Visa God, and outsourcing baby making

Date: Monday, December 31, 2007 8:58 PM

<<<<< JOB DESTRUCTION NEWSLETTER No. 1806 -- 12/31/2007 >>>>>

These two articles are about as weird as it gets, and a fitting end to this
crazy year!

http://online.wsj.com/article_email/SB119906283337358633-lMyQjAxMDE3OTM5MTAzNjEyWj.html
Divine Intervention? Indians Seek Help From the 'Visa God'

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22441355/
Giving birth outsourced to India

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http://online.wsj.com/article_email/SB119906283337358633-lMyQjAxMDE3OTM5MTAzNjEyWj.html

December 31, 2007

Divine Intervention?
Indians Seek Help
From the 'Visa God'
Priest Says Prayers May Aid
Those Trying to Enter U.S.;
A Job With Amazon.com
By VAUHINI VARA
December 31, 2007; Page A1

HYDERABAD, India -- Lord Balaji is one of the most-worshiped local
incarnations of the Hindu Lord Vishnu. His adherents flock to his many temples
to pray for things like happiness, prosperity and fertility.

Lately, the deity has grown particularly popular at the once-quiet Chilkur
Balaji temple here, where he goes by a new nickname: the Visa God. The temple
draws 100,000 visitors a week, many of whom come to pray to Lord Balaji for
visas to travel or move to the U.S. and other Western countries.

Mohanty Dolagobinda is one of the Visa God's believers. Three years ago, a
U.S. consulting company applied for a visa on his behalf. It was rejected.
When the company tried again the following year, Mr. Dolagobinda's friends
told him to visit the Chilkur Balaji temple ahead of his interview at the U.S.
consulate. Weeks later, he sailed through the interview. "I've never heard of
anyone who's gone to the temple whose visa got rejected," says Mr.
Dolagobinda.

Visitors to the Chilkur Balaji temple wait in line to pray to Lord Balaji, the
'Visa God.'
In the late 1990s, this small temple on the outskirts of Hyderabad -- the
capital of the southern state of Andhra Pradesh -- drew just two or three
visitors a week.

C.S. Gopala Krishna, the 63-year-old head priest of the Chilkur Balaji Temple,
wanted more people to come. So he gave Lord Balaji a new identity.
"I named him the Visa God," he says. Now, Mr. Gopala Krishna's temple is a hot
spot. Billboards on the dirt road to the temple advertise English-language
schools and visa advisers. Next to the parking lot, vendors hawk souvenirs and
fruit.

The Visa God's growing celebrity reflects the rising frustration of educated
Indians hoping to move West. In recent years, it's become harder to win the
employer-sponsored "H-1B" visas that let skilled professionals like engineers
work in the U.S. While the U.S. limits the number of H-1Bs granted each year
to 65,000, the demand for visas keeps rising.

For the fiscal year ended September 2004, it took 11 months for the U.S.
government to receive 65,000 applications for H-1B visas; last fiscal year, it
took two months. This fiscal year, the U.S. government received more than
65,000 applications in one day. Applications are now assigned a random number,
and the first 90,000 to 110,000 are processed and accepted or rejected until
the quota is reached.

Technology Hub

Hyderabad, a city of seven million once known for its pearl trade, has become
a fast-growing technology hub. Indian citizens have been the biggest group of
H-1B holders in recent years and Hyderabad has forged ties to U.S.
companies such as Microsoft Corp., which employ large numbers of H-1Bs.
Companies such as Accenture Ltd. and Dell Inc. have also set up huge
development and service centers in the city. That's brought a cultural shift,
as young middle-class locals replace traditional Indian clothing with jeans
and T-shirts and hang out at newly opened malls and coffee shops.

On a recent Saturday evening, as a statue of the flower-draped Visa God sat at
the back of the modest temple, a cross-legged Mr. Gopala Krishna took
responsibility for the visa fervor. Around him, visitors were speed-walking,
heads down, as they made the necessary 11 circles around the temple to gain
the favor of the Visa God. The temple was about to close, and some visitors
broke into a jog.

"At other temples, elders bring their children," says Mr. Gopala Krishna.
"In this temple, children bring their elders."

He was born at the temple, where his father was once head priest, and later
left to live with relatives in Hyderabad. Mr. Gopala Krishna studied commerce
in college and in 1968 started working at Hindustan Lever, a consumer-products
giant. In 1999, he came back to the temple to take care of his father, and
then became the head priest himself.

At the time, the temple attracted few visitors. "The temple has been there for
at least 100 years with nobody visiting," says Ravi Babu, a longtime Hyderabad
resident who runs the local chapter of the Indus Entrepreneurs, a club for
entrepreneurs.

