Samaj Shastra

War with the FDI

2012-01-05T01:17:00.000-08:00

Soledom the Indian government thinks about the public welfare. General public cannot lobby with the power centres with huge bribes. Power brokers frequenting the power corridors give no space to the agonishing public. At this critical times, where is the possibility for the government to work out local specific programmes to handle the crisis situations. Blindly following other nations in our national matters only backfires. Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) in the retail sector sounds so hallow at a time when there is an all out price war and high inflation. The past experience with the foreign investment is not sweet. Without reviewing twenty years of liberalisation, any attempt to open up the sectors for speculative and fly by night investors will boomrang on the Indian society at large. FDI should be invited for the infrastructure sector and the areas where there is no expertise? Retail trade for FDI can wait till then.

Vandana Shiva writes in The Deccan Chronicle on 4 January 2012

In November 2011, when the UPA government announced in Parliament that it had cleared the entry of big retail chains like Wal-Mart and Tesco into India through 51 per cent FDI in multi-brand retail, it justified the decision saying that FDI in retail will boost food security and benefit farmers’ livelihoods. But the assurance that FDI in retail would ease inflation did not resolve the political crisis the government was facing; it deepened it. Parliament was stalled for several days of the Winter Session after which the government was forced to withdraw its decision.

The story of FDI in retail goes back to 2005 when Prime Minister Manmohan Singh signed an agriculture agreement with the US, along with the nuclear agreement. On the board of the US-India Knowledge Initiative in Agriculture, as it is called, sit Monsanto (the world’s leading producer of GM seed), ConAgra (among the world’s big agribusiness along with Cargill) and Wal-Mart (the world’s biggest retail giant).

Protests had prevented Wal-Mart’s entry into retail, but in 2007 it did get a backdoor entry through a joint-venture with Bharti (their stores go by the names of Easyday and Best Price Modern Wholesale). No backend infrastructure has been built so far, one of the other claims of the government about why we need retail giants.

The way the UPA government tried to ram through the decision on FDI in retail — without consulting the Opposition parties, or even its allies — was clearly undemocratic. But the decision itself is also flawed. It illustrates a disconnect between an ideology based on market fundamentalism which is the leaning of the present government, and the Indian reality of small farms and small retail. There is also a disconnect between that ideology with its codeword of “reform”, and the crisis that market fundamentalism is facing, worldwide as well as in India. If anything needs reform, it is the failed paradigm of corporate globalisation.

Firstly, price rise is driven by commodification of food and speculation on food commodities. Industralisation and globalisation of food and agriculture has transformed food from a source of life into a commodity, and as a commodity, food is divorced from its sources — the seeds, the soil, the farmer — and from its end use as nourishment for our bodies. Industrialisation of agriculture and commodification of food is justified on grounds of producing more food and reducing hunger. However, industrial agriculture wastes and destroys resources — the soil, the water, the biodiversity — which produce food. The book, American Wasteland, by Jonathan Bloom, reveals that the US wastes 50 per cent of the £591 billion of food it grows a year.

Industrialisation of food also degrades and denutrifies food. We, therefore, have a dual malnutrition crisis — the crisis faced by one billion people who do not get access to food, and another two billion who have access to industrial food but not to healthy food and suffer from food-related diseases such as obesity, diabetes and hypertension.

Industrialisation, thus, creates hunger. And by increasing the costs of production, it creates a negative economy, locking farmers and food producers into debt. In the Third World, debt translates into hunger.

Hunger is also created by the commodification of food. The industrial model of food production is producing commodities, not food. More commodities do not mean less hunger, but more. And when food becomes a commodity it becomes an object of speculation for profits, robbing the poor of their entitlements. As a commodity it does not matter what food is used for. Food can be transformed into feed for animals in factory farms, or into fuel to run cars. Seventy per cent of the food grain in the US is used to feed animals, 30 per cent to feed cars. The proposed increase through FDI will take this to 40 per cent, creating a conflict between feed and fuel, and pitting both against food. This diversion of food to feed and fuel competes with the food needs of the poor. It creates food scarcity and contributes to the rise in food prices.

When food is treated as a commodity, it does not matter how it is produced — whether GM seeds were used or not, whether it is produced chemically or organically. But how food is produced does determine what happens to our soil, biodiversity and water; it also determines whether farmers live or die. And how food is produced determines whether what we eat nourishes our bodies or contributes to disease and ill health.

When food is a commodity, it becomes the object of speculation. Putting food on the global casino takes food away from people’s kitchens and plates. Secondly, the entry of big corporations into the food chain polarises prices, decreasing the share of the farmer and increasing the retail costs. This polarisation of prices is structural; corporations make their profits through vertical integration and controlling the entire food chain. They buy cheap from farmers and sell at high cost when they have a monopoly. The control of big retail over the food system has brought down the farmers’ share to as little as two per cent.

Before liberalisation, the difference between wholesale prices and retail prices was a mere six per cent. After the removal of Quantitative Restrictions, which opened up India to dumping of subsidised products, wholesale prices started to go down while retail prices continued to climb. The entry of retail giants will further push wholesale prices down, without taming the price rise. It is not the number of middlemen that matters but the size of a middleman. A giant retailer is a giant middleman. It might be a single player, but it harvests super profits at the cost of society. That is how the Walton family, which owns Wal-Mart owns $100 billion of personal wealth, which is equivalent to the wealth of the bottom 30 per cent of the US society. You do not accumulate that kind of money by paying farmers higher prices and bringing consumers cheaper products. Wal-Mart and Tesco are not friends of farmers as is being projected by the government and corporate spokesmen.

The Financial Times said on November 28, 2011: “A consolidated retail sector would require consolidated agriculture to supply.” Consolidation means concentration, concentration means displacement of small farmers, destruction of small farmers means deepening both the food crisis and the agrarian crisis. Big retail means big agribusiness.

About 250,000 farmers have already committed suicide in India since 1997 because of increasing monopolies on seeds and chemicals, rising costs of inputs and deepening debt. Big retail will uproot small farmers, as it has done worldwide. India’s future cannot be “retail dictatorship” and “seed dictatorship”. It has to be “retail democracy” and “food democracy”, based on small retail and small farms.

The Arab Summer

2011-11-29T00:49:00.000-08:00

The Arab region is burning. Long standing democratic aspirations of its citizens have led to this sad situation. Many may think that the fall of Arab dictators will herald a better prospects for the region. Alas! truth is going to be different. The inherent contradictions in the Arab society may fuel further troubles. More specifically with Israel. So far the Arab dictators maintained a smooth rapport with Israel. Now the new regimes may venture in to so sort of adventurism with Israel which will play a spoilsport for the region.

Thomas L. Friedman writes in The Deccan Chronicle on 28 November 2011

In 2001, a book came out about George Mitchell’s diplomatic work in Northern Ireland that was entitled To Hell With the Future, Let’s Get On With the Past. One hopes that such a book will never be written about today’s Arab awakenings. But watching events unfold out there makes it impossible not to ask: Will the past bury the future in the Arab world or will the future bury the past?

I am awed by the bravery of the Syrian and Egyptian youths trying to throw off the tyranny of the Assad family and the Egyptian military. The fact that they go into the streets — knowing they face security forces who will not hesitate to gun them down — speaks of the deep longing of young Arabs to be free of the regimes that have so long choked their voices and prevented them from realising their full potential.

But I am deeply worried that the longer the fighting continues in Syria and Egypt, the less chance that any stable, democratising order will emerge anytime soon and the more likely that Syria could disintegrate into civil war. You can’t exaggerate how dangerous that would be. When Tunisia was convulsed by revolution, it imploded. When Egypt was convulsed by revolution, it imploded. When Libya was convulsed by revolution, it imploded. If Syria is convulsed by revolution, it will not implode. Most Arab states implode. Syria explodes.

Why? Because Syria is the keystone of the Levant. It borders and balances a variety of states, sects and ethnic groups. If civil war erupts there, every one of Syria’s neighbours will cultivate, and be cultivated by, different Syrian factions — Sunnis, Alawites, Kurds, Druse, Christians, pro-Iranians, pro-Hezbollahites, pro-Palestinians, pro-Saudis — in order to try to tilt Syria in their direction. Turkey, Lebanon, Hezbollah, Iraq, Iran, Hamas, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Israel all have vital interests in who rules in Damascus, and they will all find ways to partner with proxies inside Syria to shape events there. It will become a big Lebanon-like brawl.

Syria needs a peaceful democratic transition set in motion now. Ditto Egypt. But that is easier said than done. Events in both countries are a reminder of the multidimensional struggle for power across West Asia — what I once described as the struggle between “The Lexus and the Olive Tree”.

On one level, you have the very modern, deeply felt and truly authentic longing by Syrians and Egyptians for freedom, for the skills to thrive in modernity and for the rights of real citizens.

Outsiders often underestimate just how much these Arab youths are determined to limit the powers of their militaries as a necessary step for achieving true democracy. What you see in Egypt today are young people from across the political spectrum and classes who are willing to join forces, break ranks with their own parties and return to Tahrir Square to press for real freedom.

This is a generational rupture. It is the old versus the young. It is the insiders (the adults) versus the outsiders (the youth). It is the privileged old guard versus the disadvantaged young guard. These young Egyptians, and Syrians, who have stopped fearing their military masters, are determined to unleash a true transformation in their world. We should be on their side.

But the weight of their history is so heavy. The new Lexus-like values of “democracy”, “free elections”, “citizen rights” and “modernity” will have to compete with some very old Olive Tree ideas and passions. These include the age-old civil wars within Islam between Sunnis and Shias, over who should dominate the faith, the heated struggle between Salafists and modernists over whether the 21st century should be embraced or rejected, as well as the ancient tribal and regional struggles playing out within each of these societies.

Last, but not least, you have the struggle between the entrenched military/crony elites and the masses. These struggles from the “past” always threaten to rise up, consume any new movement for change and bury “the future”.

This is the grand drama now being played out in the Arab world — the deeply sincere youth-led quest for liberty and the deeply rooted quests for sectarian, factional, class and tribal advantage. One day it looks as though the revolutions in Egypt, Syria and Tunisia are going to be hijacked by forces and passions from the past while the next day that longing of young people to be free and modern pushes them back.

The same drama played out in Iraq, but there the process was managed, at a huge cost, by an American midwife — managed enough so that the communities were able to write a new, rudimentary social contract on how to live together and, thereby, give the future a chance to bury the past. But we still do not know how it will end in Iraq.

We know, though, that there will be no impartial outside midwife to guide the transitions in Egypt, Syria, Tunisia, Libya and Yemen. Can they each make it without one?
Only if they develop their own Nelson Mandelas — unique civic leaders or coalitions who can honour the past, and contain its volcanic urges, but not let it bury the future.

Clean Mr.P.M!

2011-08-19T01:35:00.000-07:00

Being loyal is different from being a Prime Minister of a billion plus population. Dr. Manmohan Singh has got unfortunately the dummy P.M tag from every corner of the society. On the one hand, powerful leader starved world looks Indian P.M as the powerful among the powerless alot on the other hand, Indian public feels betrayed by his experience and eminence. Running a puppet government for the past 7 years, Manmohan has alot of clean up job. First is to clean up his polluted image as the puppet prime minister. Second to get his act together and reform the economy. Third walk away from the sycophants and lead an independent decision maker life. Unless and untill these are done, India will continue to watch helplessly the helpless P.M.

Bharat Karnad writes in The Deccan Chronicle on 18 August 2011

It is curious that India and the United States — the two most important democracies in the world today, have in Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and President Barack Obama, chief executives who, it turns out, share traits that the Washington Post columnist, E.J. Dionne, Jr., identified as Mr Obama’s hallmark, namely, being at once risk-averse and competitive. In the three weeks this writer recently spent in America, it was impossible to escape the incessant drumbeat in the media about the economy on the skids, raising of the national debt ceiling amidst rancorous partisanship, the loss of “Triple A” credit rating, and an ascendant China, fearing its huge investment in some 13 per cent of the US Treasury bonds issued being reduced to waste paper, furiously wagging a finger at Washington, demanding Americans live within their means. (In all this gloom, amusement was afforded visiting Indians and NRIs, at least, by the website of a major Indian newspaper heralding an Indian as having “downgraded the United States”!) Meanwhile, at the centre of the hubbub, Mr Obama stayed on the sidelines, mostly disengaged, even as Republican Party Right-wingers called him names. It felt like home. With scams and scandals of all kinds coming home to roost within the Congress Party portals, bad economic news dogging his every step, Dr Singh, other than sleep-talking through much the same Red Fort speech he has made the last seven years on Independence Day, has stayed mum, barricading himself in 7 Race Course Road, a mute spectator to things going horribly wrong for his government and for him personally. Except, unlike Mr Obama, the Indian Prime Minister is no mass leader nor a political visionary; even less is he an orator able to turn around a disbelieving public. His public speeches actually set many a teeth on edge. Dr Singh hopes to keep warbling the same old song without taking any of the follow-up actions he has been promising these many years to implement the second-generation economic reforms desperately needed to shift the economy to a higher plane. But transforming India into a powerful growth engine, at a minimum, requires overhauling archaic labour laws and instituting new land acquisition norms in order to give fillip to industry, and boosting the rural economy by freeing the agricultural sector from export and other restrictions, none of which is being done because of fear of the faux socialists — Messrs Mulayam Singh, Amar Singh, Lalu Prasad Yadav, and Company, and the unpredictable politics of Mayawati. It is another matter that these worthies have, so far, been held in check by the ruling party manipulating the CBI corruption cases against them. But general economic up-gearing and CBI threats nevertheless entail risks because, overdone, these measures may persuade these leaders to join with the BJP-led Opposition to bring down the Congress-led coalition government. And risk-taking of any kind, especially with so much at stake, goes against Dr Singh’s over-cautious nature and party chief Sonia Gandhi’s plans. After all he is a career bureaucrat hoisted, for reasons of zero-threat to the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty and his personal malleability, to the top post in government, an arrangement that permits Mrs Gandhi to keep her hand on the steering wheel, a control now reinforced by her chosen civil servant, Pulok Chatterji, replacing T.K.A Nair as principal secretary to the Prime Minister. The corporate bosses’ understanding of the turgid pace of economic reforms is limited by the automotive metaphor they have used. Y.C. Deveshwar of Indian Tobacco Company in the August 2 meeting with finance minister Pranab Mukherjee reportedly ventured that the problem lay with two drivers — one pressing the accelerator, the other the brake. It’s a view similar to the Infosys founder N.R. Narayana Murthy’s that the government’s “culture of taking slow decisions” is attributable to “two leaders in the set-up”. While such takes on reality seem reasonable at first glance, they are wrong in their essentials, in the main, because they assume that Dr Singh is driven by the desire for systemic change. The fact is he never had his foot on the accelerator, even as Mrs Gandhi never lifted hers from the brake pedal for fear that any forward movement would undermine the ruling party’s pseudo-Leftist moorings. Indira Gandhi’s Garibi Hatao-brand of crude populism masquerading as socialism is the true ideological lodestar of the Congress Party, not the quaint Fabian socialist tenets that animated Jawaharlal Nehru’s policies. Dr Singh, the ultimate apparatchik and beneficiary of the system, in the event, has a disincentive to burnish his reformist credentials, such as they are, if that involves crossing the party line. Mrs Gandhi, on her part, may understand little about socialism other than that it has kept her family in the clover for a very long time. But it is sufficient reason for her to stay with the socialist rhetoric, statist solutions, and a horrendous state apparatus, which together have turned corrupt practices and mis-governance into a thriving cottage industry. Where corruption is concerned, Dr Singh and Mr Obama are somewhat similarly placed. Personally clean, Mr Obama owes his meteoric rise from a grassroots organiser in Chicago to the corrupt Democratic Party political machine ruthlessly run, gangster style, first by mayor Richard J. Daley, who bequeathed the machine to his son, the even longer serving Richard Michael Daley, whose brother, William J. Daley, incidentally, is Mr Obama’s White House Chief of Staff. Dr Singh may not be corrupt himself, but that is small consolation considering he is presiding over a government that, going by the sheer extent, scale and magnitude of the loot indulged in by his party members and Cabinet colleagues, is patently the most corrupt in independent India’s history, and one that may be headed for a downfall. The muck has long ago stuck to the Prime Minister’s escutcheon. So, when he repeatedly declares that the corrupt will face punishment, who takes him seriously?

Lands Laws and Public Dreams

2011-08-10T00:49:00.000-07:00

Reaching the pinnacle of power triggers good work in the minds and hearts of elected rulers of the world. This happens double delight way to those who are in the democratic setup. The democratically elected rulers wanted to repay the debt to the voters. Hence there is rush of adrenalin to do something immediate and getting into the good books of public. Mamata Banerjee entered public life three decades ago by doing this kind of stunt politics and catching the eyes of the public. There is no surprise in her doing the same methodological stunt after taking over as the first woman chief minister of West Bengal. The Land Acquisition Bill, beautification of Kolkata, Howrah river cleaning, pro poor schemes are few of the many miracles she is waiting to anvil for the people of Bengal. One has to keep fingers crossed and watch her plans getting realised in next five years..

Indranil Banerjie writes in The Deccan Chronicle on 8 August 2011

West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee might well be the political paradigm of our times. Last week, she stood by the River Hooghly and announced amidst much fanfare and media attention a multi-crore rupee riverside beautification programme, in accordance with her pre-poll promise to make Kolkata another London. Like a modern-day Victoria, Ms Banerjee promised to reward the city mayor if he could complete the project in four instead of the projected six months. She either omitted to mention or did not know that the municipality was facing an acute cash crunch and had been instructed to slash development expenditure on sewage works, roads, health schemes, slum development and water supply. The reality is that Kolkata’s finances are in dire straits and although the honourable chief minister has decreed that Kolkata will be another London she really has no means to effect that transformation.

Ms Banerjee’s method of producing a public good through the waving of a make-believe magic wand is not her invention. Successive railway ministers, herself included, have shown the way by announcing new trains to woo politically important constituencies without bothering to first increase capacities in the railways. But that is not the concern of the modern-day Indian politician, who believes that public goods, public capacities and public revenues are nothing but means to further political aims.

The workings of the decree and be damned attitude are evident in two crucial pieces of legislation that are in the works. The first is the Land Acquisition Bill, vital for both development and social justice, and greatly overdue. The problem is not so much the provisions of the bill but the attempt to make it effective in retrospect. This means all the land acquired in the past decades to build townships all over the country would be affected. This would plunge the country into a frenzy of litigation and social turmoil.

This would not merely affect the middle classes who have bought houses in towns such as Noida and Gurgaon but would also bring down the fortunes of states like Uttar Pradesh and Haryana which depend on new urban clusters for economic development. Any sensible government would not have considered passing such a sensitive piece of legislation with retrospective effect; unfortunately, the bigger concern here appears to be the need for a regime change in a state ruled by a political rival.

The Food Security Act is another conjuror’s trick. Unexceptionable in intent, the legislation is completely unaffordable and impossible to implement fairly. As it is, the government is having a hard time paying subsidy on the existing Public Distribution System (PDS), the bill for which is climbing exponentially; it jumped 65 per cent in 2010-11 to over Rs 74,000 crore from Rs 58,228 crore in the previous year.

While the food subsidy bill is skyrocketing, much of the food meant for the poor continues to be stolen. The World Bank has warned that 60 per cent of food subsidies do not reach the poor and that it would be folly to push more money into a putrefying system without first fixing it.

The Right to Education (RTE) Act passed in 2009 is another example of how little can be achieved by mere legislation and budgetary allocations. A New Delhi-based NGO, Accountability Initiative, has pointed out that currently only an estimated 11 per cent of government schools have the necessary infrastructure as per the act and several thousand crores would have to be pumped in to bring them to minimum standards.

It is not as if the government is being miserly; it has in fact upped expenditure on the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyaan from Rs 15,000 crore in 2010-11 to Rs 21,000 crore for this fiscal year. This money is to be transferred to state governments for implementing the scheme. Problem is there are no mechanisms to enforce basic performance parameters in government schools; absent teachers, broken-down school buildings and abysmal academic standards have become the norm. Even in rural India more and more parents are sending their children to private school if they can afford it. India still has the largest number of illiterates in the world.

No one can dispute that the country needs more prosperity but little can be achieved by pompous promulgations and financial allocations read out in Parliament. In the past, politicians relied on strategising, long-term planning, gradual accretion of assets and building capacities to implement public development initiatives. They scoured the world for appropriate technology, expertise and finances; managers and workers were trained for the new enterprises; and it was through this process that the country was built up.

