore six years ago.

Her clientele has since grown to 25 companies — seven of them were added in the past two months — including such names as Intel Corp., IBM Corp., Hewlett Packard Co. and Mindtree Consulting Ltd.

Each day, about 60 to 70 employees at these companies seek counseling from 1to1help.net. The complaints are many, but marital incompatibility and relationship issues top the list, Bisht said, often because the long, odd working hours means couples don’t have much time together.

More women than men ask for help, she said. The outsourcing boom has created new employment opportunities for Indian women, but there has been little change in social expectations. Adding workplace demands to responsibilities at home, which often includes taking care of in-laws, leaves women workers with multiple stresses, Bisht said.

Loneliness can also take a toll.

There is no social life, said Vats, who worked at night and either slept or watched television during the day. You are not meeting new people.

The industry is getting sensitive to these problems.

The National Association of Software Services Companies, the main trade body of the outsourcing industry, said many of its member firms are already providing facilities like advice on health, gyms and money for regular checkups.

Companies like Infosys Technologies Ltd. have set up 24-hour helplines for counseling by psychologists, while others have tied up with companies like 1to1help.net. Some like HCL Technologies Ltd. have built daycare centers for children and routinely sponsor group outings by their employees.

But the industry insists it would do nothing to impose any lifestyle on its employees.

We do not think it is for companies or for the government to interfere in the personal life of adult Indians, NASSCOM said in a statement.

Also, there is little it can do to change the nighttime work hours of many outsourcing jobs.

The odd hours can play havoc with your health, said Vats. I never got good sleep because everyone was up and getting ready to go to work when I got home … Your diet goes for a toss. You get acidity, develop gastric problems.

Vats’ weight has dropped to 214 pounds since leaving IBM Daksh two years ago. He’s still overweight for his 5 feet 9 inch frame, but is much happier now working with a law firm for a much lower salary.

A recent survey by Dataquest magazine and technology consulting company IDC showed sleep disorders topped health complaints among outsourcing industry workers.

About 32 percent of respondents complained of sleep disorders; 25 percent had digestive troubles; and 20 percent reported eyesight problems, said the survey, which covered 1,749 employees at 19 outsourcing companies.

Yet, they would not talk about it openly. Several call center employees contacted by the Associated Press admitted to having many of these ailments, but they refused to be named or identify their employer.

Sleep and digestive disorders, doctors say, can grow into bigger problems: hypertension, diabetes and heart disease.

Doctors say the rise in these diseases, alongside growing urbanization and fast-paced economic growth, is not surprising.

But India’s case is alarming because of the sheer number of people affected and the factors that make them vulnerable to these diseases, said Ravi Kasliwal, a cardiologist at New Delhi’s Indraprastha Apollo Hospital. These include India’s fat-rich diet, genetic factors make them highly vulnerable to diabetes, and abdominal obesity that gives rise to insulin resistance and heart disease.

To top it all, there is lack of awareness, Kasliwal said. One out of 10 persons aged 35 years or more in this country is prone to heart attack.

Heart disease is projected to account for 35 percent of deaths among India’s working age population between 2000 and 2030, Kasliwal said, citing a World Health Organization study. That number is about 12 percent for the United States, 22 percent for China and 25 percent for Russia.

This is a very serious issue for this country, Kasliwal said. But nobody wants to talk about it.
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35 years later, Everglades jet crash hero is recognized

HOMESTEAD, Florida (AP) — An airboat speeding across the sawgrass and mud. A ringing in the ears when the engine was cut. Moaning. Screams for help. Desperate gasps at the water’s surface. Helicopters in the distance. Christmas carols.

These are the sounds Bud Marquis heard in the black swamp that night.

Then, for more than three decades, there was mostly silence about the December 29, 1972, crash of Eastern Airlines Flight 401 in the Everglades.

Investigators and reporters stopped calling. His airboat rusted in the yard. A rubber boot that had squished through swampwater and jet fuel deteriorated on the back porch, right where he took it off.