Wooing Microsoft

By then, Hyderabad was changing. Local officials were on a tear to turn
Hyderabad into the next Bangalore, the high-tech capital of the neighboring
state of Karnataka. They started referring to Hyderabad as "Cyberabad."
They fixed roads and wooed Microsoft and General Electric Co. to set up
offices there.

Hoping to capitalize on all the activity, technical colleges sprouted up in
the city's outskirts near Mr. Gopala Krishna's temple. Students started
trickling by on their way home from school; many complained about their failed
attempts to secure U.S. visas. That gave the priest an idea to sell the
students on the deity by giving him a new persona, "Visa God." Mr.
Gopala Krishna counseled the students in English, then told them to walk
around the temple 11 times to get their wish. "I used to say, 'Go, this time
you'll get it,'" he recalls.

Soon, Mr. Gopala Krishna started seeing dozens -- then hundreds -- of new
visitors a day. In 2005, some local newspapers wrote about the Visa God, just
as new U.S. visa restrictions were taking a toll. Mr. Gopala Krishna and his
relatives also launched a Web site and a newsletter called Voice of Temples,
with features like a primer of sample prayers for help in visa interviews.

The temple's popularity surged. Last year, a public battle between Mr.
Gopala Krishna's family and the local government, which briefly wanted to take
the temple over, only boosted its appeal among the young and subversive. Now
devotees of the Visa God say they have to reach the temple by 6 a.m. to avoid
the daytime rush.

Rajendra Vippagunta, a 28-year-old now working for Amazon.com Inc. in Seattle,
visited the temple in 2001 and saw few others. On a more recent visit, he
says, "it was really, really jam-packed." Mr. Vippagunta didn't know about the
Visa God the first time he visited the temple, but it may have had an effect
anyway: The following year, he got a visa to move to the U.S.

Mr. Babu of the Indus Entrepreneurs says the appeal of the Visa God boils down
to the following: "Even if you're not religious, you say, 'Why not? I can just
go and spend a few minutes and get a visa,'" he says.

Write to Vauhini Vara at vauhini.vara@wsj.com1

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http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22441355/

Giving birth outsourced to India

As commercial surrogacy takes off, rent-a-womb trend fuels debate The
Associated Press updated 12:26 p.m. MT, Sun., Dec. 30, 2007 ANAND, India -
Every night in this quiet western Indian city, 15 pregnant women prepare for
sleep in the spacious house they share, ascending the stairs in a procession
of ballooned bellies, to bedrooms that become a landscape of soft hills.

A team of maids, cooks and doctors looks after the women, whose pregnancies
would be unusual anywhere else but are common here. The young mothers of
Anand, a place famous for its milk, are pregnant with the children of
infertile couples from around the world.

The small clinic at Kaival Hospital matches infertile couples with local
women, cares for the women during pregnancy and delivery, and counsels them
afterward. Anand's surrogate mothers, pioneers in the growing field of
outsourced pregnancies, have given birth to roughly 40 babies.

More than 50 women in this city are now pregnant with the children of couples
from the United States, Taiwan, Britain and beyond. The women earn more than
many would make in 15 years. But the program raises a host of uncomfortable
questions that touch on morals and modern science, exploitation and
globalization, and that most natural of desires: to have a family.

Dr. Nayna Patel, the woman behind Anand's baby boom, defends her work as
meaningful for everyone involved.

"There is this one woman who desperately needs a baby and cannot have her own
child without the help of a surrogate. And at the other end there is this
woman who badly wants to help her (own) family," Patel said. "If this female
wants to help the other one ... why not allow that? ... It's not for any bad
cause. They're helping one another to have a new life in this world."

Experts say commercial surrogacy -- or what has been called "wombs for rent" -
- is growing in India. While no reliable numbers track such pregnancies
nationwide, doctors work with surrogates in virtually every major city. The
women are impregnated in-vitro with the egg and sperm of couples unable to
conceive on their own.

Commercial surrogacy has been legal in India since 2002, as it is in many
other countries, including the United States. But India is the leader in
making it a viable industry rather than a rare fertility treatment. Experts
say it could take off for the same reasons outsourcing in other industries has
been successful: a wide labor pool working for relatively low rates.

Critics say the couples are exploiting poor women in India -- a country with
an alarmingly high maternal death rate -- by hiring them at a cut-rate cost to
undergo the hardship, pain and risks of labor.

Fears of baby farms
"It raises the factor of baby farms in developing countries," said Dr. John
Lantos of the Center for Practical Bioethics in Kansas City, Mo. "It comes
down to questions of voluntariness and risk."