It would be a wonderful world if poverty, hunger and ignorance could be removed by decree; but this has not happened anywhere in the world, not in the erstwhile Soviet Union or China, and will not happen in India either. What will happen instead is that the government would fast become insolvent, paying out the bulk of its earnings on subsidies and interest payments, borrowing funds it cannot afford, slashing expenditure on new investments and infrastructure, and gradually but surely running the country into the ground. Already, in fiscal 2010-11, interest payments and subsidies accounted for 49 per cent of the Central government’s non-plan expenditure.

Given the country’s severely eroded mechanisms for implementing development projects, enforcing laws, adjudicating disputes coupled with the enormous corruption machinery that drains the financial allocation system, the politics of decrees translates to very little on the ground. Yet politicians continue to wave their mythical wands and hope the electorate will remain enthralled.

Helpless government should go

2011-07-26T05:43:00.000-07:00

Despite having a renowned economist as the Prime Minister and several stalwarts like Pranab Mukherjhee, P.Chidambaram, etal the Union Government is sinking ship every moment. The common perception is that the government works for the rich and ignores the poor. Some one aptly captured UPA as the reverse Robinhood - robbing the poor and paying the rich. Oh! the helpless UPA government for the sake a billion Indians do something to change your helpless state.

Bharat Karnad writes in The Deccan Chronicle on 20 July 2011

On June 29, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh met with the editors of a few newspapers.

When asked about whether he had been putting pressure on the environment ministry (then headed by Jairam Ramesh) to overlook environmental violations of several projects, Dr Singh said yes, and justified his action thus: “As Gandhiji said, ‘Poverty is the biggest polluter’.

We need to have a balance.” The Prime Minister was probably referring to what Indira Gandhi had said at the first UN Environment Conference in Stockholm in 1972: “Are not poverty and need the greatest polluters?” In that same speech, she had also quoted from the Atharva Veda:

“What of thee I dig out, let that quickly grow over,
Let me not hit thy vitals, or thy heart.”

Dr Singh conveniently ignored the more significant quote. The Prime Minister’s duty is to uphold the Constitution and nation’s laws, including environmental laws, not subvert them. By admitting that he has been putting pressure on the environment ministry, Dr Singh admitted that he was, indeed, subverting the law. Most commentators view the removal of Mr Ramesh from the environment ministry during the July 12 Cabinet reshuffle as a further step in environmental deregulation.

While quoting Indira Gandhi to justify his subversion of environmental law, the Prime Minister forgot that it was Indira Gandhi who created the country’s environmental governance structure; he forgot that it was Indira Gandhi’s intervention that strengthened the call of movements and scientists not to build a hydro-electric project in Silent Valley in Kerala, thereby saving a biodiversity rich ecosystem. And it was Indira Gandhi’s concern that Mussorie, the Queen of Hills, was being stripped naked by limestone mining that led to the Supreme Court order that shut down the mines in 1983.

In pre-liberalisation days, it was accepted that if commerce undermines ecosystems which support life, then commercial activity must stop, because life must carry on. Article 21 of the Constitution makes it the duty of the state to protect life. Since ecological processes support life, the state has a duty to protect ecology. Under Dr Singh’s leadership since the 1990s, based as it is on “growth fetishism”, all ecological devastation has been justified in the name of growth. But who is driving this ecological devastation and pollution? The rich and powerful corporations or the poor and powerless farmers, tribals and displaced rural communities who become urban slum dwellers?

The poor do not cause the pollution, but live in polluted places because they are displaced from their homes in rural areas where they lived sustainably for millennia. This is environmental injustice and it is an inevitable consequence of outsourcing of pollution from rich countries in the garb of FDI.

Coastal Orissa is a case in point. In the Jagatsingpur district, where Posco’s giant steel plant is planned with a massive FDI ($12 billion), farmers grow betel and paddy, coconut and cashew, fruits and fish. There is no pollution and no waste. There is a prosperity that the GDP does not count. This economy of sustenance is being uprooted violently to enable Posco to export our iron-ore and steel. Every law of the land, including the Forest Rights Act and the Coastal Zone Regulation Act, is being violated. But when the committees of the ministry of environment confirm the violations, the Prime Minister puts pressure on the environment minister to give approval to Posco. The women and children of Govindpur, Dhinkia and Nuagaon lay down under a scorching sun to stop the land grab in June. They know what the Posco project will bring: ecological destruction, pollution, displaced people and the destruction of our democracy.

In India, the major polluters are the giant coal-based power plants and industries, like the automobile. Emissions from the use of fossil fuel are driven by the economically powerful, not the poor. But it is the poor who are most vulnerable to the floods, droughts and cyclones that climate change intensifies.

The same applies to toxic pollution. A case in point is the pesticide, Endosulfan. The UN has banned it. Most countries in the world have banned it. The Supreme Court has ordered an interim ban after it was reported that over a thousand people have died and more than 9,000 crippled in Kasargod where Endosulfan was sprayed on cashew plantations for 20 years. The innocent victims did not cause the toxic pollution. It was caused by powerful corporations who influence decisions, who have blocked a ban on Endosulfan even as people die and children are born disabled.

Toxic agrichemicals harm all life. Synthetic fertilisers run into rivers and oceans, creating “dead zones”. Nitrogen oxide released from nitrogen fertilisers accumulates in the atmosphere as a green house gas that is 300 times more damaging than carbon dioxide. These synthetic fertilisers also make bombs, as the recent terrorist attacks in Mumbai and the Oklahoma bombings have shown.

We now have a new form of pollution in agriculture — genetic pollution from genetically engineered crops. Genetic pollution is destroying biodiversity and devastating farmers’ livelihoods. The chemical corporations are the gene giants who now control seed. Here too, instead of being the voice of poor and vulnerable farmers, the Prime Minister is the voice of powerful global corporations through his repeated reference to genetic engineering as the second Green Revolution.

Whether it is atmospheric pollution, toxic pollution, genetic pollution or urban waste pollution, all environmental pollution is an externality of a greed-based economy which privatises natural resources and socialises pollution. The rich accumulate the land, the biodiversity, the water, the air and the profits; the poor bear the burden of dispossession and accumulated pollution. We expect the Prime Minister to uphold the Constitution and environmental laws. We do not expect him to support and promote the polluters. We expect the Prime Minister to remember that he holds our precious natural heritage and natural capital in trust for future generations, not to be given away to greedy corporations and destroyed for short-term profits.

The Murdoch Syndrome

2011-07-25T03:00:00.000-07:00

Till the phone hacking scandal broke out, Rupert Murdoch was dominating the global media space. The disgrace came suddenly and took away all the reputation he had acquired through right and wrong means. Finally the man had bow down his head and accept a heart quake. For years, his group has been doing all the dirty work to capture world eyeballs. Unfortunately they couldn't sustain their model of media dominance. The verdict is out, Murudoch is clearly out of the good books of the public and Government corridors atleast for the time being.

Robert Cohen writes in The Deccan Chronicle on 20 July 2011

Peter Oborne, writing in the conservative Daily Telegraph, recently suggested that the Conservative British Prime Minister, David Cameron, was not merely in a mess, he “is in a sewer”. That seems about right. Cameron lost it over Rupert Murdoch. He showed staggering lack of judgement in hiring Andy Coulson, the former News of the World editor, as his first director of communications at Downing Street, a hubristic decision made against the best advice and apparently with a dual aim: to show he was not an old Etonian “toff” and to get favourable treatment from the 37 per cent of the British print media owned by Murdoch.

He then spent a fair chunk of time during his first year in office in 26 meetings with various News Corp honchos, including Rebekah Brooks, who was arrested by the British police on July 17. Brooks happened to be part of the Chipping Norton set, well described by Oborne as “an incestuous collection of louche, affluent, power-hungry and amoral Londoners, located in and around the Prime Minister’s Oxfordshire constituency”.

When I was at Oxford University many decades ago, the surrounding countryside was still just that — countryside and a delight. That was before the masters of the universe starting acquiring their Cotswold gems as weekend homes and gentrification went into overdrive, complete with helipads, of course. Brooks and her husband live a few miles from Cameron’s constituency home. Matthew Freud, the public relations guru married to Elisabeth Murdoch, also has a weekend home in the area. Chipping Norton was the limestone British Camelot. Who would have dreamt it?

Cameron’s judgment is in serious question. His coalition’s earlier green light for News Corp.’s acquisition of the 61 per cent of British Sky Broadcasting that it does not own — a deal now aborted — demands further scrutiny. It is hard to resist the impression that Cameron was completely in the thrall of Brooks, Murdoch and his son James Murdoch. I had thought there was more to the Prime Minister than slickness.

But it is not only Cameron who is in the sewer. The culture of the United Kingdom as a whole has been reeking pungently of late — its venal, voyeuristic, reality-show-obsessed, me-me-me nature thrust under the magnifying glass by revelations about what the tabloid press would do to satisfy the prurience of its readers, hacking into phones at any price, even the phone of a 13-year-old murdered girl. It may be debated to what degree Murdoch created this culture, or reinforced it, through his ruthless, no-holds-barred approach to journalism — and its ultimate deviation into criminal activity.

Certainly he had a significant role. The police and members of Parliament were compromised. But would Western societies, including the United States, be betraying these same characteristics — obsession with celebrities (and especially their sex lives); blurring of the lines between news and entertainment; extreme self-indulgence (I am my Facebook Wall); a dearth of political principle and a surfeit of political attraction to money — without Murdoch?

I suspect they would.
The Murdoch story is a cautionary tale for our times that goes well beyond the now-compromised fortunes of News Corp.
The United States, after all, has been doing its own good impression of life in the political sewers recently. Republican ideologues with no notion of the national interest do their brinkmanship number as the country hovers near an unthinkable default. The only thought in their heads seems to be: How will all this play next year in the election and how can we hurt US President Barack Obama without being blamed for it?

Is the calculation of these Republicans that different from Cameron’s? It’s all about the next news cycle, and spin, and ego, and where the money for political campaigns is, and a total absence of judgment. What it’s not about is responsibility and the commonweal.

Murdoch is a flawed genius whose very ruthlessness has now led him to his comeuppance. He knew, more viscerally than anyone, what postmodern societies wanted to satisfy their twisted appetites and he provided that material in all its gaudiness. I don’t think he created those appetites. But he sure fed them.

Something deeply insidious and corrupt is at work that has been on view in both Britain and the United States. It involves the takeover of politics by money and spin and massaged images and privileged coteries. It is the death of statesmanship.

Murdoch’s Fox News has played a big role. But all the major technological and other forces in Western societies are pushing towards polarisation. Google is profiling you through your searches and directs you to the material most likely to reinforce your world view and ideology. Increasingly, we live in our political comfort zone. Debate and dialogue die. The sordid dance of Cameron and Murdoch has ended up revealing deep flaws in the British society that are also deep problems in Western societies as a whole. Will the two men recover? Cameron is much younger and so in theory he should be able to claw his way out of the sewer. But I’m not sure he will get over this. Murdoch has more backbone and so a better chance, even at this late stage.

Collapsing UPA 2

2011-06-21T02:04:00.000-07:00

Efficient ministers, bureaucrats, judiciary and party organisation are needed to run a democratic setup effectively. Unfortunately the UPA is encouraging sycophants and liars. Those who are willing to put across the problems are kicked out or not given audience. The result of this myopic attitude of the top brass of the UPA is total chaos in the government. Without knowing the consequences the government is blindly supporting such chamchas. The best telling examples are that of handling of 2G , Adarsh scam, Common Wealth Games, Lokpal and many more. UPA fielded Kapil Sibal to counter the allegations. Good! he saved the government from complete collapse. But to save the situations he has been telling a string of lies. Considering all Indians as fools, the UPA faces are keep reeling lies without an iota of shyness. From the mishandling of Common Wealth games to Adarsh Society scam to 2G to Petroleum mess up to national security issues to Lokpal, UPA is on the fast path of death. Rest in Peace!

Ashok Malik writes in The Deccan Chronicle on 21 June 2011

Six months have passed since 2011 began and increasingly this is being written off as India’s wasted year. Caught — some would say enthralled — by domestic political theatre, it has been easy for India to ignore the wider implications of the series of corruption scandals, a paralysed government and policy and public initiatives being hijacked by amateurs belonging to one or the other civil society platform.

India will survive 2011, survive the United Progressive Alliance government and survive this storm. Yet the India story has been substantially damaged. From falling foreign investment figures to rising home-grown pessimism, the signs are telling. It is for us to read them.

There is a substantial change from even eight months ago, when US President Barack Obama addressed Parliament and called India a power that had emerged and deserved permanent Security Council membership. This summer a vacancy arose at Roosevelt House, home of the American ambassador in New Delhi. If India were still the India of Mr Obama’s praise, there would have been a clamour in Washington, D.C., for the India job. Political high-fliers would have lobbied for themselves.

Instead, a veteran diplomat — an old India hand admittedly — has been appointed. He is a trusted professional but not the sort of “A list” insider the United States President would have sent to India if it were really top of his mind. The Americans are not alone. One by one many ancient demons are coming back to haunt perceptions of India. Egregious corruption, ineffectual governance, inability to promptly honour contracts, failure to appear consistent in economic or strategic policy and goal-making: the doubts are surfacing again.

From Australia to the Netherlands, a clutch of foreign missions is constantly urging the ministry of external affairs to help clear payments to Australian or Dutch (or other) companies for services rendered during the Commonwealth Games. There have been no definite answers offered. The government is too scared to approve any payments till investigations into Games-related embezzlement are over. This could take years. In at least one case, an Australian company of long standing has gone bankrupt.

These may seem minor incidents but they are adding up. Exasperation with India, disgust with its venal and unreformed political system and concern it is slipping back to its mid-1990s (or even pre-1990s) ostrich-headed world view is growing. It would be futile to run away from that reality. In the past year India has not just stayed where it is; it has actually lost ground.

It is facile to pretend India is paying the price for democracy. Everything from coalition governments — and the failure of the Prime Minister to rein in wild political partners who may have won elections in a specific state — to Baba Ramdev submitting a list of outlandish demands, to lack of urgency on infrastructure reforms till a mythical “unanimity” is achieved can be blamed, rationalised and explained in the name of democracy.

Unfortunately, this so-called “democracy tax” is an excuse for a line of least resistance. That apart, while India’s commitment to universal franchise and free speech are applauded worldwide, the rest of the planet is driven by both political processes and economic outcomes. For India’s external stakeholders, it is not an “either/or” situation.

Global powers began to take India seriously in about 2002-2003 due to a happy confluence of phenomena. India’s economy shifted gears and GDP growth rates zoomed. The outsourcing boom matured. Key sectors — pharmaceuticals, automobiles — started to offer early evidence of India’s manufacturing prowess.

In parallel, India adopted a sober, pragmatic and modern foreign policy. It went out of its way to allay apprehensions that it was an unpredictable international actor that harboured adventurist tendencies. Finally, the US presence in Afghanistan and pressure on the Taliban and its backers in Pakistan took care of some of India’s near-term security apprehensions.

Other than 9/11 and the US intervention in Kabul, none of those events happened without effort on India’s part. Each was a hard won victory. Today, all three props of that edifice are vulnerable. The economy is shaky. A combination of high interest rates and a downbeat mood is keeping consumers from buying and manufacturers from increasing capacities (and so creating jobs).

In economic and foreign policy alike, the government has not fulfilled the potential India had demonstrated. Infrastructure, retail, land acquisition, an agricultural technology revolution, a genuine manufacturing thrust: India has been regurgitating the same promises and citing the problems for a half decade now. Where is the movement?

As for foreign policy, a country that was rewarded with an exceptional nuclear deal three years ago — the rules of global nuclear commerce rewritten only to accommodate India — has reverted to trademark diffidence. It barely counts even in Afghanistan, where the Americans are pushing for talks with the Taliban if only to give Mr Obama space and make symbolic “the tide is turning” gestures for his planned 2012 re-election. In short, India’s decade of good fortune is over.

Of course what this also means is that the supposed India-China rivalry has, in the medium term at least, devolved into a no-contest. India has chosen the worst moment to resort to navel gazing, give its economy sleeping pills and doggedly aim for strategic self-goals. In the past few months, China’s stock has actually risen. Its consumers are beginning to buy more, not enough for the West to be satisfied but more than the Chinese were willing to concede when the financial crisis broke in 2008.

The importance of China to the global economy is difficult for Indians to appreciate. In Canberra, the Prime Minister refuses to meet the Dalai Lama lest China — the largest buyer of Australian commodities — is offended. In something as obscure as the wine trade, expectation of demand from Chinese wine drinkers and collectors is pushing up 2011 prices to levels where these are 20 per cent above an anyway overheated 2010 market. In Asia, middle classes from Indonesia to the Philippines are increasingly looking to a life under the Chinese umbrella.

None of these groups and individuals has an option; and the India of 2011 is not even a ghost of an option.

Weak government attracts strong troubles

2011-06-12T07:36:00.000-07:00

A weak government with string of scandals attract strong troubles. this is clearly evident from the everyday happenings in the UPA government. Baba Ramdev who commands lakhs of followers through his yoga teachings and marketing strategies is the latest personality who challenged the weak kneed UPA. Coalition partners, opposition members, underworld dons, naxalities, external threats and other innumberable troubles keep attacking the government at the centre. Its inept handling is compounding the existing crisis. May be the UPA feels great after putting off Ramdev's fast at the Ramlila grounds at Delhi. But actually it is weakening its position day by day.

The Deccan Chronicle writes on 6th June 2011

After both sides struck an initial stance of reasonableness, the government reckoned that yoga guru Ramdev was probably disinclined to end his protest campaign at Delhi’s Ramlila Grounds, although he had agreed to do so in a letter submitted the previous day to the government ministers negotiating with him.

Sensing that the Ramdev movement had, in effect, been organised by the RSS, and then finding arch communal troublemaker Sadhvi Rithambara, known for spewing venom against the minorities, was sharing the Ramlila Ground stage with the yoga teacher, it was expected that concern and alarm would follow in official circles, not to say among a broad swathe of public opinion.

The eviction of the saffron-wrapped yoga teacher and his followers by the Delhi police from the Ramlila Grounds past midnight on Saturday thus occasions little surprise. It transpires that Baba Ramdev had sought official permission to hold a “yoga camp” there but instead he nourished a political jamboree seeking to instigate people against the government. This was unfortunate.

Baba Ramdev had told followers that 90 per cent of his demands had already been met. Some of the issues raised by the yoga guru are indeed reasonable. The corruption question finds an echo among all sections of citizens.

It is beyond considerations of party politics and ideology. The Centre, for instance, can without delay clear legislation — one of Ramdev’s key demands — intended to provide relief to ordinary people against petty harassment and bribe-extraction at service delivery points, for instance when picking up a ration card, a driving licence, a water connection or a death certificate.

When governments don’t take care of such basic needs of citizens, they lay themselves open to the charge of imperviousness, and typically fire middle and lower middle class angst, which generally drives protests in urban India.

Worse, in such situations, an absence of governmental initiative makes possible large-scale mobilisation of disgruntled elements — as we saw in the case of Ramdev and Anna Hazare. Such collectives can be exploited to irresponsible ends by demagogues of any hue — from Naxalites on the far left to the communal far right.

Popular concern and frustration with the official machinery has been exacerbated by instances of corruption in high places that have come to light in the last eight or nine months, detracting from the government’s moral authority. Even so, it would be foolish and dangerous if society permitted half-baked ideas of demagogues to take hold, and permit such elements an opportunity to overrun the system.

It cannot be overemphasised that, in particular, the issue of repatriation of black money in foreign tax havens is complex and not amenable to overnight solutions as it presupposes negotiations with foreign governments. The idea of declaring all Indian black money overseas a national asset is even more complicated.

After the police action at Ramlila Grounds, it is a pity that a national party like the BJP lost perspective and begun comparing it with the Emergency. It would be useful to remember that if it were indeed the Emergency once again, the party would not be free to belt out anti-government messages from the podium of its national executive in Lucknow.

Loose mouthed ministers

2011-05-28T02:52:00.000-07:00

The UPA government has been running into rough weather due to incoherent opinion airing ministers and members. In the name of free speech, the UPA representatives have been foul mouthing about their own establishment. Of course, free speech is the hallmark of the Indian democracy. But most of the responsible people misuse their freedom and damage the government and the nation. In the cabinet system, members are entitled to differ, oppose and object to the policies and programmes proposed. Once the discussions are over and the proposal gets the cabinet nod then there is no question of difference of opinion coming from the cabinet members. This is like sleeping while on duty and shouting after the job is over. Immediately this kind of duty sleeping people should be kicked out of the government.