Marquis sat alone on his front porch in Homestead, on the Florida peninsula’s southern tip. Acquaintances described a prickly old man in failing health. Sudden interest in the 35-year-old crash disturbed his quiet. He had saved lives, but he wasn’t used to people asking about it.

But admirers and some of the 77 people who survived the crash wanted to rebuild his airboat and make sure he finally heard thanks.

I didn’t feel it was any great, heroic thing, Marquis said. I accept the award because they said I deserved it. I figure I didn’t do anything that anybody else wouldn’t have done.

Even today, as metropolitan Miami swallows more of the Everglades, getting to the Flight 401 crash site is a half-hour airboat ride over sharp sawgrass. No road stretches that deep into the alligator-infested swamp.

On that moonless night, Marquis was teaching a friend how to gig frogs from his airboat. Miami was just a distant pinpoint of light. All Marquis saw were the stars and the frogs’ silver eyes before his headlamp.

Above him, Capt. Robert Loft, First Officer Albert Stockstill and Second Officer Donald Repo steered Flight 401 toward Miami International Airport after an uneventful flight from New York. The jumbo jet carried 163 passengers and 13 crew members.

As they began their approach just after 11:30 p.m., the pilots informed the tower they would have to circle — the light indicating whether the plane’s nose gear was down hadn’t illuminated. Controllers gave their OK and told the crew to maintain an altitude of 2,000 feet.

The pilots engaged the autopilot, and Repo went below the cockpit to inspect the gear.

No one noticed when one of them bumped a steering column, disengaging the autopilot and sending Flight 401 into a slow descent. A half-second chime indicating a change in altitude went unnoticed.

About 20 miles west of the airport, the crew received permission to turn back and make another approach. It was then the pilots realized they were just feet above the Everglades. Seven seconds later, the plane’s left wing dug into the swamp at 227 mph, sending it pinwheeling.

From 10 miles away, Marquis and his friend saw a fiery orange flash and speeded toward it.

Marquis had recently turned to commercial frogging after years as a state game officer. He knew how to pick out island silhouettes in the dark, to feel the changing terrain beneath his boat. Fifteen minutes later, he reached a levee where he’d thought he’d seen the flash.

Marquis heard a voice: I can’t hold my head up anymore! Jet fuel seeped into his boots when he jumped into the water to yank the man up. All around, he could see people still strapped in their seats, some turned face down in the water.

I’m one person in the midst of all this, Marquis said. I’m no doctor. I didn’t know what to do.

Flight attendant Beverly Raposa was gathering survivors around her when she heard the airboat. She started singing Christmas carols, so rescuers would hear them.

I knew they would find us, said Raposa, now 60 and living in Sunrise.

Helicopters swooped just south of the wreckage. The pilots couldn’t see the site — the fire extinguished in the swamp. Marquis turned his headlamp skyward, waving them toward a nearby levee.

Petty Officer 2nd Class Don Schneck was aboard a Coast Guard helicopter that followed Marquis’ light. He dashed to the airboat, carrying only a flashlight, a radio and a hatchet. Marquis ferried him deeper into the wreckage, as far as he could go without running over victims. Schneck waded out alone toward the cockpit; he was the last person to see Loft alive.

I couldn’t even see the crash. It was pitch dark, Schneck said from his Arkansas home.

Marquis pulled survivors from the water and ferried rescuers. At one point, he stopped near Raposa, who had found fellow flight attendant Mercedes Mercy Ruiz still strapped into her seat.

We could see the tail of the airplane, white in the darkness. I said, ‘It looks like a ghost,’ said Ruiz, who still bears a faint scar above her right eyebrow.

Ruiz had serious back and pelvic injuries, but she refused to be airlifted — she was done with flying. To calm her screams, the rescuers carried her to Marquis’ airboat.

She begged Marquis not to let the alligators eat her. Marquis chuckled at the memory. Any gator would have been frightened away by the crash and the jet fuel’s stench.

Ninety-four passengers, the three pilots and two flight attendants were dead. Investigators marveled that anyone, let alone 77, survived.