Patel's surrogates are aware of the risks because they've watched others go
through them. Many of the mothers know one another, or are even related.
Three sisters have all borne strangers' children, and their sister-in-law is
pregnant with a second surrogate baby. Nearly half the babies have been born
to foreign couples while the rest have gone to Indians.

Ritu Sodhi, a furniture importer from Los Angeles who was born in India, spent
$200,000 trying to get pregnant through in-vitro fertilization, and was
considering spending another $80,000 to hire a surrogate mother in the United
States.

"We were so desperate," she said. "It was emotionally and financially
exhausting."

Then, on the Internet, Sodhi found Patel's clinic.

After spending about $20,000 _ more than many couples because it took the
surrogate mother several cycles to conceive _ Sodhi and her husband are now
back home with their 4-month-old baby, Neel. They plan to return to Anand for
a second child.

"Even if it cost $1 million, the joy that they had delivered to me is so much
more than any money that I have given them," said Sodhi. "They're godsends to
deliver something so special."

Patel's center is believed to be unique in offering one-stop service. Other
clinics may request that the couple bring in their own surrogate, often a
family member or friend, and some place classified ads. But in Anand the
couple just provides the egg and sperm and the clinic does the rest, drawing
from a waiting list of tested and ready surrogates.

Young women are flocking to the clinic to sign up for the list.

Suman Dodia, a pregnant, baby-faced 26-year-old, said she will buy a house
with the $4,500 she receives from the British couple whose child she's
carrying. It would have taken her 15 years to earn that on her maid's monthly
salary of $25.

Dodia's own three children were delivered at home and she said she never
visited a doctor during those pregnancies.

"It's very different with medicine," Dodia said, resting her hands on her
hugely pregnant belly. "I'm being more careful now than I was with my own
pregnancy."

Like a fertility reality show
Patel said she carefully chooses which couples to help and which women to hire
as surrogates. She only accepts couples with serious fertility issues, like
survivors of uterine cancer. The surrogate mothers have to be between
18 and 45, have at least one child of their own, and be in good medical shape.

Like some fertility reality show, a rotating cast of surrogate mothers live
together in a home rented by the clinic and overseen by a former surrogate
mother. They receive their children and husbands as visitors during the day,
when they're not busy with English or computer classes.

"They feel like my family," said Rubina Mandul, 32, the surrogate house's den
mother. "The first 10 days are hard, but then they don't want to go home."

Mandul, who has two sons of her own, gave birth to a child for an American
couple in February. She said she misses the baby, but she stays in touch with
the parents over the Internet. A photo of the American couple with the child
hangs over the sofa.

"They need a baby more than me," she said.

The surrogate mothers and the parents sign a contract that promises the couple
will cover all medical expenses in addition to the woman's payment, and the
surrogate mother will hand over the baby after birth. The couples fly to Anand
for the in-vitro fertilization and again for the birth. Most couples end up
paying the clinic less than $10,000 for the entire procedure, including
fertilization, the fee to the mother and medical expenses.

Counseling is a major part of the process and Patel tells the women to think
of the pregnancy as "someone's child comes to stay at your place for nine
months."

Kailas Gheewala, 25, said she doesn't think of the pregnancy as her own.

"The fetus is theirs, so I'm not sad to give it back," said Gheewala, who
plans to save the $6,250 she's earning for her two daughters' education.
"The child will go to the U.S. and lead a better life and I'll be happy."

Patel said none of the surrogate mothers has had especially difficult births
or serious medical problems, but risks are inescapable.

"We have to be very careful," she said. "We overdo all the health
investigations. We do not take any chances."

Health experts expect to see more Indian commercial surrogacy programs in
coming years. Dr. Indira Hinduja, a prominent fertility specialist who was
behind India's first test-tube baby two decades ago, receives several
surrogacy inquiries a month from couples overseas.

"People are accepting it," said Hinduja. "Earlier they used to be ashamed but
now they are becoming more broadminded."

Convenience for the rich?
But if commercial surrogacy keeps growing, some fear it could change from a
medical necessity for infertile women to a convenience for the rich.

"You can picture the wealthy couples of the West deciding that pregnancy is
just not worth the trouble anymore and the whole industry will be farmed out,"
said Lantos.

Or, Lantos said, competition among clinics could lead to compromised safety
measures and "the clinic across the street offers it for 20 percent less and
one in Bangladesh undercuts that and pretty soon conditions get bad."

The industry is not regulated by the government. Health officials have issued
nonbinding ethical guidelines and called for legislation to protect the
surrogates and the children.

For now, the surrogate mothers in Anand seem as pleased with the arrangement
as the new parents.

"I know this isn't mine," said Jagrudi Sharma, 34, pointing to her belly.
"But I'm giving happiness to another couple. And it's great for me."

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