Antara Dev Sen writes in The Deccan Chronicle on 28 May 2011

The damage control has begun. Three days after the minister of state for environment and Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT) alumnus, Mr Jairam Ramesh, said that IITs and IIMs (Indian Institutes of Management) were not world-class institutions because their faculty and quality of research were not good enough, the government has protested. Yes, the IITs are world class, says Mr Kapil Sibal, Union minister for human resources development. Well, er, at least 25 per cent of the faculty is, anyway, since they are IIT alumni and Mr Ramesh says that the students are world class. And if their research work was not top international quality, it is because of the “ecosystem” — where the US spends $250 billion on research, India spends merely $8 billion.

So while Mr Sibal declares that IITs are world class, his logic implies the reverse. Sure, we understand the constraints of the “ecosystem”. Though we may not accept that a quarter of their faculty is world class because they were once world-class students (which has no direct bearing on their quality as teachers). But what could the government do when the image of their top educational brand is trashed? The nation is paying an education cess, remember?

This muddled, half-hearted, sarkari response characterises the attitude of the government in education. There are two issues here: the quality of our centres of excellence and the quality of education in India. First, the obvious. Are the IITs, apparently the crowning glory of our education system, world class? Depends. These are certainly excellent institutes. As Mr Ramesh said, they have some of our best students. And contrary to what he said, they do produce some remarkable research. But if the faculty is not “world class” it is because no one can fly high if tied to the apron strings of a stern yet callous government. Unless IITs — and other government-funded institutions — have the freedom to hire and fire teachers at their discretion and at better salaries, and the liberty to operate as they see fit, the best minds will escape to greener, freer pastures. Institutions may need regulation, but not crushing control. Also, the government has launched new IITs without hiring faculty, further pressuring existing IIT teachers.

Besides, no government-linked institution in today’s India is truly world class, is it? Except for our institutionalised corruption, of course. According to Transparency International, India has an integrity score of 3.3, which makes it one of the most corrupt nations of the world. Happiness!
A close second would be our institutionalised callousness. Take our home ministry dealing with top terror suspects from Pakistan — not exactly a low priority field. The error attacks in our attempts at cornering Pakistan with hard evidence are almost as terrifying as the terror attacks themselves. First we sent the wrong DNA sample, claiming it to be Ajmal Kasab’s. “A minor clerical error”, shrugged home minister P. Chidambaram. Then it transpired that two men on India’s list of most wanted terrorists allegedly hiding in Pakistan were in India — one in jail and the other out on bail. “An oversight”, said the minister. “A genuine human error.” Meanwhile, our investigative institution of excellence, the Central Bureau of Investigation, had reached Copenhagen to extradite Kim Davy, prime accused in the Purulia arms drop, with an expired warrant. Naturally, the Danish court refused. Yes, we are world toppers in institutional callousness.

Anyway, returning to the IIT issue, it’s possible that the students make these institutes centres of excellence. Among 1.21 billion citizens, millions may be born with world-class intellect — then put into a system that meticulously constrains, limits, erodes and smothers talent and imagination. Naturally IIT students are brilliant — that’s why they are selected. And they have had less exposure to the harsh Indian social, political and cultural environment. The poor teachers have been dented, blunted, clipped and chipped by the system.

This smothering of natural capabilities begins even before birth. We are killing more daughters than ever before through foeticide and infanticide. At 914 girls for 1,000 boys, this year’s census shows the worst child sex ratio ever. And criminal neglect of women also affects babies allowed to live. The mother’s health determines the health and development of the unborn child — and our pregnant and new mothers are so neglected that our future generations are born less healthy and already disadvantaged for learning. Poorer Indians grow up with less nutrition and fewer options for education, sometimes with no access to education at all. Worst off are girls and the lower castes, who face the double whammy of poverty and social discrimination.

Successive governments have addressed these problems, though the education budget has rarely crossed three per cent of the gross domestic product. The Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan helped. The new Right to Education Act promising free and compulsory education to all children between six and 14 years offers huge hope. Integrated Child Development Schemes (ICDS) and Mid-Day Meal (MDM) Schemes certainly help in giving nutritional support and incentives for educating the future generations. And starting hundreds of new schools may indeed offer new opportunities. But these are not enough.

We need to look not only at quantity, but also the quality of school education. More than a quarter of schools do not have proper buildings or drinking water. Half do not have girls’ toilets. Most do not have proper teachers. Teacher absenteeism rages. Allotments for ICDS and MDM schemes are inadequate and do not always reach students. And endemic class, caste and gender discriminations spawn systematic deprivation of large sections of society, institutionalising disparity in educational achievements.

Sadly, our attitude towards excellence is to neglect schools for the masses and focus on elite institutions of higher education. Sure, we need centres of excellence, but we can’t be proud of tiny islands of well-funded distinction in a sea of hopeless, life-sapping neglect and illiteracy. If we really want to debate our educational excellence, we should stop this elitist navel gazing. And focus on good primary and secondary education for all. That social vision could change our collective future. And make us truly world class.

Bad sex and Great people

2011-05-21T00:40:00.000-07:00

Sex is like hunger. It is badly needed when there is a desperateness. Civilisation and moralism cannot stop human beings when there is over desperation. This final feeling drives people on the peak of popularity to leave everything on air and indulge in sexual acts. Be it molestation, rape or any unwanted and undesirable sexual conduct. Countless cases can be cited. Recent case is the out of mind and in of the sexual urge of Domnique Strauss-Kahn, the disgraced ex chief of IMF.

Maureen Dowd writes in The Deccan Chronicle on 20 May 2011

Oh, she wanted it.
She wanted it bad.

That’s what every hard-working, God-fearing, young widow who breaks her back doing menial labour at a Times Square hotel to support her teenage daughter, justify her immigration status and take advantage of the opportunities in America wants — a crazed, rutting, wrinkly old satyr charging naked out of a bathroom, lunging at her and dragging her around the room, caveman-style.

Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s reputation as a thrice-married French seducer loses something in the translation.

According to the claims of the 32-year-old West African maid, what took place in the $3,000-a-day Sofitel suite had nothing to do with seduction. If the allegation is true, Strauss-Kahn’s behaviour, boorish and primitive, is rape.

Was the chief of the International Monetary Fund telling other countries to tighten their belts while he was dropping his trousers? Lawyers for the 62-year-old Frenchman, who had been a leading Socialist prospect to run against Nicolas Sarkozy next year, seem ready to rebut any DNA evidence by arguing that sex with the maid who came in to clean his room was consensual.

Will they argue that she wilted with desire once she realised Strauss-Kahn had been at Davos?
Jeffrey Shapiro, the maid’s lawyer, angrily rebutted that there was “nothing, nothing” consensual about the droit du monsieur. (It was not a “come in and see my monetary fund” kind of thing.)

“She is a simple housekeeper who was going into a room to clean a room”, Shapiro told the New York Times. He called the devout Muslim woman from the Bronx “a very proper, dignified young woman” and said “she did not even know who this guy was” until she saw the news accounts.

Strauss-Kahn’s French defenders are throwing around nutty conspiracy theories, sounding like the Pakistanis about Osama. Some have suggested that he was the victim of a honey-pot arranged by the Sarkozy forces.

Bernard-Henri Lévy, a friend of the accused, says he is outraged at the portrayal of Strauss-Kahn as an “insatiable and malevolent beast”. He wrote on the Daily Beast: “It would be nice to know — and without delay — how a chambermaid could have walked in alone, contrary to the habitual practice of most of New York’s grand hotels of sending a ‘cleaning brigade’ of two people, into the room of one of the most closely watched figures on the planet”.

At least he didn’t mention Dreyfus. For years, I’ve stayed at the Sofitel and other hotels in New York City, and I’ve never seen a “brigade”, simply single maids coming in to clean.

In Washington, they have now nicknamed the street that separates the IMF and the World Bank, where Paul Wolfowitz lost his job over financial hanky-panky with his girlfriend, the Boulevard of Bad Behaviour.

These are the two institutions that are globally renowned for lecturing the rest of the world on discipline and freedom, when it’s the West that’s guilty of recklessness and improvident behaviour. First in finance, then in sex.

People who can’t keep their flies zipped lecturing other people.

While the French excoriated the American system of justice — discouraging pictures of Strauss-Kahn handcuffed, which are illegal in France — Americans could pride themselves on the sound of the “bum-bum” “Law & Order: SVU” gong sounding, the noise that heralds that justice will be done without regard to wealth, class or privilege.

It’s an inspiring story about America, where even a maid can have dignity and be listened to when she accuses one of the most powerful men in the world of being a predator. (A charge that has been made against him before, with a similar pattern of brutal behaviour.)

The young woman escaped horrors in her native Guinea, a patriarchal society where rape is widespread and used as a device of war, a place where she would have been kicked to the curb if she tried to take on a powerful man. When she faced the horror here, she had a recourse.

Another famous European with a disturbing pattern of sexual aggression got in trouble over the help this week: The ex-governor of California, who got elected after his wife, Maria Shriver, defended him so eloquently against groping charges.

Arnold Schwarzenegger was also guilty of the raw assertion of male power. More than mere infidelity, The Sperminator was caught on lying and piggishness, having a son with a staffer around the same time Maria had their youngest son, who is now 13. He kept the staffer on the payroll and even may have brought the son Maria didn’t know about into the house. No wonder Maria fled to a Beverly Hills hotel.

We’re always fascinated with the contradiction that cosmopolitan, high-powered, multilingual people can behave in such primitive ways. But civilisation and morality have nothing to do with sophistication and social status.

The lesson of these two fallen grandees, as Bill Maher told Chris Matthews, is: “If you’re going to go after the household help, get a ‘Yes’, first”.

Osama's end should end Pakistan's evil designs

2011-05-21T00:35:00.000-07:00

Egg on the face of Pakistan. Operation Geronimo had thrown foul egg kept secretly for the past one year. Now the evil state of Pakistan can’t deny that terrorists are staying on its soil. In fact it has been the breeding of terrorism for years. The ISI and political establishments although function divergently but convergences in terror matters. Especially the India matters unites all wings of Pakistan.

Without catching red handedly, USA can do little against Pakistan. At this stage it is wise to use Pakistan with all attractions including a liberal funding and then end the evil designs promoted by the state and non state actors in Pakistan.

Christina Lamb writes in The Deccan Chronicle on 5 May 2011

Even those of us who did not believe that Osama bin Laden was producing his videos from a cave in a remote tribal mountain would never have guessed that he was, in fact, living in a “Come and Get Me” three-storey house surrounded by cabbage fields just down the road from Pakistan’s top military academy.

To many in Washington, here was final proof — if any were needed — that its supposed ally has been playing a double game; that, for the past 10 years, Pakistan has been playing the role of US ally (and taking more than $18 billion of American aid) while all the time sheltering the Taliban and Al Qaeda.

“The game is up”, a senior Pentagon official told me the day after Bin Laden’s killing, admitting he felt “a darned idiot” for being played for so long.

Last year I went for lunch in Abbottabad, Bin Laden’s adopted hometown, which nestles in green hills about 90 minutes’ drive from Islamabad. It is one of those pleasant former British military cantonments that in colonial times were known as hill stations.

I didn’t notice a large compound behind 12ft-high white walls that never threw out its rubbish and had no phone or Internet connection. I did notice, though, that the town was crawling with military. It houses the Pakistan Military Academy, and is a favourite location for retired generals.

Little wonder that John Brennan, Obama’s counterterrorism adviser, says it was “inconceivable” that Bin Laden did not have a significant “support system” in Abbottabad. He did not need to say that the only organisation in Pakistan that could have supplied such support to Al Qaeda is its military intelligence, Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI).

Leon Panetta, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) chief, told congressmen in a closed-door briefing, “Either they (Pakistan) were involved or incompetent. Neither place is a good place to be”.

So far, Pakistan’s establishment seems to have gone for the latter. An unnamed ISI officer said they were “embarrassed” at having missed Bin Laden. This from an agency that follows every movement of every journalist that comes into the country; that has thousands of agents in taxis and hotel lobbies, tracking every foreigner who arrives.

The problem with this defence is that Bin Laden’s choice of hideaway fits a pattern. Every top Al Qaeda operative arrested in Pakistan has been living in a city, often in military areas. First there was Abu Zubaidah, Bin Laden’s chief recruiter, picked up from a villa in Faisalabad in March 2002.

Then in March 2003, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the mastermind of 9/11, was arrested from a house in a military cantonment in Rawalpindi, a mile down the road from Pakistan’s General Headquarters.

Why should any jihadi settle for a cave when Pakistani military neighbourhoods are so accommodating?
The truth, which has now become harder to ignore, is that Pakistan is the destination of choice for would-be terrorists.

It is home to a tangle of jihadi groups, initially formed with the intention of fighting in Kashmir. It is a land of training camps and safe houses, and of madrasas with their pools of potential recruits. A study by terrorism analyst Paul Cruickshank of the New America Foundation has found that, of the serious terrorism plots or attacks against the West over the past seven years, 42 per cent had direction from jihadist groups in Pakistan and 52 per cent had training in Pakistan.

From the beginning, Pakistan’s double game has slowed Western progress in Afghanistan. The Taliban would never have recovered from being ousted in 2001 without their safe haven in the Pakistani town of Quetta. Those of us who went there to report on how the Taliban were openly regrouping and training found ourselves picked up by ISI (in my case at 2 am from my hotel room) and unceremoniously kicked out of the country.

After my deportation, the head of consular services at the British foreign office called me to his grand office in Whitehall to apologise at not having done anything to help. But, he said, “You have to understand we need Pakistan”. For a decade, the West has decided it was too much trouble to confront the problem — that it was easier, diplomatically, to turn a blind eye.

After Bin Laden’s capture, this is harder than ever. “We have to either grit our teeth, declare victory and move on — or declare war on Pakistan”, said a US official.

It looks as if the West wishes to grit its teeth yet again. For his part, Mr Brennan is focusing on what progress Pakistan has made. “It has captured and killed more terrorists inside its borders than any other country”, he says. “By a long way.”

Washington’s problem is that it still needs Pakistan’s help. According to Mr Brennan, a dozen of the top 20 Al Qaeda figures are still believed to be in Pakistan. Not to mention co-operation on possible plots being launched on the West.

Without Pakistan’s cooperation it would be hard for the American military to supply 140,000 Nato forces in landlocked Afghanistan. And of course who wants to take on a country that is estimated to have around 200 nuclear warheads? “We have all the leverage”, grinned a Pakistani officer I talked to in Rawalpindi last month.

But as the Bin Laden raid showed, the US does not always need Pakistan to go about its business. The mission was accomplished without informing Pakistani authorities, not even when Pakistan scrambled military jets to go after the intruder. This will encourage the powerful voices in Congress, who are arguing that support for Pakistan should stop.

Dana Rohrbacher, a Republican congressman from California who sits on the Foreign Affairs Committee, told me, “Pakistan has literally been getting away with murder… We were snookered — for a long time we bought into this vision that Pakistan’s military was a moderate force and we were supporting moderates by supporting the military. In fact the military is in alliance with radical militants. Just because they shave their beards, drink whisky and look Western they fooled a lot of people”.

When Mr Panetta, the CIA chief, was interviewed by Time magazine this week, he said that “it was decided that any effort to work with the Pakistanis could jeopardise the mission” because “they might alert the targets”. It is difficult to come any closer to accusing Pakistan of being in league with Al Qaeda. Opinion polls in Pakistan have long ranked America as a greater threat than Bin Laden.

Now the world’s most wanted terrorist has been found in Pakistani suburbia, it may indeed be the US that Pakistan has to fear.

From insecure to over secure Indian Muslims

2011-04-30T07:56:00.000-07:00

Muslims are en bloc vote bank in India. Muslims are not just a minority but considered as the good catchment area during election season and communal season. For ages Muslims are playing a potential role in the Indian society in these forms. Unfortunately there is no farsighted Muslims coming out. Using the limited vision of the Indian Muslim leadership, political figures of all hues are exploiting to the fullest extent. As long as Muslims are confined to the narrow mental territory there is no scope for the betterment.

Javed Anand writes in The Deccan Chronicle on 29 April 2011

Indian Muslims just got luckier. Already spoilt for choice, the Spring of 2011 has brought two fresh bonanzas for the country’s “second largest majority”. One comes gift-wrapped as a brand new political party; the other is a forum of Muslim advocates of Maharashtra. Many compliments of the season, Badhai ho badhai!

But hang on a moment. It perhaps is too early to exult. The Jamaat-e-Islami’s (JI) invitation to a party has met with more jeers than cheers. Not many Muslims, it appears, are keen on singing Happy Birthday to the new-born named Welfare Party of India. The Muslim advocates’ meet in Mumbai on a Friday (April 22) saw the enthusiastic participation of around 300 advocates from all over Maharashtra. The stars of the show were two retired Muslim judges from the Mumbai high court: Justice Bilal Nakzi and Justice Shafi Parkar. But outside the venue the reception was mixed.

Let’s take the second one first. What on earth is the meaning of a separate Muslim lawyers’ forum? What’s coming next: Muslim doctors’ forum, Muslim journalists’ forum, Muslim IAS/IPS officers’ forum, Muslim consumers’ forum? Thane city’s advocate Abdul Kalam explains the rationale for such a forum thus: “After the communal riots, it has been found that Hindu advocates are reluctant to fight cases of Muslim victims or accused. We don’t say that all non-Muslim advocates are biased, but during moments of crisis, many upright advocates have developed cold feet”.

Is that so? What about Kapil Sibal, Shanti Bhushan, Anil Divan, P.P. Rao, M.S. Ganesh, Kamini Jaiswal, Sanjay Parikh, Aspi Chinoy, Navroze Seervai, Gautam Patel, Mihir Desai, Aparna Bhatt and Ramesh Pukhrambam, all of whom have contributed time and talent pro bono, fighting for justice to the Muslim victims and punishment to the perpetrators of the state-sponsored 2002 Gujarat carnage? What about Teesta Setalvad and her non-religious organisation Citizens for Justice and Peace (CJP), which for over nine years has led the Gujarat victims’ struggle for justice from the front? What about Mukul Sinha, the lawyer from Ahmedabad, and the hours and days that he has spent before the Nanavati-Shah-Mehta inquiry commission?

As for the JI and its new baby, the Welfare Party of India (WPI), if you’ve never heard of Syed Abu Ala Maududi, the maulana who founded the Jamaat-e-Islami in 1941, here’s a crash course. Throughout his life Maududi preached that unlike other religions, Islam is not just about worship and religious rituals like prayer, fasting, charity and pilgrimage. Instead, Islam is a revolutionary ideology; to be a Muslim is to be a revolutionary committed to debunking man-made ideas (democracy etc.), institutions (Parliament etc.) and laws (Constitution etc.) and striving by every means possible to establishing Allah’s rule (Islamic state etc.) and Allah’s laws (Sharia etc.).

This is what every Jamaati has fervently believed and preached for the last 70 years.

Among those who were deeply impressed by Maududi was a person named Syed Qutb of Egypt who proceeded to argue that striving by “every means possible” includes killing those who are Muslims only in name in the interest of ushering Allah’s sovereignty on earth.

Now that the same JI has chosen to place itself at the service of man-made laws, should we not welcome this change of mind and heart? We should if the JI were to publicly declare that Maududi’s views now belong to a library that houses outdated, intolerant, outrageous ideology. But that’s not what the JI is telling us. Instead, it wants us to believe that the WPI is a secular, democratic entity, never mind the fact that 11 out of its 16 office-bearers are Jamaati stalwarts.

That’s reason number one for the non-Jamaati Muslims’ lack of enthusiasm. To many of them, the JI-WPI relationship looks like a mirror image of the RSS-BJP equation. The goal is the same: infiltrating the institutions of democracy for subverting the constitutional spirit from within.

But the facade is all too transparent: How much cover can you expect from one of WPI’s several vice-presidents, including a Christian priest who chanted the Gayatri Mantra at the party’s launch, to provide? Some Muslims see him as the WPI’s Sikander Bakht!

Reason number two: Less than two years ago, in July 2009, we saw the Popular Front of India (home in south India to ex-Students Islamic Movement of India leaders and activists following the ban on the radical outfit) give birth to the Secular Democratic Party of India. Simi, remember, emerged from the womb of the JI in the early ’70s, and the PFI still draws inspiration from Maulana Maududi and Syed Qutb of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood. In its spare time, the PFI runs a moral police enforcing Islam on Muslims in a manner that might make the Bajrang Dal and the Ram Sene envious. Ask Kerala’s Muslims.