Marquis, now age 78, greets visitors with a firm handshake and twinkling eyes. Hardly anyone has stopped by in 35 years to discuss the crash.

One survivor, certain Marquis carried him to safety, once showed up with a $1,000 check.

Eastern Airlines, mistakenly believing they’d hired Marquis for the rescue, sent him $125. Marquis went to the now-defunct airline’s Miami headquarters to return it.

I was angry about the form letter, Marquis said. They thought they hired me. They should have gotten my name as the first one that was there.

News clippings Marquis had kept flew out his broken windows when Hurricane Andrew blew through Homestead in 1992, but he is lucky: the storm destroyed the five houses across the street.

Hurricane Wilma brought back the crash. Talking to a roofer fixing his home after the 2005 storm, their conversation turned to the crash. The roofer posted an online message in June 2006 about Marquis’ plight to a Flight 401 crash forum.

Another forum for airboat enthusiasts picked up the discussion and rallied to raise funds for Marquis and restore his airboat. Meanwhile, separate efforts began to recognize the rescuers and bring the survivors together with victims’ families.

Marquis met Ruiz, Raposa and other survivors for the first time at a December 3 ceremony. The man he heard struggling to stay above water thanked him.

Had it not been for Bud, there would not have been a grandpa for the children, there would not have been a grandpa to share the good times in life with, said David Kaplan, now 71 and living in Delray Beach.

On Saturday, 60 airboats will carry survivors and victims’ relatives to the crash site. Marquis, in his reconditioned craft, will lead. The survivors hope to build a memorial near the site.

Hopefully this will help the people that haven’t been there since 1972, Marquis said. They can see what a vast area it is.

Passenger Ron Infantino will join him. He remembers the sound of Marquis’ engine. He strained to hear his wife’s voice, but she never answered his cries. She had died, 20 days after they married.

I need to do it. I never was able to see my wife. I need to go back there, said Infantino, a 61-year-old Miami insurance agent. I always said to myself, ‘I don’t know where to go.’ I’ve always wanted some kind of recognition for the people who’ve lost their lives.
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Woman’s whereabouts a mystery

BOLINGBROOK, Illinois (AP) — Nearly two months after Stacy Peterson was last seen, the investigation into her disappearance and suspicions surrounding her husband have produced many intriguing questions. But few answers.

A mysterious blue barrel. Divers searching the murky, frigid waters of an industrial canal. A woman’s body exhumed for clues three years after her death.

All the story lines, though, have led back to one house on a quiet street, and to Sunday, October 28, the day the 23-year-old mother of two small children vanished.

The last time anyone outside the Peterson home talked to her was around 10:15 a.m., when she spoke briefly with a friend, Bruce Ziderich, about helping to paint an apartment he owned in nearby Yorkville.

Ziderich told her to wait until she heard from her sister, Cassandra Cales, before going to the apartment, said Pamela Bosco, a longtime family friend.

After that, the trail goes cold.

Peterson’s husband, Drew Peterson, 53, who resigned from the Bolingbrook Police Department after being named a suspect in his wife’s disappearance, has told reporters that when he awoke around 11 a.m., his wife already had left.

About noon, Sharon Bychowski, a neighbor and friend of Stacy’s, phoned Drew and told him she’d been to the market and had some candy for the kids.

Drew Peterson stopped by about 1:15 p.m., saying he had to run a brief errand, and returned about 15 minutes later, Bychowski said.

By midafternoon, around 2:30 or 3 p.m., Bosco said, Cales tried to call her sister.

Cales said Stacy had told her two days earlier that she feared Peterson might harm her and that she planned to talk to a divorce attorney the following Monday.

Stacy Peterson had told family and friends that her husband — whom she’d met six years earlier, when she was 17 and he was married to his third wife — had become increasingly controlling, following her, tracking her with GPS and calling her incessantly on her cell phone.

Two weeks before she disappeared, she had gotten a new cell number after she found her phone bill in her husband’s briefcase, with some of the numbers highlighted, Bosco said.

