EVERY morning, Perumal Raja sets off to lay his nets, sitting on a boat made of a few rough-hewn logs lashed together. At first glance it looks like a piece of driftwood. But while his boat may be low-tech, he is armed with information from a thoroughly high-tech source. Unlike the thousands of other Indian fishermen who venture into the Bay of Bengal, Raja knows the latest weather forecasts and wave-height predictions, downloaded from a US Navy website.
Raja lives in Veerinpattinam, a village of a hundred or so brick and palm-leaf houses on the lush coast outside Pondicherry, just…