Adding to the Indian Muslim’s embarrassment of riches is the All-India United Democratic Front of India floated by the Assam-based Badruddin Ajmal of the Jamiatul-ulema-e-Hind in 2005. And let’s not forget the nearly half-a-dozen Muslim organisations in Uttar Pradesh that have sprouted in recent years.

What then should Indian Muslims expect from this abundance of Muslim-floated parties? Ideologically speaking, it means secularism by daylight, Sharia after dark. Politically speaking, at best they’ll cancel each other out; eat into votes of mainstream parties that swear by secularism. At worst, they’ll provide propaganda fodder to Hindutva, feed Islamophobia.

The increasing political disempowerment of India’s Muslims in Parliament and in the Assemblies, continuing discrimination and “red zoning” are no doubt problems crying to be addressed. But a cancer cell like proliferation of Muslim parties will, if anything, compound the malady.

Safeguard Nuclear Plants

2011-04-06T07:54:00.000-07:00

It is not possible to manage this world's ultra pace development with just solar, wind and other less polluting or non polluting sources of energy. Obviously nuclear energy which is considered as less polluting but more risk prone danger is opted as the no alternative option. In this scenario it is important for all in the world to safeguard the nuclear plants rather than completely demonise it.

The Deccan Chronicle writes on 17th March 2011

The news about Japan’s nuclear power plants — and the threat of the spread of radiation — continues to be full of foreboding. The psychological impact of the disaster, however, appears to be more marked in debate in this country than in Japan itself. The Japanese people and their leadership, now in the midst of an unprecedented situation, have to their credit shown no sign of panic, although worry in such circumstances would be only natural. While doing what’s needed to fix the nuclear problem, Tokyo has pumped in close to 23 trillion yen (around $300 billion) to generate rebuilding activity in the economy. The approach underlines for the world the determination and resilience the Japanese people are capable of in the face of disaster, no less acute than that which the country faced in the aftermath of defeat in World War II. It is significant in this context that within Japan no cry has been raised to eliminate nuclear power generation in the country. After the Japanese people became victims of two atom bomb attacks by the United States in 1945, the island nation determined to eschew nuclear weapons and has been in the forefront of the global nuclear non-proliferation movement. This did not stop it, however, from choosing to derive electricity through nuclear power. Today one-third of power generation in Japan — the world’s third largest economy — derives from the nuclear source. As such, it will not be easy for it to make a break with nuclear power generation. In the days ahead we might have a better appreciation of how Japan wrestles with the question of generating nuclear energy. In India, however, we have already seen a tsunami of criticism of our domestic nuclear power programme. India generates a paltry 4,000MW of nuclear power, around two per cent of its current requirement, but aspires to step this up to 20,000MW by 2020 and 30,000MW by 2030. Governments are likely to work toward these goals if public opinion is supportive. The crisis in Japan has led anti-nuclear groups in India to step up their campaign against the idea of nuclear energy itself. Their first target is the proposed nuclear power plant at Jaitapur on Maharashtra’s Konkan coast, which is designed to be the biggest nuclear power plant in the world, with a capacity of 9,000MW. The question of nuclear safety was always pre-eminent but has acquired urgency in the wake of Japan’s recent experience. The trouble in Japan only lends their campaign an edge. Irrespective of the position such campaigners might take, we need to revisit the safety question again. It is not sufficient for the Prime Minister, Dr Manmohan Singh, and leading lights of the Indian nuclear establishment to make an assertion on the safety of our reactors. It is not sufficient to say that Kalpakkam withstood the 2004 tsunami. Barring a couple, our reactors are of relatively recent compared to Japan’s Daiichi reactors, which go back to 1972. As such, they do possess a greater safety factor. But on the question of structural fortifications or other factors, learning from Japan’s own building codes might relieve public anxieties.The key is to strengthen safety, not to panic.

Charity and uncharity

2011-03-27T04:45:00.000-07:00

Charity is flowing in the Indian blood for ages. It is being part of the life, philosophy, and culture, of the Indian society. There is no separation of charity from the everyday living of Indians. Before eating, rest of the world thanks the God for giving food but Indians offer food to crows. Many more examples can be given for the top most charitable order of the Indian society. In these difficult circumstances, bottom of the society cares and shares their fellow poor people in a better way. They have large heart and offer immediate help when there is a need by anyone on the street. Only rich people differentiate between classes when there is an urgent need for intervention. Eye witnesses and experience galore in this regard. All these facts apart, no one can deny the contributions of Americans for charity. Especially Warren Buffet, the octagenerian American who is lucky and superb human being. May be because of his large heart he is garnering billions after billions.. Whatever it is, charity publicized is unchartiable.

Warren Buffett exhausts me.

I’m sure he exhausted several other people on his virgin trip to India.

At 80, he is still at the crease, batting away… and going by his energy levels, he’ll hit his century effortlessly. It is just not natural for an octogenarian to be jetting half way around the world at such a hectic speed. He described his quickie chakkar to India as a “better late than never” trip.

And came up with a booklet-full of quotable quotes, starting with philanthropy being much harder and riskier than business.

At around the same time, another American billionaire buddy of his, Bill Gates, was also floating around the countryside, telling us what to do with our money (earn it — and donate it!).

Why do I get the feeling India is being sent on a massive guilt trip by these two guys? And why do we need to take lessons in charity from anybody? Least of all super rich Americans who have made their pile. One of whom has an established business here, and the other wishes to establish business in India?

Declared the Oracle of Omaha in Bengaluru, “We want to be where the action is, and the action is here”. No kidding, buddy! Someone obviously forgot to tell these two guys our approach to philanthropy is different.

Daan has always been an intrinsic part of our culture. If the present generation has callously ignored the message from the shastras, that’s their business. The thought of being lectured to by people who represent the land of milk and honey and scolded that we are not doing enough is a bit much. I think it is condescending and patronising in the extreme for anybody to preach charity.

To each his own. And decision to give or not to give, or even how much to give and to whom, is a very individual one.

We keep hearing wonderful speeches on corporate social responsibility, and there are enough people cashing in on the glory attached to it. But give me a break. Mr Buffett is obviously a very, very generous chap (he has pledged 99 per cent of his fortune, mainly to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation).

Well, good for him. And I am sure the angels in heaven (where his seat is guaranteed) will compose a special song for him when he gets to the pearly gates. But right now, what he is doing in India is scouting around for fresh opportunities to make still more money.

He has his “brother or son” Shri Ajit Jain to help him invest in the country via Berkshire Hathaway (more chewing gum, anyone?). We are cool with that. We are also cool with more fizzy drinks (thanda matlab…?) hitting our stores, what with summer around the corner and over a billion parched throats to quench.

Mr Buffett says he hasn’t come her with an “elephant gun” loaded for acquisitions, but hey, we are cool with that, too. India is original elephant country.

I am confused. Perhaps I am too “retarded” (Mr Buffett’s word to describe the delay in his coming to India) to get it. But the man is here to make even more money — right? And after he has made it, he will donate it, right? Meanwhile, his shareholders will be a happy lot, since Mr Buffett has assured them he is scaling up and looking at big markets like India, China and Brazil.

He also told overwhelmed, gushing reporters that he feels he has more money than he needs — he eats well, takes vacations, watches movies… the regular stuff lesser mortals indulge in even without those billions and trillions.

So, the logical question to ask him is this: “Why do you want to make more money, sir?” His answer will be: “The more money I make, the more I can give”. Noble.

Our Mr and Mrs Money Bags are being prodded into following the Gates-Buffett pattern of giving. They are being coerced into parting with large portions of their wealth because they are told it makes them look good. Heaven knows how convinced they are about all this giving-shiving of their paisa, and God knows what their children think about it (“Grrrrrr… Dad! Mom! Ab mera kya hoga?”).

But “giving” is the new a la mode statement to make. And all these “new” and “improved” charity drives amongst loaded desis have a lot to do with keeping up with the Buffetts. How can you hope to sit at the high table in Davos if you haven’t announced a humungous donation to a pet cause?

Without knocking these magnanimous gestures of our do-gooders, it is amusing to note the publicity machine that goes into overdrive when these grand donations are made. There’s nothing quiet or discreet about charity these days.

And perhaps Gates/Buffett will argue the more you talk about it, the more it inspires others to reach for their wallets. I dunno. I have seen some high-profile charity auctions at which dodgy millionaires have crept out of the woodwork for the all important photo-ops… only to creep right back again… zero follow-ups, zero money. Where does all that lolly go? Any answers?

The second and third richest men in the world doing zabardasti with the 55 desi co-billionaires featured on the Forbes 2011 list are definitely pushing their luck. Coaxing these guys to sign The Giving Pledge followed by a public statement and letter is really a bit much, as pressure tactics go. The Chinese are smarter.

After a similar initiative in China last September, not a single Chinese billionaire who showed up for the banquet bothered to sign the pledge. That’s what is called the ultimate Oriental snub. Let’s see whether the multi-course Indian buffet piles on more on the table than the Chinese one.

Or else, the world’s most famous philanthropists may go home hungry and disappointed. No such thing as a free lunch… perhaps India is not the moveable feast Bill and Warren expected it to be!

Freedom from the dysfunctional Indian system

2011-02-28T06:27:00.000-08:00

No field of public significance is free from corruption, chaos and dysfunction. Indian system is so systemically rotten beyond any repair. Who is responsible? How to be eradicated this menace? These searching questions may not produce any substantial change from the present mess. But one cannot allow the current rotten situation to continue. From entrepreneurship to education, from governance to gambling, every aspect of the Indian system is bought and sold for a price. Ironicialy those who were responsible to change the system for the past six decades are chest thumping this problem for the past six decades. When we are going to find some credible action?

Jayant writes in The Deccan Chronicle on 16 February 2011

The following story from a particular edition of the Ramayana sets the tone of this article. In the aftermath of the destruction of Ravan, Ram returned to Ayodhya to set up his rule. Ram Rajya, as his rule was called, became synonymous with good and just rule. Anyone demanding justice had full access to the king. So one day a dog with a ferocious appearance entered Ram’s court asking for justice. Ram asked him to state the details of his complaint. “Sire,” said the dog, “I was following a sanyasi as he went around begging for alms and with no provocation on my part, he kicked me. He is standing outside and I demand that he be suitably punished.” Ram called the sanyasi who readily admitted to the act. But he gave a reason. He said: “Sire, I was begging for food to eat and wherever I went, the housewife who opened the door immediately shut it on seeing this ferocious dog. As a result I went hungry. Since it was all because of this dog, I took my anger out on him by kicking him. I agree that it was an unjust act on my part and the dog cannot be held responsible for how he looks. So I am willing to accept any just punishment.” Then Ram turned to the dog and asked him what he thought would be a just punishment. The dog thought for a while and then said: “Sire, I suggest that you create a vidyapeeth, and make him its kulapati”. “But that is an honour, not a punishment!” said Ram. “I beg to differ, Sire!” said the dog. “The responsibility of running a vidyapeeth will cause him enough mental anguish which would be a good punishment for what he did to me.”

The situation prevailing today in the Indian universities is no different. The atmosphere in which a vice-chancellor (VC) has to function is volatile with pressures coming from students, faculty, the non-teaching staff, outside threats to him and to the security of the university et cetera. Although the university is autonomous, there is enough political interference from outside and the last word often rests not with the VC but with the babus in the secretariat. The days when VCs, like Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan or Acharya Narendra Dev, were towering personalities commanding respect are long past. The post itself has been seriously devalued by the procedure of selection. Would you have expected the personalities just named applying for the post, being short-listed and interviewed?

It could be argued that this procedure followed in Maharashtra, a supposedly progressive state, is a necessity today because no other action involving selection for such an important post is credible enough. The procedure whereby the chancellor (or the appointing authority), after receiving expert advice, invites a distinguished academician to accept the post, would be viewed with suspicion. The fact that the system worked well in the old days of pre-Independence (and even for a few years post-Independence), speaks for the steep decline in moral values in our public life. For example, I was shocked to read about a VC of a very old university publicly thanking the state education minister for keeping his word by making him the VC.

The situation at the other end of the spectrum — in school education — is equally dismal. Government-aided schools are asked to admit more than 80 children per class because there is a shortage of schools. What can a teacher do with such a large number of pupils? Naturally, because of bad or no teaching in the school, students seek the help of coaching classes outside. In addition, there are government missives: fail no student until Class 8. If student is really weak in a particular subject, it is the responsibility of the teacher to stay after school hours and teach the student to the required level. Which teacher — who is already overworked and underpaid — is going to accept this extra responsibility? So all students are declared passed. The parents are blissful and satisfied that their wards are doing well, until they reach Class 8 when they discover with a shock that the kids cannot even add, subtract or read and write.

In 1980, when I was on a sabbatical visit to the University College, Cardiff, the headmaster of the primary school in our neighbourhood sent circulars to all the houses in the neighbourhood urging parents to send their children to his school stating that in order to increase the number of students the entry age had been reduced by six months to five years. He had done so because reduced birth rate had decreased the school student population and the government was threatening to close down schools with a low number of students. This example illustrates the economics of supply and demand for available schools versus students seeking admission.

Logic dictates that in India, where there is a grave shortage of schools, we reduce the number of students per class to half, and double the number of schools. The number of teachers needs to be increased even more since the present numbers are already inadequate and teachers are being hired on a contract basis at shamefully low “daily wages”, barely above the legal lower limits. This will require huge increases in the budgetary provisions of the ministry of human resource and development. But whichever political party is in power, this department is always kept on the backburner. There may be innumerable discussions and reports on education but when it comes to the implementation of any recommendation the result can be summarised by the four letter word, “zero”.

The Prime Minister, Dr Manmohan Singh, himself a distinguished academic, and our Nobel laureate, Mr Amartya Sen, have stressed the need to empower our youth through education. If India aspires to be a developed nation by 2020, it needs to develop huge human resources and education is the most crucial qualification that adds value to the human being. Despite many declarations from the pulpit, politicians of all parties do not seem to appreciate the truth behind this dictum. Or, perhaps, they do, and see in the educated electorate a threat to their continuation in power!

Drop the ego, order JPC

2011-02-11T06:25:00.000-08:00

The UPA government's efforts to whitewash 1.76 lakh crore scam got egged. With the vigilant media, judiciary and a hand full of proactive citizens, spectrum scam is on the top of the national surface today. If the dumb government missed the scam of the civilisation atleast it should have paid attention to others information. For the past many months the UPA has been finding all tricks to avoid the accusation. It refused to accept the mass charges of corruption. Instead of sending the gang of culprits to jail immediately it waited, watched and annoyed the entire nation and the whole world. Shame is the mild word to use the situational mess which the UPA has got in. The immediate task is to book all the real masterminds of all scams including spectrum, CWG, Adrash and other unearthed scandals and give them life imprisonment. Otherwise Indira Congress is going to oblivion forever.

The Deccan Chronicle writes on 10 February 2011

With the Leader of the Lok Sabha, Mr Pranab Mukherjee, holding a discussion with the Opposition parties on Tuesday on the conduct of Parliament’s forthcoming Budget Session, there appears to be a sense — communicated to the media by the Opposition parties — that the fog might be clearing on the issue of a joint parliamentary committee probing the 2G spectrum scam, and that the government might be coming round to accepting the Opposition demand. However, this optimism might be premature. With the Budget Session less than a fortnight away, it is natural that political parties would return to the question of forming a JPC to probe the 2G scam, a demand initially made by the BJP and the Left and one which comprehensively derailed the Winter Session two months ago. The Congress had resisted a JPC probe. Instead, it professed its faith in Parliament’s Public Accounts Committee, now chaired by senior BJP leader, Mr Murli Manohar Joshi, doing the job. The government went out of its way to give the PAC an investigative adjunct to facilitate the inquiry, and the Prime Minister, Dr Manmohan Singh, broke from precedent to offer to appear before the PAC. The BJP was not persuaded and continued to insist on a JPC probe. It is, however, evident that in recent weeks the political situation has registered some change. Other than the BJP and its NDA allies, the rest of the Opposition has subtly signalled leaving behind its insistence on the JPC issue by privileging the running of Parliament over the path the inquiry into 2G should follow, although at the formal level they have not abandoned the JPC demand. In the last session of Parliament the JPC demand had gathered considerable force because the entire Opposition appeared united on it, and some parties that technically support the UPA government but oppose it on key issues also favoured the JPC route. That appears not to be the case now. The Left, and the Samajwadi Party of Mulayam Singh Yadav, seem not to want to be on the same page as the BJP as elections are looming in Kerala, West Bengal and Uttar Pradesh. They realise that parties that stalled Parliament over the JPC issue have not earned public sympathy. Many who oppose the government are unhappy about Parliament not being allowed to function, particularly when the government has no difficulty about the 2G case being probed by the PAC. In short, the government is not avoiding a parliamentary probe. In the event, the non-BJP Opposition is these days busy canvassing the importance of letting Parliament transact its business. After the Tuesday meeting some Opposition leaders had quoted Mr Mukherjee as saying that no price was too high to pay for the sake of letting Parliament function. It is this which raised hopes among a few about a JPC probe materialising. It is noteworthy that neither Mr Mukherjee nor his party has said anything to indicate that their position on the JPC has changed.

Blind building laws; dumb law enforcers

2011-02-06T20:23:00.000-08:00

The Indian government for the past 63 years have been blind and numb towards the construction of buildings. Without following its own rules the government has been blankly allowing any and every citizen to construct what he or she wants. All is done through few currency notes. This blindness of the government is going to infect the entire population and will paralyze the coming generations.

Gautam Bhatia writes in The Deccan Chronicle on 6 February 2010

Some years ago, a Delhi firm invested in a “smart” building for its new Gurgaon office. A 12-storey structure of beveled glass was designed by a Japanese architect, using American and French technologies and built under South Korean supervision. Surrounded by the dumb buildings of old India, this was supposedly user-friendly intelligent architecture at its best, technology’s answer to India’s future.

When I saw it on a sweltering June afternoon, a few days before its official opening, it stood shimmering silver grey in a black tar parking lot. Near the entrance, a remote sensor detected my approach and — through electronic identification — alerted the control centre inside, of my presence. Within seconds, the door opened. A complicated e-device worth `22 lakh had eliminated a Haryanvi guard at `6,000 per month. Further in, were more smart surprises. My weight on the lift lobby floor triggered six lifts into action; they all came racing down to pick me up. Activated by complicated circuitry that cost `28 lakh, the intelligent building had effectively done away with the need for a push button. Upstairs, the glass-shell of the building was surrounded by Japanese micro louvers and heat sensors at the ridiculously low summer discount rate of `2.8 crore. An elegant, electronically-activated “intelligent” device had happily eliminated the ordinary screen of reed chicks at `12 per square foot. Moreover, the smart structure, built at seven times the rate of a conventional building, had effectively done away with Indian skills and labour — still the cheapest in the world — and joined the ranks of world class architecture. Expensive, over-designed and completely oblivious to local conditions. But smart, nonetheless.

Like the intelligent building, can a smart city in the West be a stupid one in India? The Indian government’s sudden and erratic wish list for smart cities along the Delhi-Mumbai corridor is not only seriously misplaced, but is a harebrained view that cities can be produced on an assembly line, like cars and coke bottles. Certainly, taking Indian urban ideas to the next level should prompt the government to serious measures. But the proposal to build 24 cities when so far not a single new idea on urban living has been implemented is a despairing shot in the dark, a hope that extreme measures will yield results where smaller local initiatives have not even been tried.

Many perplexing questions need to be asked before the government embarks on a reckless real estate adventure. Does the physical structure of the city have any measurable impact on our lives? Can a city’s livability be measured like a gross national product? Can it be rated from one to 100 like an exam score? To say that Shanghai is better than Mumbai is as good as saying that an elm tree is better than neem. It is an entirely facile and inaccurate comparison. Certainly there are measurable barometers that can point to the health of towns; the quality and quantity of municipal services, provision of water, health care and sanitation, the availability of sidewalks, parks and roads, the proliferation of schools, institutes, places of recreation and commerce, all fall within the common understanding of daily human requirement. The nourishment needed to stay alive, like a daily vitamin pill. But at its core, the life breath of a town is a deeply guarded secret. Heard sometimes in sighs of its long time residents, but always hidden from those who seek only its cosmopolitan gratifications — the new French restaurant, the Formula One race track, the mall. Connection to places, links to family, past and present, and to some degree, future opportunity, the city’s physical environment has a direct correlation with personal lives.