But one thing didn’t change: her insistence on always keeping her phone turned on, Bosco said.

So when Cales couldn’t get through that afternoon, she began to worry.

At 2:30 p.m. that day, Drew Peterson — a 29-year Bolingbrook police veteran — called work, saying he could not work his 5 p.m.-to-5 a.m. shift because his wife was gone and he needed to stay home with his children, Lt. Ken Teppel said.

But other stories have emerged to contradict Peterson’s account.

Around 10 that night, a friend of Drew Peterson’s stepbrother Thomas Morphey said he was home watching the World Series when Morphey called in a panic, saying he needed to talk.

Walter Martineck said Morphey told him that just hours earlier he’d helped Peterson move a large blue container from an upstairs bedroom into Peterson’s SUV. Morphey said he never looked inside the container, but it was warm to the touch and he had a terrible feeling, Martineck said.

He took me by my shoulders, told me I can’t say anything, and he just told me that he thinks he helped dispose of Stacy’s body, Martineck said on NBC’s Today program.

Peterson has denied that Morphey helped him move anything.

He has told reporters that his wife called him around 9 that night, telling him that she was leaving him. Later, in one of several television interviews, Peterson said his wife told him, She found somebody else.

Investigators have never confirmed reports of a container, but volunteers from the Texas-based group EquuSearch who helped look for her have said police asked them to watch for a large blue plastic barrel.

For weeks, police divers searched a canal south of Chicago looking for evidence.

Cales went to Peterson’s house around 11 p.m. on October 28 looking for her sister, Bosco said. Drew was not home, but his kids were.

They said their parents had a fight and that Stacy had gone to Grandpa’s house, Bosco said.

At 11:26, Cales said she reached Peterson on his cell phone.

He said, ‘Your sister left me,’ Cales recounted on the Web site findstacypeterson.com. She recounted what he told her next: She called me at 9 p.m. and said she was leaving me and going on a li’l vacation … and she left the car somewhere in Bolingbrook.

Bosco said Peterson told Cales even more.

He said, ‘She took $25,000 from the safe, her bikini is missing and her passport is missing, she’s disappeared just like your mom,’ said Bosco, the last comment referring to Cales’ and Stacy Peterson’s mother, who vanished when Stacy was a teenager.

Cales said she didn’t believe any of it — starting with Peterson’s contention that he was home. She knew that wasn’t true, she wrote, because she had just been there and was sitting around the corner.

At 1:36 a.m. on October 29, Cales went to the Bolingbrook Police Department to report her sister missing, then filed another missing-person report with the Illinois State Police, Teppel said.

By November 9, police were calling Drew Peterson a suspect in his wife’s disappearance and said it was a possible homicide. They also said that they would exhume the body of Peterson’s ex-wife, Kathleen Savio, saying a 2004 death that was originally ruled an accidental bathtub drowning likely was a homicide. They have not called Peterson a suspect in that case and have not released results of a new autopsy.

But for all the searches by police and volunteers, all the tidbits of information and speculation, there still have been no charges — and no indication that they’re imminent.

Drew Peterson’s attorney, Joel Brodsky, even raised the possibility that Stacy Peterson’s disappearance might never be solved.

Not every mystery gets solved, Brodsky said. This is not TV, it’s real life.
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Bridge-collapse rescuers battle darkness, current, isolation

KATHMANDU, Nepal (CNN) — Rescuers were searching through the night Tuesday for hundreds of people who fell into a river after a footbridge collapsed during a religious festival in Nepal.

The rescuers have not given up yet. They’re still there, and they’re still looking for bodies, journalist Manesh Shrestha told CNN from Nepal’s capital, Kathmandu.

The suspension bridge in remote Surkhet collapsed with as many as 1,000 Hindu pilgrims on it, police said.

While many swam to safety, about 200 people who were on the bridge were missing, police said. Only 15 bodies had been recovered so far.

Rescuers took 20 women and 12 men to a hospital, police added.

While initial reports suggested the river’s currents were swift, photographs of the scene sent to CNN showed a relatively slow-flowing river.

