India looks poised to allow 49 percent foreign direct investment in the aviation sector when the prime minister's cabinet meets Thursday, the Economic Times reports. But with the rule change effectively acting as a quasi-bailout for beleaguered Kingfisher Airlines, is the government playing favorites?

Vijay Mallya, beer baron and self-styled "king of good times," has admitted that despite his supposed business acumen it will take a miracle or a "policy change" to save the airline he launched in yet another attempt at aping Virgin's Richard Branson a few years back. But as a member of the upper house of India's parliament, the Rajya Sabha, he's lucky enough to have the political juice to make that happen.

He's not the only potential beneficiary, of course. The change could be good for state-owned Air India, too, which is just as bad off but considered too big to fail -- but only if the government ever decides to sell the albatross rather than sending billions of good money after bad to keep it afloat. And consumers might benefit from the entry of new players (though that will make it even harder for anybody to make a buck).

With fierce competition and high fuel prices hitting everybody, the aviation boom that saw carriers fighting over pilots and India adding nearly 20 international airports last year is officially over. So what are the stakes?

Washington is either exceedingly clever or incredibly stupid. The trouble is that we're never quite able to figure out which one, because we're never privy to all the information.

Take the recently announced $10 million “bounty” for information leading to the arrest and conviction of Hafiz Muhammad Saeed, the man that India claims heads Lashkar-e-Taiba and masterminded the November 2008 terrorist attacks on Mumbai, as well as countless other operations.

Upper crust India has indeed been "shaken" by the story of a 13-year-old housemaid whose employers locked her in their flat, too scared of a beating to eat anything after her rations ran out, while they vacationed in Thailand, as Jim Yardley points out in Thursday's New York Times.

But in focusing the debate on child labor, most everybody has missed the point -- however real that problem remains.

"In India, reported to have more child laborers than any other country in the world, child labor and trafficking are often considered symptoms of poverty: desperately poor families sell their children for work, and some end up as prostitutes or manual laborers," Yardley offers. "But the case last week of the 13-year-old maid is a reminder that the exploitation of children is also a symptom of India’s rising wealth, as the country’s growing middle class has created a surging demand for domestic workers, jobs often filled by children."

True enough.

"Despite a web of strong laws, the number of child workers in the country is substantial," the Hindustan Times writes in a staff editorial. "...The demand for such workers has been rising in India and the sorry state of affairs in the rural areas has only helped in stitching a demand-supply link, which is usually serviced by unscrupulous touts who indulge in child trafficking."

Shame!

"Out of the hundreds of child laborers rescued in the city every month, eight to nine are child domestic workers, according to figures provided by the Child Welfare Committees (CWC) in the city," an HT news feature adds. "Rescued from homes of the affluent who can afford to employ domestic workers and pay between Rs. 20,000 ($400) and Rs. 30,000 $600) for nine months in addition to a meager salary to the placement agencies, these children usually run away from the employers’ homes before being rescued by NGOs or the police."

I don't mean to underplay how terrible it is that so many people are still employing children, and I certainly don't want to belittle the abuse that these children sometimes suffer.  These are terrible stories, and terrible statistics, and they are damning about the casual acceptance of the worst abuses of feudalism in a society that in other respects claims to be one of the world's most progressive -- as far as they go.

But it irks me that only an egregious case such as this one -- a 13-year-old locked in while her employers are in Thailand! One couldn't invent better propaganda! -- can prompt any soul searching about labor conditions and the unfairness of society.  And I'm a little concerned that the holier than thou approach here -- "Gasp! People are employing children as maids!" -- has allowed everybody to pat themselves on the back as a nice, moral, well-meaning person who would never do such a thing.

The 1995 kidnapping of six foreign tourists in Kashmir in some ways marked the lowest point of the simmering separatist rebellion that has plagued the beautiful mountainous region -- though local residents could point to dozens of incidents that were as bad or worse and barely made headlines abroad.

The six tourists, Americans Don Hutchings and John Childs, Britons Keith Mangan and Paul Wells, German Dirk Hasert and Norwegian Hans Christian Ostro were allegedly abducted by Al Faran, an offshoot of the now defunct Harkat-ul-Mujahideen.