In a country which offers a continually degrading form of life to its urban citizens, the importance of new and inventive solutions can hardly be underscored. Choked cities, grey murky rivers, brown skies, depleting energy, erratic services, the haves and the hope-to-haves are ready-to-wage battles over water, electricity, land and air rights. Before the present rage turns to all-out war, city living requires desperate resolution. Unfortunately, the thirst for a new idea in India almost always acts on hyperbolic dimensions: the highest building, the richest Indian, the second-largest dam — reducing public action to meaningless numbers and trivial hyped publicity rather than serious welfare. Somewhere on a foreign trip, a minister or a bureaucrat, sensed the possibility of an idea, and promoted the smart city as a quantum leap of faith.

In a country like China such leaps may be possible. The Chinese willingness to step outside of conventional urban thinking is prompted as much by its own rapid urbanisation, as its need to enlarge the scope of urban technology and experiment with new forms of city living. The new town of Dongtan, near Shanghai, is an altogether unprecedented mix of these lofty ideals. An eco-city of one million residents that promotes a lifestyle without cars, without streets, without conventional houses, is an optimistic sign that China is looking beyond the environmental and technical thresholds set by the West, to set a benchmark for itself. Though Dongtan is a quantum technological leap, its most generous attribute is its affinity to Chinese culture. And the insistence amongst its makers that future lies in promoting a Chinese way of life.

However, an incompetent government with barely a new urban idea to its name is hardly in a position to built 24 new cities from scratch. No one today has even defined in simple common terms a house that suits an Indian lifestyle. No builder has ever attempted — despite massive profits — to create self-sustaining neighborhoods, or clusters of housing that take on fresh ideas. No state or national housing programme has ventured outside the safety of building as anything but a form of fulfilling statistical requirements. A whole city needs to be carefully weighed in cultural terms for the value its residents attach to their lifestyle, and the potential for its growth as a living organism. A thoughtless, culturally unimaginative approach to the design of 24 new towns may yield another 24 Chandigarhs. The sheers numbers of such a disaster would be hard to dismiss as a bureaucratic folly, just another missing file in the ministry. But in 21st century India, so desperate to be counted as a world power, the smart city may just be another thrust to an expensive publicity venture.

Mysterious India

2011-01-26T03:53:00.000-08:00

On the Republic Day, every Indian vows to builds his or her motherland firmly and fastly. While looking for ways and means for the mission, the most important agenda is to find out the current maladies. Unfortunately the maladies are many and the route for implementation is impossible. One step up and ten steps down is the day to day Indian move. It is not a country where everything is horrible and great. Half problematic and half promising nation. When can India minimises its minus and maximises its plus?

Shiv Viswanathan writes in The Deccan Chronicle on 26 January 2011

India is a strange country. We seem to be quarrelling all the time. We identify ourselves by the dislike we feel for other or smugness with which we say “we are not them”. Our identity is composed of divisions, of the memories of Partition, of linguistic re-ordering, of the populism of small states. Our national game is neither hockey nor cricket but factionalism. It adds to the perpetual instability of our system. Yet, long-range watchers studying this chaos wonder if our dividedness hides the logic of a different order. Is there a gene that prevents us from falling apart even as we quarrel with each other? What is the secret of unity which works beyond the magic of even Fevicol advertisements?

To say India is tied by identity and consensus would be naïve. Our differences are blatant. Yet in a way we are tied by our differences. Oddly, it is the logic of our difference that keeps us together. India is a country with the courage of its confusions.

Difference allows for varieties of behaviour. It allows for an interaction in the public domain but restricts communal ties or familial interaction. It is a different kind of wisdom, a different grammar.

We are a country of segmentary minds. Each segment is opposed to the other segment and the two segments confront together a third entity at a higher level. Checks and balances operate according to levels. Nukkad can fight nukkad but combine at a different level. Violence gets contained at the next level of unity. Beyond segmentariness, there is syncretism. Here difference is acknowledged and differences combine to reflect opposites. Sufism could combine Hindu/Muslim tenors, Sikhism, Hindu/Islam. Syrian Christianity uses the Hindu to sustain the Christian core. There is a transference taking place over time, where sharing is always possible over difference. It is almost as if taboos created around difference allow for playful reciprocities. Thirdly, difference in India does not always operate across hard territorialities. Boundaries are porous and choices do not have to be polarised. The People of India survey states that there are 300 communities in India that cannot be classified as primarily Muslim or Hindu. Our identities thrive on cross-connections.

There is a standard narrative of divisiveness that is invoked in every squabble. Indians love factionalism and factionalism seems to provide the dynamic of everyday power. There is the old adage that the English conquered us through a policy of divide and rule. But remember, Indian society like many other segmentary systems is easy to defeat but hard to conquer. In fact we expect the coloniser to be like us, settle down like one more caste and slowly merge into the system. Our news is all about squabbles. Party politics operates as factional politics. Everyone needs some one to differ with in order to be himself.

The Indian idea of unity is based on “I differ from you, therefore I am”, “I contradict myself, therefore I continue to be”. We are a society that believes that logic of some against others is better than the logic of all against one. We allow differences to create multiplicities rather than resort to extermism. Our self as a collection of contestations allows for tolerance and unity.

There are exceptions to the rule. The riots in 2002 in Gujarat are one example. Usually after a riot, there is a plethora of stories of how families of one ethnic group protected another. Stories of friendship, ethics, hospitability, solidarity create a compensatory universe which facilitates a return to normality. With Gujarat, one heard the language of exterminism, of wanting to eliminate a minority. Thankfully such a framework has not extended to other states. However, Kashmir was an example of a similar ruthlessness in another form as the Kashmiri pandits were driven from their homes to become refugees in their own land.

But the glue is not just structural idea of crosscutting differences. Accompanying this architectonic is the gum of folklore, the epidemic of dialects, the grammar of diversity. This unity exists in two forms. Firstly, it is civilisational, articulated as a sacred complex of spaces. The second is national. There is a sense that the flag and the constitution keep us together, providing a frame to negotiate differences. At a level of folklore, there is the cosmopolitanism of the common man, proud of our cultural hospitality, carrying with him a sense that India is a compost heap of differences. We constantly invent versions of unity from Vande Mataram, Jana gana mana to the unity songs of Bollywood from Raj Kapoor’s Mera Joota hai Japani and Made in India. There is a sanitised unity that creates sentiments of togetherness. Our myths always have places for the alien, the stranger, the marginal, the dwarf, and no matter how history sanitises myth, our minds carry the legends of hospitality and syncretism, making us cosmopolitan despite ourselves. We might quarrel with the local Bengali, but happily invite a million Bangladeshis to feel at home. The Tibetan senses our hospitality and Tibetans in turn add to our celebration of difference.

Bollywood captures the mindset of the difference. Bollywood, especially Bombay Talkies, was a miniature answer to the Partition, to the difference between Hindu and Muslim and their creative collaboration across differences. Bollywood has maintained that mindset, even sentimentally forging alliances between Hindu and Muslim at the moment of maximum collective rage. Only one other institution can match that sense of difference and unity — the Army. The Indian Army recognises the ethnicity of battalions — Jat, Sikh, Rajput, Gorkha and Maratha. Each has its own tradition and yet each adds to the collective unity of the Army. Bollywood and the Army are the stuff of legends and folklore. As institutions they provide the imaginative glue of a quarrelsome society proud of its diversity yet convinced there are logics beyond uniformity and homogeneity.

As long as our myths, our memories and our folklore rule the grammar of our lives, history can be as quarrelsome as it wants. If myths are elaborations of contradictions, our democracy is a resolution of the myth of difference.

The Pain of Onions

2011-01-22T04:33:00.000-08:00

Onions are not ordinary eating stuff. It can create or destroy political parties power holding. Historically onions have played a pivotal role in the political makeup and governance structure of India. In 2011 too onions will play its role fully well to the sadness of ruling coalition.

Manreet Sodhi writes in The Deccan Chronicle on 21st January 2011

In 16th century India a cook in the kitchen of the Mughal emperor Akbar accidentally added two portions of onion to a dish which went on to become a great hit. Thus was born dopiaza, literally onion twice over, a dish cooked in onion sauce that remains immensely popular to this day and has been successfully transplanted to Britain as well.

Except, if you wanted to cook it in India today, you might once again wish to seek royal patronage (or settle for a recipe that required no onion). With the vegetable selling at `85 (about $2) a kilo, up from `10 six months back, the staple of the average Indian household has gone extortionate.

The onion is rather ubiquitous in Indian food. Roughly chopped, it is an essential accompaniment to the sparse meal of the poor, while its braised, pureed, sauteed and garnished avatars surface in the meals of all others.

Muthi piaz — onion smashed with a fist — is de rigueur at roadside eateries throughout the country, and sirkawala piaz — onions in vinegar — are as essential to any table as salt and pepper.

So integral is the onion to the Indian way of life that it has its own mythology. Ayurveda, traditional medicine native to India, claims onion is diuretic, antiseptic, anti-inflammatory and anti-pigmentationary. Highly regarded as an aphrodisiac in ancient India, it was banned to Hindu widows.

In the sizzling heat of the subcontinent, the onion is called upon for its cooling properties. This was brought to me forcefully when I began my sales training in the plains of Central India in summer when the average day temperature is 45 degree centigrade, fuelled by a hot tropical wind called Loo. Since my work required me to visit 40 grocery stores in one day, I was advised to keep an onion with me, preferably on my person, or in my sales satchel.

By way of explanation, my supervisor showed me his bag, where an onion sat shrivelling in one corner. He made his point further by requesting a labourer to allow me a peek at the folds of his turban — sure enough, tucked within was a red onion.

Legends have grown around the pungent bulb. Shivaji, the fearsome Maratha warrior who took on the might of the Mughals, was reputed to eat a lean diet of unleavened bread with raw onions, as opposed to the effete Mughals, who gorged on twice-cooked onion dishes.

To add to the woes of the Mughals, a holy man, Baba Buddha, when served a simple meal by the wife of a Sikh guru, smashed the onion and predicted that her son would one day similarly crush the tyranny of the empire. Obviously, the humble vegetable is an underdog’s ally.

For the runaway price of onions today, the government has blamed heavy unseasonal rains, but poor agricultural productivity, lack of adequate infrastructure for storage and transport, and deficient government investment are equally to blame.

So what is the average Indian to do? Use cabbage and radish as substitute. And protest. Effigies of the agriculture minister have been burnt. Opposition leaders adorned with onion garlands have held rallies.

A novel protest had Santa Claus handing out onions on Christmas Eve. Meanwhile, enterprising businessmen are giving free onions with the purchase of televisions, cars, motorcycles and tires.

Rising onion prices have historically felled governments. In 1980, Indira Gandhi ousted the ruling government by appearing at election rallies with strings of onions. The message was clear: If you can’t manage the price of onions, how do you manage the country? A recent poll showed that the Congress Party would lose its parliamentary majority were an election to be held now.

The government is scrambling to bring the price of onions down. It has banned export of onions, turned to Pakistan for imports, and the prime minister has held cabinet meetings on the issue. Pakistan complied briefly before turning hostile, and now India is threatening in turn to halt cement exports.

It was always understood that you could knock next door for a bowl of sugar, some salt, an onion. With the current price of the vegetable, that would be akin to asking the neighbour for their family jewels. No wonder Pakistan is not responding.

We need to keep the peace in our neighbourhoods. In the interest of social cohesiveness, and its own survival, the government needs to fix the onion price pronto.

Unchangeable India

2011-01-07T01:33:00.000-08:00

It happens only in India, says an advertisement. All good and bad things keep moving the mighty civilization called India. Common people's confidence to survive under any circumstances is the real force behind the marching India. Political representatives, bureaucrats, media and other vital organs of the Indian society are the disappointing figures in the upward trajectory of the nation. Sadly these forces cannot be changed or removed. The tragedy of India continues to haunt the bottom of the national pyramid. Ironically the top of the pyramid exploits the bottom by bringing in the sufferings again and again. As long as poverty is there politics will be there. It is a mutual survival policy.

Dr.P.C.Alexander writes in The Deccan Chronicle on 5 January 2011

As we enter the second decade of the 21st century the issue that dominated the political debate of the late 1940s — the system of government best suited for India — is being raised again in certain intellectual circles.

The main problem before the framers of the Constitution was how to devise a Constitution best suited for both stability and accountability and also one which would help lift the vast masses of people stuck in ignorance, illiteracy, ill-health and poverty as a result of a century-and-a-half of colonial exploitation.

B.R. Ambedkar had explained to the members of the Constituent Assembly that they had two options before them: One, the presidential form of democracy as prevalent in the US, and the other the Westminster model of parliamentary democracy as prevalent in Britain.

The Constituent Assembly came to the conclusion that the Westminster model was the best suited for effectively tackling the problem of underdevelopment and at the same time providing for accountability and gave us the present Constitution, which in spite of a 100 amendments retains its basic features without any change. Let us examine how far the objectives of the founding fathers of our republic have been fulfilled under this Constitution.

While assessing the progress made in poverty eradication we have to acknowledge the fact that the lot of the poor today is much better than what it was at the time we achieved Independence. But what should cause serious concern is the fact that a large number of people still live in abject poverty in India, though the country has emerged as one of the top economic powers of the world.

What has gone wrong is not in production of wealth, but in distribution and in ensuring that all those who create wealth pay the taxes due to the government. Quite a good part of the wealth created has flown to tax havens in foreign countries and successive governments at the Centre have failed to plug such leakages.

According to a Swiss bank report of 2006, India topped the list of depositors of wealth in banks in Switzerland to the extent of $1,456 billion compared with Russia’s $470 billion, UK’s $390 billion, Ukraine’s $100 billion and China’s $96 billion. Deposits of Indians are thus more than the deposits of all the other countries, and this shows the extent of wealth owned by Indians, but which has escaped taxation. Many Indians have earned the distinction of being billionaires, but unfortunately India has not produced a Bill Gates or a Warren Buffett, who have made big money in a honest way and are spending the bulk of their wealth on deserving charities in countries all over the world, including India.

We have to admit with shame that hunger is still a major problem in our country and a large number of people in different parts of the country — both urban and rural — die of malnutrition and hunger.

According to the Global Hunger Index published by the Washington-based International Food Policy and Research Institute, India ranks 66 among 88 countries with 23.7 points on a 100 point scale. (Zero is the best score, indicating no hunger while 100 is the worst.) India’s Constitution and the laws made under it have never stood in the way of coming to the help of such people, but poor enforcement by the government has resulted in continued misery for such people.

On the criterion of education, fairly good progress has been made after Independence but the situation remains dismal because of the inadequacies of these institutions in both quantity and quality.

The condition of public health facilities, particularly in rural areas, is as bad as that of educational facilities in these areas.

The size of the population in 2,86,469 villages is less than 500 each and in 1,45,180 villages it is between 500 and 1,000 each out of a total number of 6,22,621 villages in India. There are serious problems in setting up proper health and educational institutions in such very small villages and the government has so far failed to devise suitable techniques to solve them. Instead, the government follows the traditional practice of establishing health clinics and primary schools in a few villages and appointing teachers or doctors for such places.

Now let us turn to the quality of the institutions of democracy in India. Whenever we speak of India’s achievements we pat ourselves on the back by claiming that we are one of the successful democracies. No doubt, compared with most other such newly-independent countries in Asia and Africa, we can legitimately claim that democracy has been stable, but, based on the criterion of quality of the institutions of democracy, India is still classified as one among the 50 “flawed democracies” of the world. According to the democracy index published by the Economist Intelligence Unit, 30 countries are full democracies, 50 “flawed democracies”, 36 hybrid regimes and 51 authoritarian regimes out of a total 167 countries. At the rate at which we are abusing the forum of legislature for staging protests and neglecting its primary duties, we may even slip below our present rank in the list of “flawed democracies”.

From the above assessment of the progress in programmes undertaken in the last six decades it is clear that the Constitution, which has been adopted by India, has in no way prevented it from improving on its performance. On the other hand, the manner in which the programmes have been implemented, the intolerable long delays, and, above all, the corruption associated with implementation of programmes, have been responsible for the shortfalls in performance.

Today there are many countries that have Constitutions combining some of the features of the Westminster model and some of the presidential system, but one doubts whether this type of combination will suit India.

I can do nothing better than quote Dr Larry Diamond, a reputed authority in the world on democracy and at present professor of political science and sociology at Stanford University, when he said after his recent visit to India, in the course of a question and answer session, that if India wants to improve its democracy, it must create stronger institutions that allow for horizontal accountability. Also, I strongly endorse his suggestion that India needs a “counter corruption commission”, like the Election Commission, which should be fully autonomous in its authority to check efficiency and punish corruption.

Wikidanger Assange

2010-12-26T21:36:00.000-08:00

With switches under its control every Government tries to make right things wrong and vice versa. Easily it whitewashes its crimes. Conventional tools and people were not able to break this monopoly of the Governments. But Wikileaks is an unconventional tool. Information and dirty secrets of the Governments may be brought out. The final impact becomes disastrous for every one including its founder Julian Assange. Too much of leak is dangerous for the very survival of the global society.

Shiv Vishwanathan writes in The Deccan Chronicle on 17th December 2010

Wikileaks has become a modern fable. Its founder Julius Assange faces charges of rape and years of harassment. Mr Assange is seen as that loathsome creature, the hacker. The hacker threatens the security systems of foreign policy. But more than security Mr Assange, the hacker has exposed the hypocrisy of governments.

The leaks have exposed the arrogance of US secretary of state Hillary Clinton and her sense of pomposity of India as a self-appointed member of the United Nations Security Council. Wikileaks has provided an everyday X-ray of how the American ambassador reads the weakness of India as a soft state, too invertebrate to take on Pakistan. The disclosures reveal the contempt of the ordinary foreign service bureaucrats for politicians and political processes.

The general reactions everywhere have been a sense of outrage first at the temerity of the act of disclosure and secondly at what the disclosures reveal. It reveals the hypocrisy of bureaucrats and politicians and it also exposes the fragility of the power to information.
The leaks almost seem to suggest that power exposed is power weakened. The sanctity of secrecy creates a halo around power which it does not deserve.
The leaks also expose the ambivalent figure of the hacker. The hacker is half outlaw, half dissenter. He is like the Levellers and the Dissenters were in Oliver Cromwell’s time. He embodies a different idea of power and responsibility.
The hacker as dissenter is a moral figure. He is an early warning system of the pathologies of power. The hacker is a liminal, ambivalent figure, anarchic enough to threaten power, an outlaw challenging the sanctity of rules and redefining them.
What I want to argue is that the hacker must be seen as homeostatic to the system. Every information system needs a hacker. It threatens power but guarantees the limits of power by creating an epidemic of accountability. To control the hacker beyond the norms of democracy is futile.
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has argued that phone tapping is essential because security demands and terror legitimises it. My counter argument is that if phone tapping is necessary for security, hacking is necessary for freedom.
One admits the problem resides in the sense of proportion. If an excess of phone tapping creates the paranoid world of surveillance, an excess of hacking can destabilise norms.
The hacker is seen as a bohemian. In fact, someone like Mr Assange is seen as bohemian in his sexuality and in his attitude to information. The hacker personalises excess. Given his liminality, the hacker must be allowed his way of life. This holds as long as the hacker is a dissenter. In that sense Mr Assange is a prisoner of conscience and must be adopted by Amnesty International as one. It is illiterate to compare him to a Cyber bin Laden. Mr Assange is a dissenter not a fundamentalist. He wants to save lives not to eliminate people. It only frightens power. Hacking is a part of the power of the powerless.
The responsibility does not end with the hacker. The information the hacker revels is an invitation to citizenship. Hacking cannot end as a scandal. The scandal is a ritual that initiates deeper understanding of power. Where hacking stops, the citizen takes over — asking for accountability and transparency from power. The journalist as investigator, the dissenter as researcher finds a new sibling in the hacker as a subventor of power. The tuning fork for judgment is motive and the consequences of the hacking act. The hacker is an essential purgative to the system.
mr Assange in a historical sense stands on par with Daniel Goldberg of the Pentagon tapes or the journalists Woodward and Bernstien who exposed Watergate and ended the strange career of Richard Nixon.
The hacker is a special kind of whistleblower. Whistleblowing is usually an individual act of courage, an exemplary act of dissent. Hacking is more communitarian. It is a network of dissent which operates on power.
I want to emphasise that I am not creating a hagiography of the hacker. I think his ambivalence is what provides a sense of limits of power. The hacker carries both the marks of a trickster and a martyr, and we need to recognise his mixed, mixed-up nature.
The hacker in homoeopathic doses is necessary to prevent the arrogance of power. He is an antidote but should not become purgative. In excess he is an epidemic, in aesthetic limits he is a democratic necessity. Think of it, the right to information will be a feeble promise without the culture of hacking. If the right to information creates access to information, hacking breaks the secrecy that prevents information from going public.
One might ask what the difference between wire-tapping and hacking is. Wire-tapping as an instrument is used by the structure of surveillance. Wire-tapping invades privacy.
There is a final point one must emphasise in this ode to hacking. Hacking emerged like IT, out of the beat cultures that made Silicon Valley. Hacking was a dissenting cult which understood the spirit of the network and kept it alive. Hackers are not luddites. They are experts in technological folklore. As tricksters they understand that technology cannot be a servant of power. This much the Wikileaks proved and for this much Mr Assange must be seen as a force of freedom, a dissenter, a whistleblower, whose “noise” is always the unwelcome music that power cannot tolerate.