However, Shrestha said the current is more swift below that point.

The pictures also showed the bridge was just a few yards above the water, contrary to earlier reports that it spanned a gorge with the river as far as 100 feet below. Watch what rescuers are up against

The bridge collapsed because there were hundreds of people on it, said Nepalese police officer Nibandha Budha. They had gone to the river for a three-day Hindu religious festival on the occasion of full moon.

The 120-yard-long bridge spanned the Bheri River in the Surkhet district, southwest of Kathmandu. The river is fed by snow from the Himalayas. See a map of the region

Seven hundred to 1,000 people were on the bridge when it gave way, Budha said.

Many people were just standing on the bridge rather than crossing it, adding to the stress on the structure, Shrestha said. He added that most of the people on the bridge were women and children, and that women in Nepal are not encouraged to learn how to swim.

The bridge linked two temples involved in the festival, which was in its final day, he said.

Nepalese soldiers, police officers and civilians were involved in the rescue effort, which was hampered by darkness and the remoteness of the location.

Nepal has been roiled by political upheaval since the early 1990s.

A Maoist insurgency that began in 1996 ended with a cease-fire in November 2006. The crown prince massacred 10 members of the royal family and killed himself in 2001.

King Gyanendra fired the prime minister and cabinet in 2002. A government was established in 2004 but dissolved in 2005. The king retained absolute power until mass demonstrations led to a new parliament in April 2006. A new constitution that includes the Maoists took effect in January 2007.

Shrestha said this year’s festival was the first since the conflict with the Maoists ended, and marked the first time in 10 years that festival-goers could move about freely, so attendance was larger than usual.
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Pope urges end to conflicts in Darfur, Iraq

VATICAN CITY (AP) — Pope Benedict XVI issued a Christmas Day appeal Tuesday to political leaders around the globe to find the wisdom and courage to end bloody conflicts in Darfur, Iraq, Afghanistan and Congo.

Benedict delivered his traditional Urbi et Orbi speech — Latin for to the city and to the world — from the central balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica, blessing thousands of people gathered in the square below under a brilliant winter sun.

Wearing gold-embroidered vestments and a bejeweled bishops’ hat, or miter, Benedict urged the crowd to rejoice over the celebration of Jesus Christ’s birth, which he said he hoped would bring consolation to all people who live in the darkness of poverty, injustice and war.

He mentioned in particular those living in the tortured regions of Darfur, Somalia, northern Congo, the Eritrea-Ethiopia border, Iraq, Lebanon, Israel and the Palestinian territories, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and the Balkans.

May the child Jesus bring relief to those who are suffering and may he bestow upon political leaders the wisdom and courage to seek and find humane, just and lasting solutions, he said. Watch as the pope delivers his Christmas message to the faithful

Beyond those conflicts, Benedict said he was turning his thoughts this Christmas to victims of other injustices, citing women, children and the elderly, as well as refugees and victims of environmental disasters and religious and ethnic tensions.

He said he hoped Christmas would bring consolation to those who are still denied their legitimate aspirations for a more secure existence, for health, education, stable employment, for fuller participation in civil and political responsibilities, free from oppression and protected from conditions that offend human dignity.

Such injustices and discrimination are destroying the internal fabric of many countries and souring international relations, he said.

In a nod to his engagement with environmental concerns, the pontiff also noted that the number of migrants and displaced people was increasing around the globe because of frequent natural disasters, often caused by environmental upheavals.

The pontiff delivered his message just hours after celebrating midnight Mass in St. Peter’s Basilica.

Benedict followed his speech with his traditional Christmas Day greetings — this year delivered in 63 different languages, including Mongolian, Finnish, Arabic, Hebrew, Swahili, Burmese, and in a new entry for 2007, Guarani, a South American Indian language.

As he finished, the bells of St. Peter’s tolled and the Vatican’s brightly outfitted Swiss Guards stood at attention as a band played and a crowd numbering in the tens of thousands waved national flags and cheered.
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