Honestly, you just have to ask yourself one question. Do you feel lucky punk? SM tipster Sabeena alerts us to this story at the BBC.

At a time when most children prepare to go to school, Saurabh Nagvanshi is off to the office.

Saurabh works at a police station in Raipur, the capital of India’s central state of Chhattisgarh. He is five years old.

He is part of an Indian system that allows a family member to take the post of a government employee who dies while in service.

There is no age limit and many families have no alternative but to send young children to work to make ends meet.

Saurabh has to feed a family of five and so his mother, Ishwari Devi Nagvanshi, holds his hand and takes him the 110km (68 miles) from Bilaspur, where they live, to Raipur.

Rest assured, Saurabh has been known to strike fear into the dark hearts of criminals:

He is quiet. If you try to talk to him he will either run away or hide behind his mother.

All joking aside this is a story that tugs at the heartstrings. There are a number of children in predicaments similar to that of Saurabh’s who are covered in the article. The money they bring in is a necessity for their poor families, but it comes at the expense of their childhood. Some human rights groups are raising objections to the system:

Subhash Mahapatra, president of a human rights organisation called Forum for Fact-finding, Documentation and Advocacy, goes further.

According to the Geneva Convention, he says, employing children as police officials and making them work at such a young age is against Indian and international laws.

“It is very similar to the definition of child soldiers as outlined by the United Nations,” he says.

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A massive Methamphetamine bust went down in Georgia recently. Close to 50 people were charged. GG2.net reports:

Around 50 Indian American convenience store owners and employees have been arrested, in Georgia, and charged with selling substances used in the illegal manufacture of methamphetamine (meth), a highly addictive stimulant.

An indictment unveiled in a US magistrateÂ’s court, on Monday, said the arrests were made in six Georgia counties over the past month under an operation to hunt down peddlers of meth ingredients. Several of those arrested have been released on bonds ranging from $10,000 to $50,000.

Some of the defence attorneys have accused the investigators of targeting immigrant merchants, most of them of Indian origin. Attorney Steven Sadow, who is representing six defendants, said he will investigate if officials singled out Indians in their “Operation Meth Merchant”.

“I want to know why they went after the Indians to begin with,” said Sadow. He proposes to file a motion to “dismiss all charges based on selective prosecution”. One of the defendants also asserted that the charges stemmed from stereotyping and generalisation.

A list of defendants can be read in the DOJ release. There are a lot of Patels up in there. It doesn’t immediately strike me as “selective prosecution.” I mean Indians do own a lot of convenience stores, and convenience stores do sell drugs. Of course a quick news brief doesn’t give the full story, especially the “convenience store demographics” of the area.

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New California Media, partnering with The Center for American Progress and the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights Education Fund have just released a poll that they claim shows that nearly half the country’s Hispanics, Asian Americans and other minorities prefer ethnic newspapers, television and radio to mainstream media. The poll is titled, The Ethnic Media in America: The Giant Hidden in Plain Sight. Several news organizations including Yahoo report:

Overall, ethnic media reach approximately 80 percent the groups studied — about 51 million people, or a quarter of the U.S. adult population.

“This is something that is growing like a giant hidden in plain sight,” said Sandy Close, executive director for NCM, a nationwide association of more than 700 ethnic media groups.

Many turn to foreign language newspapers and broadcasts because English isn’t their native language. Additionally, minority media often do a better job covering news from the homeland and other issues the community cares about.

“We have a multicultural society with multimedia choices, so people pay attention to media that pay attention to them. That’s the bottom line,” said Felix Gutierrez, professor of journalism at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California.

I am a little offended that the poll apparently did not consider ethnic blogs. Although I am obviously biased, it would seem to me that once blogs penetrate the consumer’s mind as an alternate source for news, the overall numbers in this poll will trend higher. Some additional highlights:

-The national reach of ethnic media was calculated by including all adults that watch ethnic television, listen to ethnic radio OR read ethnic newspapers on a regular basis.

-This group includes the 29 million “primary consumers of ethnic media” and another 22 million “secondary consumers of ethnic media” that prefer mainstream media but access ethnic media on a regular basis.

-The reach of Asian Indian, Filipino and Japanese newspapers is smaller but still impressive – more than half of the adults in these groups read an ethnic newspaper a few times a month or more.

-Access to the Internet is very high (67 percent) among all Asian Americans and half of them prefer ethnic websites to mainstream websites. Asian Indian adults access the Internet more often than other Asians.

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