Destroying Global Agriculture

2010-11-29T05:38:00.000-08:00

Agriculture is the backbone of global society. Contradictory this truth some foolish economists are persuaded developed nations to switch over to industrial mode of production completely.More than half of the world is developing and a quarter is undeveloped. Now these anti agriculture tribe is compelling developing and underdeveloped nations to shed agriculture. Where will the world will go to beg for the food.

Suman Sahai writes in The Deccan Chronicle on 27 November 2010

A new colonialism is underway. Rich, food-importing countries are grabbing the world’s farmland for captive food production for their people. China, South Korea, Japan, as well as Saudi Arabia and the Arab states are the new colonisers. Africa, with its large land mass, fertile land in most places and abundant water, is a target, like India, with its fabled wealth that once was. Only this time, India is joining the ranks of the land grabbers, not on the same scale as the biggies but India, too, is acquiring land in Africa.

The tragedy of Africa is that it remains food insecure despite its fertile farmlands, receiving food-aid from UN agencies like the World Food Programme. Ethiopia, which is aggressively promoting the lease out of its land to foreign investors, receives food aid worth $115 million but its lands generate cereals worth $100 million for Saudi Arabia. Ethiopian land produces food for foreigners but cannot do the same for itself! Similarly, Sudan which receives as much as $1.6 billion worth of free food from international agencies, grows wheat for Saudi Arabia, vegetables for Jordan and its own staple food, sorghum, for animal feed in the United Arab Emirates.

The food crisis of 2008 and high food inflation brought home to many how fragile the global food situation can be, not just for the poor but also for the rich who do not have sufficient land to grow the food they require. When global food commodities disappeared from the international market as a result of factors like speculation leading to hoarding, diversion of foodgrains like corn and soybean to biofuels and increased demand for animal feed, the rich food-importing nations realised that it was not sufficient to have money. To be food secure, they decided, they could not depend on international food stocks but must have control over food production directly. If they did not have enough land in their sovereign territories, they would simply acquire this land elsewhere, produce the food there and ship it home. This would allow them to bypass global food markets and the volatility associated with them in the recent past. It is estimated that in the last few years, up to 20 million hectares of land are either already leased or are being negotiated for lease.

This new colonialism takes forward the trend of the last centuries. The 19th century Europe took over large tracts of farmland in Africa for coffee and cocoa plantations. US-based fruit growing conglomerates appropriated farmland in South and Central America and in Southeast Asian countries like the Philippines to produce bananas, pineapples and other tropical fruits for the world market. The farmland grab of today is fundamentally different though. Earlier it was cash crops and a means to wealth generation, today it is based on straightforward food security instead of revenue generation. Food-importing countries are seeking the first instance to secure food supplies for themselves.

Not just the wealthy countries, others have also joined this exploitation of global farmland.

In neighbouring Pakistan, the government is offering farmland to (largely) Arab investors. Government-backed roadshows are being held in the Gulf state, offering extremely generous tax incentives to attract investment. Given the state of the country’s domestic security situation, an additional bonus that Pakistan offers is a one lakh strong security force to protect the foreign investments.

India too is in the thick of the land grab. Indian companies have found a way out of the land ceiling laws in India to build vast agriculture operations in Africa where there is no ceiling on land ownership. Building huge agriculture empires is not possible in India, but it is in Africa. The Indian government supports this move and provides soft loans and reduced import duties to enable the shipment of agriculture produce to India. Indian farming companies have bought thousands of hectares of land in Africa and are growing rice, maize and pulses which they sell to India. These companies have invested upwards of $2.4 billion to buy up farmland in Ethiopia alone. Karuturi Global, a Karnataka-based company is one of the biggest land owners in Africa, where it grows cash crops like sugarcane and palm oil, as well as rice and vegetables. Not surprisingly, the backlash from people in Africa against foreign investments has begun. Karuturi is one of the prime targets. Activist groups are calling the investments a “land grab” taking away the entitlements of the African people. They say such alienation of land will deprive locals of their livelihoods. They have a point.

If this form of land leasing is to be made fair and sustainable, a code of conduct must be formulated. This could be done by bodies like the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation.

- Dr Suman Sahai, a genetic scientist who served on faculty of the Universities of Chicago and Heidelberg, is convenor of Gene Campaign

There is a fear that the foreign investments in food production will end up hurting farmers as corrupt local governments allow the land to be leased out without building in any securities for the land owners. These could often be small farmers with little idea of what has been negotiated or what would be the terms of getting their land back. Would the land owner have some right to the food that is produced on his land? Would the local community have preferential rights to access the food or could it be all exported without leaving anything for the local people? Who would ensure that the land is not degraded during the lease period and that it is returned to the owners in a healthy state? Such investment deals have been notoriously non-transparent in most cases so far.
If this form of land leasing is to be made fair and sustainable, and if the small landholders are also to benefit from it, a code of conduct must be formulated. This could be done by bodies like the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation. They should define the terms and conditions under which land is made available for contracted food production. There must be a consultative process with not just the governments but with the land owners directly and the terms and conditions must be made clear to them. Prior Informed Consent, a feature of recent negotiations determining access to resources, as for instance in the Convention on Biological Diversity, must be made standard features in all such arrangements, before a deal can be finalised. The international community must put its weight behind compliance of the code of conduct in both the host and investor country so that such deals do not become tools of exploitation, depriving the poor and hungry and robbing them of the chance to ever become food secure.

Corrupt Chief Vigilance Commissioner

2010-11-26T01:56:00.000-08:00

The UPA is self-contradicting its dhramic philosophy. The promise made by Sonia Gandhi and Manmohan Singh duo in 2004 was to stem the rot of corruption and provide good governance. Day in and day out it seems this duo will outlive the previous corrupt regimes in the country. May be they are not corrupt personally. Failure to the control the other's corruption when they are in power to control will amount to personal corruption. This inefficiency is worst than the personal corruption. Worst of all the tragedies happened in the UPA governments in 2004 and 2oo9 afterwards it the appointment of P.J.Thomas as the Chief Vigilance Commissioner. The tainted bureaucrat whose hands are full of bribes and black marks were appointed as the CVC despite opposition from Sushma Swaraj during the selection committee meeting. The invitation to the leader of opposition during the selection process was mere formality than any sincerity. Now the onus is on Manmohan Singh and Sonia Gandhi to clean the dirty linen which they got in the government's hands.

PJ.Thomas, the former telecom secretary was appointed as the CVC to cover up the 2G and other telecom scams. Who was behind his appointment? Surely there was extra Prime Ministerial and Congress presidential authorities in this matter.

The Deccan Chronicle writes on 24th November 2010

At a time when UPA-2 finds itself in political difficulty following revelations over the 2G spectrum allocations, the Supreme Court has embarrassed the Manmohan Singh government by questioning its decision to appoint P.J. Thomas as chief vigilance commissioner, although it appears the government did so in good faith. From the arguments advanced by attorney-general Goolam E. Vahanvati in the court on Monday, the government appeared to believe it had the right man for the job, even though his name figures in a chargesheet filed in Kerala in 2000 as an accused in a case of import of palmolein. There is an impression that the case has not moved forward, in the past 10 years, for reasons that appear partly technical, and partly an attempt on the part of the CPI(M) to embarrass the Congress during whose tenure the import was made. The attorney-general has also argued that there was no case involving the Prevention of Corruption Act against Mr Thomas. He noted that when the then chief secretary was empanelled to become parliamentary affairs secretary, his name was cleared by the then CVC. The final point in Mr Vahanvati’s brief is that the former chief election commissioner, Mr J.M. Lyngdoh, had once noted in an annual confidential report on Mr Thomas’ performance that he possessed “integrity beyond doubt”. The irony is that the questioning of Mr Thomas’ appointment as the new CVC has come in a pubic interest litigation case filed by Mr Lyngdoh and others.
To be fair, the first instance we should perhaps suspend judgement on Mr Thomas’ presumed guilt. We should also hope that the system is made to improve so that no case is permitted to drag out so long. All the same, given the totality of circumstances, it is clear that appointing Mr Thomas as CVC has been singularly unwise. The most important reason is suggested by the key question posed by the Chief Justice of India S.H. Kapadia. The CJI has maintained quite appropriately that since the CVC remains an accused in a listed case, he will not be in a position to issue notice to a party in matters brought before him, rendering him effectively “non-functional”. This makes eminent sense. It is a pity that the attorney-general did not grasp this, especially when he is dealing with as sensitive a constitutional appointment as that of the CVC, whose role is decide corruption matters concerning senior officials.

To make matters worse, the attorney-general argued with uncommon foolishness that if the idea of “impeccable integrity” were to be strictly adopted, key judicial appointments might come under scrutiny. This would sound like a threat to most people. Indeed, the attorney-general must be asked why the Indian citizen must not aspire to have only those of “impeccable integrity” holding top administrative and constitutional positions. This is among the reasons why the BJP’s Ms Sushma Swaraj, Leader of the Opposition, had opposed Mr Thomas’ appointment. The CVC is chosen by a troika comprising the Prime Minister, Union home minister and the Leader of the Opposition. Overlooking Ms Swaraj’s objections clearly looks like a mistake and amounts to the disregard of a well-conceived institution.

Crush the reality shows

2010-11-19T02:00:00.000-08:00

In the name of reality some shows exceed the social limit and create havoc in the lives of common people. Due to the hgih TRP ratings media goes gung ho over these shows. With the media frenzy people too get attracted towards these televisions shows without any distinctions. Age, class, caste and other social factor become invalid when it comes to these shows. The social psychology of the Indian society cannot be controlled by the intellectual warnings. It is better to censor these shows. Left unchecked will create devastation in the society. It is like leaving the criminals free.

The Deccan Chronicle writes on 19th November 2010

The eclipse of Doordarshan’s monopoly on the small screen, and the opening of the brave new world of liberalisation and globalisation, have served several worthwhile objectives and brought to our milieu many laudable commodities and services that we were earlier missing out on. Alas, a good deal of television programming is not in this category. The independent news and current affairs channels are generally second class, although enough years have passed since they first appeared. Of the fare these purvey in the name of entertainment, the less said the better. But many will probably agree — it is impossible to speak for the majority in the matter of personal tastes, and when it comes to offering a non-legal definition of decency — that the so-called entertainment channels have plumbed depths that we didn’t suspect existed in our broad cultural context, although that area too is elusive of a definition that may satisfy most. So, the question is does the recent directive of the information and broadcasting ministry asking two channels that broadcast Bigg Boss and Rakhi ka Insaaf respectively to broadcast at times that will blank them out of viewers and hit their earnings hard, come to the rescue of those of us who look upon these serials as base, gross, vulgar or otherwise unacceptable? Making the effort to be careful, the government order has not asked the channels in question to stop broadcasting the serials it finds offensive, or to televise only duly edited parts. However, the Bombay HC has stayed the I&B instruction. There is every likelihood that the channels will come up with the freedom of expression argument. Of course, no freedom is absolute and reasonable restrictions do come into play in a democratic order. Probably the judges will eventually look at the question whether the broadcast material causes enmity between sections of the people, nudges viewers to violence, or outrages the sense of public modesty in the manner open pornography (whose public representation is taboo in India while it is not in some Western democracies) does. These grounds have been trodden before, needless to say. At least at the level of theoretical discussion there can be no serious disagreement that freedom of expression should apply even to those who provide lousy fare, or make a living out of choosing to be vulgar. In effect, then, the HC is likely to be ruling on whether the particular material placed before them — and this might amount to going over each episode — is deleterious to the society’s health and causes internal divisions, sabotage or unrest. This is frankly quite absurd. After all these programmes have been on a long time and the government has not sought to clamp down on them before. In the spirit of democracy and free expression, it might be best if the government withdrew its order (although it might find many takers) altogether. What the I&B ministry has done is censorship by another name. That much is clear, and that is exactly what some right-wing groups tend to do through display of open goonda force. Perhaps the choice of viewing a particular programme should be left, in the final analysis, to t

Boston worry can't stop Bengaluru

2010-09-17T00:05:00.000-07:00

Not only Barack Obama but his predecessors were worried about Indians and Chinese dominating the work places of America. This trouble was self-inflicted by Americans. A casual approach to everything tripped American society, economy, culture and polity. In order to rescue the American society it is important to ensure seriousness in schools, colleges and universities. Unless and until this is done Bengaluru and Shanghai will continue to dominate the American empire.

US President Barack Obama has exhorted American students to toil harder at school, saying their success would determine the country’s leadership in a world where children in Bengaluru and Beijing were raring to race ahead.

Obama has repeatedly said that American schools would have to ensure that they continue producing leagues of top professionals, so that the American hegemony in human resource continues in this century.

“At a time when other countries are competing with us like never before, when students around the world in Beijing, China, or Bangalore, India, are working harder than ever, and doing better than ever, your success in school is not just going to determine your success, it’s going to determine America’s success in the 21st century,” Obama said.

“The farther you go in school, the farther you’re going to go in life,” he told students at a school in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

In 2009, while announcing an end of tax incentives to US companies which created jobs overseas, Obama had launched the “Say no to Bangalore and yes to Buffalo” slogan.

Since then, he has time and again mentioned the competition coming in from developing countries like China and India while asking Americans to rise to the challenge to keep the American supremacy alive.

“…You’ve got an obligation to yourselves, and America has an obligation to you, to make sure you’re getting the best education possible,” Obama said in his latest remarks.

He said preparing the students for success in classroom, college and career would also require an enormous collective effort of teachers, principals as well as the administration.

“It’s going to take outstanding principal and outstanding teachers who are going above and beyond the call of duty for their students,” he said. Asking the students to work harder than everybody else and seek out new challenges, he said his call was directed at all Americans alike.

“… I’m not just speaking to all of you, I’m speaking to kids all across the country. And I want them to all here that same message: That’s the kind of excellence we’ve got to promote in all of America’s schools,” Obama said.

Too much worry; too much China relaxation

2010-09-17T00:03:00.001-07:00

Whether others like it or not, China is zooming in the world skies. Its carefully crafted growth is creating unbelievable situations around the world. India being the long time foe of the dragon giant needs to be cautious about the galloping neighborhood. Although China extends warmth and a hand of friendship openly to India it encourages anti Indian elements in Pakistan and other countries. What Srinath Raghavan writes in the article may be an underestimate about China’s potential threat. But it is also true that India is over obsessed with China threat.

Srinath Raghavan writes in The Deccan Chronicle

China seems to have a knack for generating a periodic hubbub in our public discourse. The most recent one has been triggered by reports in Western media about the presence of Chinese troops in the Gilgit-Baltistan area and by the denial of a Chinese visa to the Northern Army Commander. Coming on the heels of the earlier controversies, these have yet again excited our imaginations over the “threat” from China. Notwithstanding interventions by a phalanx of experts, the current debate tells us more about our own discourse on China than about Beijing’s intentions or plans.

Consider, for a start, the claim that the recent moves indicate a significant hardening of China’s position on Kashmir. China’s stance on Kashmir has evolved in three distinct phases. In the 1950s, the Chinese took a largely neutral position. The evidence now available from Chinese archives shows that in their limited interaction, the Chinese were urging the Pakistanis to settle with India. Things began to change with the deterioration of the Sino-Indian relationship. For three decades, starting from 1963, the Chinese switched to a position of endorsing Pakistan’s demand for a plebiscite. From the early 1990s, the improving ties with India led the Chinese to shift their stance yet again. They now held that Kashmir was a bilateral problem to be solved by India and Pakistan. This is, of course, close to the Indian position on the matter.

However, the Chinese have never acknowledged sovereignty over Kashmir. Their visa policy is a way of simultaneously needling India and extending symbolic support to Pakistan. But it is nothing more than that. Indeed, given India’s ability to respond in kind — not least over matters like the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan exiles — the Chinese are unlikely to escalate tensions on issues of core concern. On more practical matters, such as developmental activities in occupied Kashmir or disaster relief, the Chinese will continue to extend assistance to Pakistan. And there is little that India can realistically do here. As Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel once remarked, possession is nine-tenths of the law. It is as unrealistic of us to expect our protests to bring these activities to a halt as it was of China to expect that it could block Indian developmental activities in Arunachal Pradesh.

The ongoing debate also highlights three important strands of our narrative on China. The first is the view that China is a highly strategic and deeply malevolent power that thinks in long-time horizons. The obverse of this is the claim that India lacks any strategic vision and is numbed by short-term expediency. In consequence, our experts urge us to remember that every small move by the Chinese is an integral part of a larger plan calculated to advance their power and interests and to undercut ours. That the Chinese have shown themselves capable of long-term planning, especially in economic matters, is undeniable. But the historical record also shows that they are capable of making enormous blunders — mistakes that have usually defied any strategic logic. Think of the Great Leap Forward and the break with their most important ally, the Soviet Union.

Take the more recent example of China’s position in East Asia. Until about a year ago, the smaller East Asian countries were loquacious in their admiration for China’s “peaceful rise”. But China’s swagger and assertiveness over the last year has nudged many of these countries towards a more wary stance. The retention of the American military base in Okinawa, the strengthening of US-South Korea ties, the US-Vietnam naval exercises in the South China Sea: none of these work in China’s interests, but all are a consequence of China’s stance on a range of issues which have not been clearly thought through. The Middle Kingdom, then, can also be the Muddle Kingdom. It is important, therefore, not to read too much long-term strategy into every Chinese move.

The second, and related, strand is the assumption that China is out to encircle and box-in India in the subcontinent. The numerous ports that China is building in our neighbourhood are held out as evidence of this intent. That the military aspects of the Sino-Pakistan relationship are aimed at balancing against India is clear. Not so the assumption that every port built by China in our neighbourhood is a potential naval base for them. For one thing, the military implication of these commercial activities is not at all obvious. More importantly, we need to ask ourselves why we are unable to undertake similar projects. The answer is simple: India does not yet have a competitive world-class port construction industry. Instead of inveighing against the Chinese for allegedly making inroads into our neighbourhood, we might usefully turn the searchlight on our own capacities.

The third strand is the entrenched belief that China has deliberately refrained from coming to an agreement with India on the disputed boundary. This is a seriously one-sided reading of the record. For two decades after 1962, India was as uninterested as China in resuming the negotiations. Thereafter, too, India dragged its feet on a sensible framework for discussing the boundary and insisted on subsidiary negotiations to clarify the Line of Actual Control. It was only in 2003 that we agreed to a viable framework for political negotiations. True, the Chinese have adopted a tough stance over the last few years. But this is only to be expected in any such negotiation. Instead of harping that India is the only country with which China has not settled, it might do us some good to consider why India is the only country which has been unable to settle with China. The strategic thinker Basil Liddell Hart’s prescription is apt for our China experts: “Avoid self-righteousness like the devil — nothing is so blinding”.

Taken together, these three assumptions seriously distort our debates on China. This is problematic because .international politics is an interactive game. Our narratives about other states invariably end up influencing their behaviour. Unless we are careful, the “China threat” might well become a self-fulfilling prophecy

China - World's Darling for Next Few Decades

2010-08-25T01:50:00.000-07:00

China is world's darling for the time being and for next few decades. Its pre planned growth is paying well. From economy to external affairs, from poverty eradication to people control, from cultural expression to communication network, the dragon nation is speeding up well. One cannot expect it to be the unchallenged superpower forever from now. But as of now China is succeeding in its plans.

Vikram Sood writes in The Deccan Chronicle on 25 August 2010

For decades China pretended to be modest and Deng Xiaoping’s successors followed him as they couched their ambitions in soft idioms. The “sons of heaven”, as the Chinese traditionally consider themselves, also consider those on their periphery as rebellious barbarians who had to be tamed or conquered. So the discourse was: “Tao guang yang hui” — variously translated, but which essentially means “hide brightness, nourish obscurity”. The exhortation was to keep a low profile when in an adverse situation and wait for a suitable opportunity to reverse fortunes. The other advice was “yield on small issues with the long term in mind”. All this has begun to change as China’s influence began to rise and the United States was perceived to be in decline. The US policy predicaments in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran and Western economic crises in contrast to China’s steady growth is probably the reason for this change in attitude. There is an exuberance and global self-confidence accompanied by a global outreach that was not visible earlier.

It is useful to go back to January 20, 2009 — the day Barack Obama was sworn in as US President. This was also the day that the Chinese released their White Paper on National Defence (2008). Perhaps a coincidence, perhaps not. The White Paper covers issues like Taiwan, Tibet, the defence budget, diplomatic outreach and gives some details about how China would use its nuclear force. It is important to refer to some portions of the paper which underline the new philosophy. The preface mentions that historic changes were taking place between contemporary China and the rest of the world, and the Chinese had become an important part of the international system. China, it said, “could not develop in isolation from the rest of the world, nor can the world enjoy prosperity and stability without China.” The intention was to portray China as a participatory nation with huge responsibilities and its own indispensability in the new global order.

China’s international behaviour has been a mix of defiance — such as at the Copenhagen climate summit, when it sent junior functionaries to discussions with heads of state, or its dealings on the Iran nuclear issue or the nuclear deal with Pakistan. China has been assertive with India on Arunachal Pradesh by blocking the ADB loan, has been provocative by issuing “plain paper” visas to Indians born in Jammu and Kashmir and routinely shrill about the Dalai Lama, while increased border violations have been noticed in Arunachal Pradesh — which Chinese commentators call “Southern Tibet”. Chinese activities in our neighbourhood, its plans to dam the Brahmaputra and extend the Tibet rail link into Nepal are other aspects of continuing Chinese assertiveness. The Chinese PLA had recently transported combat readiness material to PLA and Air Force units in Tibet by rail for the first time. This would further enhance the military transportation capacity, apart from the construction of more airports in Tibet.

While some American experts like Prof. David Shambaugh describe this Chinese attitude as a sign of defensive nationalism — assertive in form but reactive in essence, the fact is that since about the middle of 2009 the Chinese have talking more and more about their “core interests”. As D.S. Rajan, director of the Centre for China Studies, Chennai, points out, Chinese leader Dai Bingguo said in July 2009 that “the PRC’s first core interest is maintaining its fundamental system and state security, the second is state sovereignty and territorial integrity, and the third is the continued stable development of the economy and society”. Translated into specifics, it means protection of its interests in Tibet, Taiwan, Xinjiang, the South China Sea and its strategic resources and sea trade routes.

China’s assertiveness about the South China Sea, its umbrage at US secretary of state Hillary Clinton’s July 2010 remarks in Hanoi on creating an international mechanism to resolve this issue, has been particularly visible in the past few weeks. Dai Bingguo conveyed to Ms Clinton in May 2010 that China regarded its claims to the South China Sea as a core national interest. The Chinese have closely watched the growing US-Vietnamese ties, which includes an American offer of a civil nuclear deal to Vietnam on lines similar to the India deal. A triangular acrimony between the US, China and Vietnam has been growing for some time.

The Chinese carried out a live ammunition PLA Navy exercise in the South China Sea on July 26, followed by another exercise on August 3 along the Yellow Sea coast — the other area of contention. The Chinese conducted exercises there in April and June this year, and were now asserting that China opposed any foreign ships entering the sea or adjacent waters; they even vehemently opposed joint US-South Korean exercises there.

The message in these demarches to the US was in keeping with protecting China’s core interests in the adjacent seas and telling the US that the western Pacific was China’s sphere of interest and influence. It suggested a division of zones of influence between the Eastern and Western Pacific. The US and China have their own geostrategic rivalries to settle, and the Chinese may have assessed that their moment has come.

Yet China remains concerned with its intricate trade and financial links with the US, and also with the security of its trade and supply routes that transit the Malacca Straits. It has endeavoured to develop extensive land routes through Central Asia, but these are inadequate. It is a matter of time before China will make its presence more visible in the Indian Ocean. It has port facilities in Hambantota and Gwadar, and a presence in the Arabian Sea as it battles Somali pirates. China has expanded its contacts with Iran, more in competition with Russia than the US, it seeks mineral wealth in Afghanistan, its relations with Pakistan need no elucidation and it has developed strong ties with Burma. Thus while we may agonise over challenges across our land frontiers, we would be ignoring the new challenge in the Indian Ocean unless we plan countermeasures now.

Negotiating Life Through Changed Topics

2010-08-03T23:03:00.000-07:00

Life in the ultra pace world is like a hanging sword over head. Every minute requires clever negotiation. Without a strategy in steering life it is impossible to find happiness. In this steering changing the topic when you get into the crisis is the finest strategy. Despite changing the topic many evil minded people will attack you, drag you, in fact push to the periphery. In that case even changing the topic will be futile. But in most of the times changing the topic will be healing touch maker during life crisis.

Jairam M Menon writes in The Times of India on 3 August 2010

Until the matter blew up on prime-time television, the chairman of the Commonwealth Games organising committee would happily talk about the glory of sport when asked for the financial details of the Games. And when our friendly neighbourhood masterminds were asked about their Mumbai marauders, they talked instead about Kashmir. None of them were lying, they just made lies redundant. While politicians as topic changers (TCs) may make front-page news, they aren't the only ones at it. There are bright young management consultants who have made a living (and until the downturn, a killing) with an avalanche of 'exponential', 'synergistic', and 'transitioning' until no one recollects what the original topic was. Doctors, lawyers, bankers, academicians, bureaucrats, journalists are all talented TCs in their own right. And as a matter of fact, i am no mean TC myself, having built a reputation as a peace-maker in social circles solely on the ability to deflect a conversation before it charts a collision course.

Changing the topic does not always mean you are shirking the responsibility of arriving at a meaningful conclusion to a discussion. Rather, it means that like an astute Mahendra Singh Dhoni, you are opting for spin when pace does not seem to be delivering the goods. Successfully executed, topic changes can keep marriages afloat, prevent friends from flying at each other's throats, promote good neighbourliness, prolong careers and, in their own little ways, contribute to world peace. Frankly, i think the reason the world is getting to be such a mess is that we are running short of TCs.

Topic changing comes from an acceptance of things as they are. It flows from the benign understanding almost Vedantic in its sweep that some problems are better left unattended. For instance, the logical thing to do when you are confronted with moral policemen outside a pub would be to point out the error of their ways. The trouble with this approach is that life is not logical and still less are moral policemen. Persisting with an argument in the quest of an immediate solution is hazardous you may end up losing both argument and life. As the Bard (arguably the world's most accomplished TC) would have said, those who change the topic return to debate another day.

It is not only when conversations threaten to enter danger zone that you need a mid-course correction. As every hostess knows, a topic has in-built limitations, and long silences at what was supposed to be a convivial gathering can be embarrassing. So it is handy to have a TC around to keep the traffic moving. Imagine a group that is animatedly discussing, say, the lissome loveliness of Kareena Kapoor. After talking without a pause for an entire weekend, the group will inevitably reach the point beyond which even Saif Ali Khan may not be able to contribute anything significant to the discussion. This is when the TC steps in to bring up the subject of Kareena's possible nuptials. "That would make her a triple 'K', wouldn't it?" he enquires, ever so gently. A renewed gush of conversation ensues, and someone is bound to hark back to the other 'KKK' - America's defunct racist group - which can turn the spotlight on America's unfailingly interesting African-American president. And that is as good a cue as any to talk about the empowerment of India's own disadvantaged, to wit Mayawati. Before your audience knows it, you have successfully changed topics from the feline grace of Kareena to the elephantine power of Mayawati's party.

There are bull-headed opponents who feel that topic changers only brush unpleasantness under the carpet. They insist that if the world has to be made a better place tomorrow, we need to confront issues head on today. I think it is pointless to argue with such single-minded opponents of changing the topic. I just change the topic.

Blind Focus of the Government

2010-07-17T00:21:00.000-07:00

The Government of the day is responsible in providing both physical, human and social securities to every citizen. The UPA Government although loud mouths about the turn around of social disparities is yet to prove its capacity in this front. Many fancy schemes sponsored by the Central Government is announced often to attract sympathies of common people. Alas! there is no positive change in many downtrodden people's lives. It is important to create and sustain a team of committed force from the planning to implementation stage. If this crucial exercise is left to a loosely jokers with ministerial tags and cabinet perks it is bound to fail. There may be trumpeting in paper about the success of these schemes. Most of the central schemes instead of creating positive changes is bringing in negative impact. For instance the Mahatma Gandhi Rural Employment Guarantee Programme has take away the farm labour. If the take away farm labours are creating constructive assets then it is a happy news. They are wagging away time to get Rs. 80 above per day. This destroy both the private agriculture and public funds. Instead of focusing on the crucial aspects of national development the UPA government is losing balance. Before it takes the nation to the irrecoverable accident some sense should stop this blind driving of India.

Shiv Viswanathan writes in The Deccan Chronicle 16 July 2010

The other day someone asked me what I thought were the three most important ministries. The standard answers expected were defence, home and finance. Some would hyphenate foreign and defence. I must admit these are important ministries, if law and order, security are the most important goals of the state. But in a futuristic sense, as a vision for creativity, the three most important ministries are health, environment and education. These constitute the framework for the future. Today I want to focus on one of them — education.

The reason is we are being outthought. Education in India is creating a mimic man, an imitative society content with being a fourth-rate America, glad if it has Donald Duck or Spiderman on the flag. It is turning us into a third-rate global regime. We are so pleased with our success abroad, from Spelling Bees to a two-inch column in the Times, that we don’t recognise that we are being bypassed intellectually.
Competition is good in its own way but what are we competing about? Our leadership is quite happy to have reached the 19th century of ideas in a society they still treat as 14th century.

Our dynamism is misdirected because our language and theories of education are flawed. Look at how we approach education. It is in the language of productivity and numbers. The way our minister speaks we don’t know whether he is in charge of buildings or education. He sounds more like a minister for housing because building education is a totally different game. The numbers game creates a sense of targets but an obsession with it forecloses the debate on quality, plurality and content. We play the multiplication game with slogans of more IIT, more IIMs, as if we have patented a way of cloning institutions. No one takes a critical look at these institutions beyond an occasional critique of their admissions policy. The IIMs and IIT have research ratings which would embarrass a modest, even provincial, US university. In fact, we have no theory of the modern university.

Ironically, we are still children of Macaulay. His ghost overpowers the Gandhian vision. There is an irony to it because Macaulay made us middle class English speakers. It is our comparative advantage in English that powers our economy. Our model of education is still the tutorial college. More students have grown up reading K.K. Dewett and Ruddar Dutt than the management expert Prahlad and the economist Sen.
What is the tutorial college? It is the ultimate fantasy of reduction and miniaturisation. A society’s inversion of Macaulay’s perverse dream. Macaulay’s arrogance proclaimed that all of Indian civilisation is not worth a shelf of Western books. The irony was that we literally reduced Western civilisation to a shelf of dull functional books. We then bowdlerised it, simplifying it to its crudest elements. The kunji or cogbook was born. We reduced Western civilisation from a text to a textbook and religiously updated it. These books are the publisher’s ultimate fantasy and run up to 40 editions. We turned education into an instrument like a lathi or a screwdriver between the kunji and the tutorial college. The ultimate dream of the tutorial college is entry into IIT and IIT pays back by imitating its pedagogy.

If imitation is a sign of flattery, India is the ultimate mimic civilisation. Mimicry may be a form of temporary survival but it cannot be a substitute for creativity in a democratic society. One has to be more inventive.

More crucially, India can’t create a history where education mimicked the violence of colonialism. Imperialism could, with the aid of homogenising development models, museumise tribe and craft, or condemn them to assimilation. We need plural structures of knowledge and education where craft is reworked as a new kind, as a new hand-brain hyphen and our linguistic wealth, both written and oral, is sustained.
Our university is still the examination machine of the 19th century, meant for turning out clerks and bureaucrats. Our mandarins still emerge from that system and exemplify it. We are masters of the exam system but mediocres in research. We are poor at knowledge creation and it is in the domain of knowledge creation and knowledge strategies that India is losing out.

We need a gradient of knowledge systems from the primary school to the centres of advanced knowledge. We have to realise it is one chain of being, like a food chain, and violence to any part damages the whole. To a theory of integrated knowledge, we have to add a theory of knowledge itself.

We have to keep the varieties of knowledge in our society dynamic. We have to realise that the democratisation of knowledge demands that the tribal, the peasant, the hawker, the nomad be seen as strategists of survival, as men and women of knowledge. Our informal economy is a knowledge system of its own that we are loathe to appreciate. The democratisation of knowledge has to be part of the democratisation of democracy. This demands that we be a knowledge culture first before we are a knowledge economy.

The Knowledge Commission actually did not work. India has no current equivalent of the Kothari or Radhakrishnan Report. We need such an overall statement which links education to new ideas in science, ecology and culture. Europe and the USA are continually rethinking their universities. These changes don’t merely cover budgetary reform but critical changes in economy and the structure of science.

Our paradigms of education are 19th century and our policy is only a collection of add-ons. What we need is a new “Educational Report” which is as ethnographically rich as a colonial gazetteer, which connects to other critical reports like the Sengupta Report and the Sachar Report on Minorities. A theory of the knowledge economy cannot be a nation state document. It has to be simultaneously civilisational and located in community and civil society. A project that links all these into a vision of the future is a project whose time has come. The question is do our politicians have the will to create such a vision and implement it, or is obsolescence and illiteracy the strategy of our populism-seeking elite?

Truly Beautiful Soccer

2010-07-07T00:16:00.000-07:00

Tolerance and goodwill are some of the best learnings taught by the sports. The ongoing FIFA 2010 world cup is one of the effective means to promote harmony and friendship. So far the soccer world cup is going well and brought people across the world over the football, fun, cross cultural learning.

Francis Gonslaves writes in The Deccan Chronicle on 6 July 2010

There’s this fable about Jesus going to a football match between the “Catholic Conquerors” and “Protestant Punchers”. Both teams were excellent and the match was exciting. The Conquerors scored a goal first. Jesus jumped up, whistled wildly and applauded appreciatively. Then, the Punchers scored. Again, Jesus jumped up, whistled and clapped riotously. This puzzled a man behind him who tapped him and queried: “Which side are you shouting for?” “Me?” asked Jesus, and replied, “I’m not shouting for any side. I’m here to enjoy the game!” At this, the questioner turned to his neighbour and sneered, “Hmmm, look at that atheist!”

I love football, though I’m undecided which country I am supporting in the present Fifa world cup since my incredible India features nowhere among the best of footballing nations. But, favourite teams and football apart, if Jesus, Ram, Buddha, Mahavir, Guru Nanak or any devas, devis, tirthankars or jivanmuktas were asked which group they were for, and which they were against, would they choose a few and condemn all others? I think not. Yet, that’s what many of us, believers, believe.

The word “religion” is derived from the Latin religare meaning “to bind”. More than any other realm of human life, religion is the numero uno “binder” since it gives cohesion and meaning to all other spheres of human activity, and, by its very nature, deals with Ultimate Truth. But, much as religion binds, it also blinds. And God help you if you don’t use labels and take sides — like Jesus at the football match you’ll be branded an “atheist”.

Competition is the stuff of world cup and Commonwealth Games. No competition, no fun. Agreed. But when competition spills over into the field of religion and quite literally becomes “cut-throat”, then something’s wrong somewhere. Religious rivalry can be seen at the communitarian and individual levels. At the corporate level, one religious group could feel that it is superior to the others and boast: “My God is bigger than yours!” At the individual level, Jesus narrated a parable of two people who went to the temple to pray: a Pharisee (i.e., one who meticulously observed religious laws) and a tax-collector. The Pharisee prayed loudly: “God, I thank you that I’m not like other people: thieves, rogues, adulterers, or even like this tax-collector”. By contrast, the tax-collector bowed his head and said, “God, be merciful to me, a sinner!” (Luke 18:9-14). God loved the latter.

What we urgently require is not mere tolerance but recognition of the beauty of religions other than our own. In a round-table discussion, when the Dalai Lama was asked by theologian Leonardo Boff: “Your holiness, which is the best religion?” he answered, “The best religion is the one that brings you closer to God and makes you a better person”.

Ultimately, God is always bigger and better than anything we can ever imagine. Sant Kabir succinctly said, “My Lord hides Himself, and my Lord wonderfully reveals Himself”. So, let me not think that I know God fully, and believe God’s only in my team and against all others.

The Rig Veda asserts: “Ekam sat viprah bahudha vadanti” (Though it is One, the wise call Him diversely). That One has woven a beautiful principle of diversity into the universe. Events like the Fifa World Cup and the Commonwealth Games make us aware of our dazzling diversity. Let’s delight in diversity. And, of course, applaud and shout for all those who respect differences. Long live differences! Vive la différence!

Five days of Karunanidhi's family singing

2010-06-29T01:32:00.000-07:00

Five days of extravaganza to celebrate the classical Tamil is not wrong. But to use the public money and time to sing Karunanidhi and his family tunes only in these five days was wrong. None can deny the worthy contributions of Kalaignar. The world likes him as a script writer, dialogue writer, Tamil scholar, clever politician. But his performance as an administrator is abysmally dismal. Almost all the government departments are going negative. Especially the electricity situation in Tamil Nadu is worse. Giving everything free but taking away the self respect of people amounts to the worst indicator of DMK government. Who knows the final days of Karunanidhi's government.

While condemning Karunanidhi's worst performance as C.M, I strongly support the recognition of Indian languages in the official proceedings. It is a sad state of affairs that the Indian language speakers are looked down. A language should not be a barrier for the performance of people's representatives or for that matter any common man.

The Times of India writes on 29 June 2010,

If the Tamil Nadu government wishes to spend Rs 300 crore on a five-day bash in Coimbatore to promote Tamil, that is its prerogative. But chief minister M Karunanidhi has gone much further, sowing the seeds of divisive identity politics. He has demanded that jobs be reserved for Tamil speakers, and that Tamil be made the language of the Madras high court as well as an official language of the Union government. Given our diverse linguistic identities, reviving the old language debate is totally unnecessary. According to Article 348 of the Constitution, the language to be used for the conduct of affairs in the Supreme Court and the high courts is English. This is because the cases that come up for hearing before these courts may involve litigants from across the country. If Tamil were to be made the language of the Madras high court it would be a serious impediment to non-Tamil litigants. Similarly, job reservation for Tamil speakers opens a can of worms, as other states can make similar demands. Another constitutional guarantee, allowing Indians to live and seek work anywhere in India, would go out of the window.

Tamil is already one of the scheduled languages under the 8th Schedule to the Constitution. To suggest that it be made an official language of the Union government is simply unreasonable. Tamil just doesn't have the same universality as English ^ the language predominantly used by the Union government. In the interest of the state as well as the country, the DMK should not walk the path of the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena.

Nitish Kumar's Kiddishness

2010-06-21T02:46:00.000-07:00

A well performing Chief Minister and a man with least petty political behaviour is finally jumping into the dirty political bandwagon. Nitish Kumar, Bihar C.M's onslaught against Narendra Modi and trying to create a secular image will backfire on Kumar. The alliance between BJP and JD (U) can win majority of seats in the upcoming assembly elections. If Nitish Kumar thinks that he can win alone a majority then he is living in his sand castle when there is warning about political storm. It is better in the interests of Nitish Kumar to maintain silence and carry on with the alliance to continue the good work done for Bihar.

Shivanand Tiwary and Giriraj Singh debates in The Deccan Chronicle, 17 June 2010

To talk about this is to state the obvious. After five years of running a successful government in Bihar, with the cordial cooperation of a long-trusted, mature ally like the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), Mr Nitish Kumar certainly needs the BJP to win hugely in the forthcoming Assembly polls, and return to power.

In a coalition government, success springs from the healthy functioning of every link in the chain. We in the BJP are proud to have contributed whole-heartedly to the historic success story of Bihar’s National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government, and place it on the path of getting Bihar out of the list of “Bimaru” states. Mr Kumar and his Janata Dal-United (JD-U) have always been appreciative of the BJP’s concrete support.

Although JD(U), a regional party, and BJP, a national party, are two distinct entities with ideological differences, it is their coalition that has won the hearts of Bihar’s people. The empathetic coordination and understanding between them has made our two parties almost inseparable.

Without the BJP, it is unimaginable for Mr Kumar to return to power. That is simply because it was as much the BJP’s solid network of committed cadres across Bihar as the JD(U)’s regional appeal that ensured victories of candidates of both the parties in the past elections.

Shortly after Bihar’s 2005 Assembly polls, it was the BJP that played a crucial role in making Mr Kumar the Chief Minister in the face of stubborn internal bickering among JD(U) leaders who were unwilling to accept him as head of the JD(U)-BJP government.

It is completely incorrect to describe the BJP as a weakened political force in Bihar. This impression is partly caused by the media’s projections of the NDA government in Bihar. Just because the face gets better visibility, and becomes the recognition point, it does not mean the rest of the body is defunct. The BJP is a cadre-based party. It functions in Bihar at the grassroots levels with the help of several cultural organisations working actively with a nationalist zeal. Our people are active in each of Bihar’s 54,000 polling booths and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh runs 32,000 schools across Bihar. The Chief Minister understands this.
The BJP has never compromised with its self-respect anywhere, including Bihar. With its sheer cadre strength, proven commitment, and greatly widened appeal in Bihar, the party’s future is very bright in this state.
—

Bihar needs Mr Nitish Kumar. His government’s epoch-making achievements have placed him in a class apart, making him the man that Bihar needs more than anything else.
Being a leader who is naturally acceptable to every section of society, regardless of caste and religion in a fiercely identity-driven state, Mr Kumar is going to be the natural choice for Bihar’s electorate. Although he ran a coalition government, he strived hard to put the good of Bihar over everything else in the past five years. His successes are visible across the state after the long darkness of the 15 years of Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD)-Congress misrule.

The JD(U) and the BJP in Mr Kumar’s coalition government have assiduously stuck to their common minimum programme so as to create development milestones in the face of obstacles by Opposition parties. But behind every success story written by this government stands the towering leadership and vision of the chief minister. To deny this is to falsify facts.

While the minorities and the dalits of Bihar had got almost nothing other than lofty promises and resounding pronouncements of secularism from previous governments, Mr Kumar’s vision and action gave them solid benefits and raised their self-confidence. It is Mr Kumar who, as the face of the JD(U)-BJP government, inspires faith and hope in Bihar’s Muslims. Bihar has been free from any communal tension in Kumar’s regime. Its dalits who wonder why other parties, involved in dalit politics did so little for them.

The JD(U), the senior partner in the state government, is on a superbly solid platform today. Last year’s Lok Sabha poll results bore ample evidence of this. While alliance with the BJP helped the JD(U) to come to power in the 2005 Assembly polls, the JD(U)’s reach has penetrated remote corners of the state due to the chief minister’s leadership, and the attention paid by his government to implementation of welfare projects. No other chief minister has visited as many villages and spoken to as many ordinary people individually as Mr Kumar.

Any comparison between Mr Kumar and Orissa’s Mr Naveen Patnaik (in the context of relations with the BJP) — however facile — must not overlook the fact that Mr Patnaik gained strength and legacy from his legendary father, while in Bihar Mr Kumar built his strength brick by brick. The people of Bihar are wise enough to decide for themselves.

Only country which defends foreign criminals

2010-06-14T03:02:00.000-07:00

India is the only country which defends foreign criminals and let down its own citizens. This is evident from every day functioning of the Government. The culpable act of killing 20,000 and disabling more than 5,00,000 people in 1984 in Bhopal by the Union Carbide factory continues to disturb us even after 26 years. The reason is that the government of India let off the chief criminal, Warren Anderson without any punishment. If this was a mistake in the past, you are mistaken. In the Nuclear Liability Bill passed few months back in parliament, the UPA government want to repeat the same mistake by pleading for peanut compensation in case of any disaster. Unless this act of sacrificing its citizens lives for the mere political survival is dropped Naxalism type of violence cannot be stopped.

Nandita Rao writes in The Deccan Chronicle on 9th June 2010

In the world’s worst industrial disaster, commonly known as the Bhopal gas tragedy, we as citizens of India lost much more than 20,000 lives. Over the last 25 years, slowly but steadily, in several rounds of litigation, we lost our hope in the rule of law and in the ability of the judiciary, the custodial of our Constitution, to protect us against the greed and money power of multinational corporations. Reviewing the failures of the justice system in the Bhopal Gas Tragedy is even more important today as we are debating the Nuclear Liability Bill which, in fact, is seeking to set maximum limits of liability on foreign companies and give them complete immunity from criminal prosecution.

In the context of Bhopal, for once the police authorities cannot be faulted as when the killer gas escaped from the Union Carbide India Ltd. (UCIL) factory on the night of December 2-3, 1984, killing thousands and affecting the lives and futures of lakhs of others, the station house officer of the Hanumanganj Police Station, Bhopal, at his own initiative lodged a first information report (FIR) for culpable homicide not amounting to murder (under Section 304A of the Indian Penal Code), which penalises an act done with the knowledge that such act is likely to cause death and carries a penalty of 10 years’ imprisonment. Not only was the police quick in lodging the FIR, but by December 7, 1984, all the accused, including Warren Anderson, CEO of Union Carbide Corporation (USA), and the top management of its Indian subsidiary, UCIL, were arrested.

The instinct of this relatively junior police officer, when he saw people being eaten up by this toxic gas, that what he had witnessed was more than an accident was proved to be correct when the case was transferred to the Central Bureau of Investigation as early as December 6, 1989. The government of India constituted a scientific and technical committee, known as the Vardarajan Committee, which after evaluation of the UCIL plant and events gave its unequivocal finding that the plant design approved and installed under the directions of Union Carbide Corporation (USA), signed and approved personally by Mr Anderson, was defective and likely to cause a back flow of water and alkaline substances that could lead to the methyl isocyanate (MIC) becoming explosive. The committee also found that the safety norms, mandatory for the use and storage of a substance as dangerous and lethal as MIC, had been flagrantly violated. Even basic precautions, such as maintenance of an empty container for diversion and storage in the event of an emergency, had not been complied with.

However, the Supreme Court of India in its three judgments, from 1989 to 1996, failed to see what was obvious to a police officer. When the Government of India — which had assumed jurisdiction over the claims of all the victims by virtue of the Bhopal Gas Leak Disaster (Processing of Claims) Act, 1985 — approached the Supreme Court to ratify a settlement it had entered into with the primary accused, Union Carbide Corporation (USA), in settlement of claims, including withdrawal of criminal prosecution, a three-judge bench accepted as a full and final settlement a sum of $470 million as compensation, blindly permitting the compounding of a non-compoundable criminal prosecution in violation of the statutory law of the land. The Supreme Court was forced to review its judgment in 1991 as civil society and victims’ organisations refused to accept this blatant abdication of its constitutional duty to protect the rights of citizens. The trial against Union Carbide was restarted in 1991, only to be stalled again by the accused who again approached the Supreme Court seeking the quashing of the charges on the grounds that the evidence did not make out any case against them. And yet again, taking a U-turn, the Supreme Court in 1996, by a judgment delivered by three of its esteemed judges, came to the conclusion that (a) admitting that the plant was constructed on a defective design; (b) admitting that safety norms were flouted in its running; (c) admitting that the accused knew how lethal MIC was, it could not be said that while working this plant they had knowledge that it could cause such a disaster. Based on this finding, in the third and final round of litigation before it, the Supreme Court whittled down the charges from culpable homicide to causing death by negligence (from Section 304-Part II to Section 304A), an offence of a much lower grade with a maximum punishment of two years.
Unfortunately, this judgment of the Supreme Court went unchallenged by victims’ organisations and was not highlighted by the media, leading to the tragic verdict handed out by chief judicial magistrate P. Mohan Tiwari on Monday, sentencing the accused to two years’ imprisonment, and a fine of Rs 1 lakh.

This judgment has left us angry, despondent, crying out that it is too little and too late. One wonders how, of the 11 judges of our Supreme Court who had the opportunity to do justice to the people of Bhopal, all choose to interpret the law hyper-technically, justifying the callousness with which life is treated in the Third World.

While our despondency is justified, there still exists a possibility offered by the law that could enable the Supreme Court to rectify its own judgments even today. Under Article 137 of the Constitution, the Supreme Court may entertain a curative petition and reconsider its judgment/order in exercise of its inherent powers in order to prevent abuse of its process, to cure gross miscarriage of justice. Such a petition can be filed only if a senior advocate certifies that it meets the requirements of this case. The Supreme Court’s rules set no time limit within which the judgment can be curated and, therefore, it would be open to the Supreme Court to reconsider the law laid down by it which refuses to acknowledge that the flagrant violation of safety norms, with full knowledge of the disastrous consequences by a multinational corporation, constitutes culpable homicide.

Divorce - The Inevitable Consequence

2010-06-06T01:33:00.001-07:00

Marriages are made in heaven but broken in earth. In the fast moving consumer world, wedded ones have limited choice or no choice. Work, little joy and madness continues to circulate. After all this is the general pattern of life in the every phase of human civilzation. If this pattern goes on routinely there is no reason to complain. Unfortunately this is found to be missing in this ultra modern world. With Double Income No Kids (DINKs)as the common feature of many families, restlessness is the everyday matter. With both husband and wife working and encountering troubles at the work place life cannot be easy for many. Do we have a choice? Can we dump the cosy life to sail together? If we want to sustain luxurious life styles, rarely we can avoid division in the family and human feelings.

Deirdre Blair writes in The Deccan Chronicle on 5 June 2010

THERE’S an old French expression I found useful when I wrote a book about couples who divorced after long marriages: “I wasn’t holding the candle”. It means that I couldn’t know what happened between the two people in a marriage, so how could I possibly know why they split?

That hasn’t stopped speculation about Al and Tipper Gore, who are behaving with grace and dignity as they keep to themselves their reasons for ending 40 years of marriage. Public reaction has followed a pattern, beginning with shock and disbelief: “They seemed like the ideal couple, so perfect together”. Outrage came next: “Was it all a sham, especially that kiss on the convention stage?” And finally fear: “Are all marriages doomed to wither and die — and will mine be among them?”

But such questions expose just a few widespread but unrealistic assumptions about late-life divorce. Divorce lawyers tell me the fastest-growing segment of their clientele is the middle-aged and elderly. And their divorces do not all that often involve husbands running off with someone new, leaving wives alone and bereft. A 2004 AARP survey of 1,147 people who divorced in their 40s, 50s or 60s found that women initiated late-life divorces more often than men did, and if the divorced women wanted a new partner, they usually found one.

For my book, I interviewed 126 men and 184 women who divorced after being married 20 to 60-plus years. And what surprised me most was the courage they showed as they left the supposed security of marriage. To them, divorce meant not failure and shame, but opportunity.

“People change and forget to tell each other”, Lillian Hellman said. Still, many couples seem to have an “aha!” moment when they realise that it’s time to split up. No matter how comfortably situated they are, how lovely their home and successful their children, they divorce because they cannot go on living in the same old rut with the same old person.

Men and women I interviewed insisted they did not divorce foolishly or impulsively. Most of them mentioned “freedom”. Another word I heard a lot was “control”; people wanted it for themselves for the rest of their lives. Women had grown tired of taking care of house, husband and grown children; men were tired of working to support wives who they felt did not appreciate them and children who did not respect them. Women and men alike wanted time to find out who they were.

One spouse might have wanted to keep working while the other wanted to retire. Often, there was an emotional void; one would say that the other “doesn’t see me, doesn’t know who I am”, while the other hadn’t a clue: “I thought everything was just fine; we never argued, we don’t fight”. One grew disenchanted with the wrinkled person across the dinner table and wanted someone new and exciting.

I talked to men who were serial marry-ers with trophy wives they abandoned, as one of them put it, the minute the woman “got broody and wanted babies”. And I found women who wanted a man who would take them dining and dancing, but then go home to his own bed and leave them alone until the next party.

Many stories ended with some rendition of, “It’s my time and if I don’t take it now, I never will”. No matter whether they had spent years gearing up for divorce or decided on the spur of the moment after one minor disagreement too many, few had regrets. Men who wanted new companionship easily found it, and women who wanted new partners had them within two years.

Divorce is easier now. Our retirement years are longer and healthier. Both men and women often have enough money to make changes. And the stigma of divorce has long since faded. A century ago, Elizabeth Cady Stanton called it a “social earthquake”. But several decades later, Margaret Mead thought every woman needed three husbands: one for youthful sex, one for security while raising children and one for joyful companionship in old age. In the 21st century, Margaret Drabble, the British novelist, calls life after divorce “the third age”. The heroine of her novel The Seven Sisters says, “Our dependants have died or matured. For good and ill, we are free”.

So let us not feel shocked or sad about the end of Al and Tipper Gore’s marriage. Let us instead wish them well, and hope that they might enjoy their third age, individually and in peace.

No Pardon for Chamelon Economists

2010-06-03T04:57:00.000-07:00

The global economy is a Frankenstein monster. No wonder it is destroying its creators. The self praising economists are singing a different tune after their creation is collapsing. Who prescribes the economic module for the world? The so called brilliant economists are chameleons. One colour in front of the government and the other behind the government. These chamelon economists are sought after everywhere for their stupid noises about global economy. What is the point in talking high if they are not able to provide the right guidance to the suffering economy? To this question they will simply wash off their hands by saying that "the proletariats won't listen to their suggestions", "the Brettonwood Institutions controlled by America is the real operator". How long these excuses will be accepted? Despite getting chances to rescue the ailing economy these economists are making huge media noises and minting enough wealth out of the global distress. No pardon for them.

Jayati Ghosh writes in The Deccan Chronicle

In the global economy, the past few months have been as bizarre as anything that could be imagined. And nowhere is this more evident at the moment than in Europe where the crazy and unsynchronised tango between financial markets and governments now threatens the lives of ordinary citizens.

Consider the fear that is now supposedly spooking the markets, that of the possibility of sovereign default. At the frontline in Greece, the country that is being asked to impose an unbelievably severe austerity package that is bound to cause employment and incomes to spiral downwards, in return for a supposed “improvement” in state finance, which are nonetheless projected to be in parlous condition for years to come.

Just behind Greece come the next line of countries under attack, currently Spain and Portugal, and quite soon possibly the United Kingdom. Other governments that have been implementing draconian budget cuts already, like Ireland, Estonia and Latvia, still find it hard (and getting harder) to borrow money for new public debt.
Now, even countries that do not seem to be under pressure from financial markets (like France) and those that cannot possibly be under pressure because they have large current account surpluses (like Germany) are also announcing budget cuts and moves to fiscal austerity.

The funny thing is that the more the governments announce budget cuts and other measures to squeeze out savings in the economy, the worse the hit that their bond markets seem to take. Interest rate spreads have been rising and signs of investor panic in sovereign debt markets spread just as governments try to placate markets by bowing to their pressures to cut government deficits. So, instead of being rewarded for good behaviour by the financial markets, they are being further punished.
What exactly is going on? It is really a case of the stupidity of markets being magnified by the apparently even greater stupidity of economic policymakers, who seem to be undertaking kneejerk responses to changes in market sentiment, rather than engaging in strategies based on an appreciation of actual macroeconomic processes. As a result, their actions serve to generate precisely the opposite tendency from what was desired, thereby causing further financial panic.

Consider the current situation. The global economy is recovering from a major recession but the recovery is fragile, uneven and easily reversible. It is fairly obvious — and indeed was universally recognised in the midst of the financial crisis in 2008 — that when private economic agents are caught in a liquidity trap or in a deflationary spiral, governments must increase their own spending and ease access to credit to keep the economy going. If they also cut spending and tighten monetary policy, they will worsen the downswing and possibly even cause a deep depression. In other words, macroeconomic policy should be countercyclical, not procyclical.
The only way this can be avoided is if the economy concerned tries to rely on global markets and increase its net exports, or if the attempt at stabilisation somehow makes the economy appear very attractive to foreign investors who rush in to invest (which is typically very unlikely in a stagnant or declining market). The dependence upon foreign markets is why the International Monetary Fund typically has advised this brutal combination of fiscal and monetary tightening to countries in deficit, effectively bringing on even sharper slumps in many of the countries that have taken their medicine.
But, obviously, this is not something that all countries together can hope to do. So if all countries expect that external markets will save them, then all of them will sink together.
But that is precisely what all the economies in Europe are collectively expecting. This has another predictable result, which is that the attempt to reduce the fiscal deficit can become self-contradictory. Governments cut their spending and impose austerity measures. This then reduces incomes and employment immediately, and over time through the negative multiplier effects. As a result, government tax revenues come down. This can even lead to a worse fiscal deficit than before, as many countries have found in the past. In fact it is well known that since tax revenues go down in a crisis or a recession, the fiscal deficit is bound to increase. Policies that aggravate the slump will only make it worse.

Now consider how this plays out in interaction with private financial markets. When private investors apparently decide that a country’s level of government debt is “too high” or that it has current account or fiscal imbalances that are “too large”, the spread on interest on that government’s debt rises. Bond yields rise as bond prices fall. The country finds new borrowing more difficult and/or more expensive. The government then decides that it has to cut back on spending in order to reduce the deficit. The markets (or at least the financial media) applaud this decision. But then the cutbacks cause more economic pain in terms of reduced incomes and employment, which makes the growth prospects worse. So financial markets respond by
further increasing the spreads on government debt! And so on. In fact, the prescription for austerity in these countries is bizarre because it undermines the foundations for economic growth without which they will never be able to repay existing debts.

This ridiculous drama can go on for a while, and the only thing that can stop it is decisive government action. But such is the control of the financial markets that they seem to have come to completely dominate public policy discussion, at least in Europe where these basic economic processes seem to have been forgotten. We have got to the point where even the US government is concerned at how this completely slavish and illogical response will threaten global economic recovery.

What is even more amazing is that surplus countries in Europe, like Germany, are also opting for fiscal austerity measures, even though these will definitely rebound adversely on growth in the entire region. As long as this peculiar combination of mercantilist expectation of exports saving all economies and emphasis on fiscal austerity in the midst of the downswing persists, it is hard to see how the world economy can really recover.

Dump wrong cultural models for better governance

2010-05-03T04:58:00.000-07:00

Culture matters in every sphere of society. Whether politics or corporate administration. Whatever the cultural traits of a particular society is reflected in the functioning of other branches of the society. India is more deep rooted in the traditional culture yet confusedly addicted to the Western culture. Due to this paradox it faces a chain of problems in all arenas of the society. The fungus and virus which are infecting the Indian society needs to be uprooted. The process also need to protect the Indian systems from the evils of Western model of development. Over celebration of the Western system and giving it a clean chit is very myopic and factually negative way of painting the development sector. The Western world is also full of flaws. What is required is a new and clean model of development. Whoever develops it needs to be practiced.

R. Gopalkrishnan writes in The Economic Times on 3 May 2010,

Urban middle class Indians think in English but act in Indian . For example, flexibility and compromise is very Indian. Nee katru, naan maram, yenna sonaalum, thalai aattuven (you are the breeze, I am the tree, my head will sway whichever way you blow), sang Hariharan in the 1998 Tamil film Nilaave Vaa.

Praising to persuade is quite Indian. Hanuman allowed himself to be captured so that he could deliver Rama’s message personally to Ravana. Everyone in the Lanka court wanted Hanuman executed. Only Vibhishana interceded by first praising Ravana and only thereafter suggested a lesser punishment.

Judging through background and appearance is Indian. Urban middle class Indians think that educated Indians (like them) who speak English are likely to be more reliable than their vernacular counterparts. The truth is that unless the raja and leaders are honest, the praja will not be honest.

In the Mahabharata, Duryodhana said, “Contentment and patience, though the virtues of ordinary men, are not virtues in kings.” With that pompous statement, he invited Shakuni to deploy his wiles at his court leading to the battle of Kurukshetra. Why culture matters: Culture matters in many things, including in corporate governance.

The Indian practice need not be completely different from the west, but it must embed cultural influence. The western mind is shaped by the Greek philosophical tradition of analysis, linearity and abhorrence of ambiguity. It believes in a unitary sense of right and wrong and lays great emphasis on meritocracy.

On the other hand, the Indian mindset represents integrative and perambulatory thinking with a great tolerance for ambiguity . Nothing is black or white, everything is shades of grey. Merit is important, but so are age, connections and lineage. These show up in many ways:

Alan Greenspan was Fed Governor in the US till 2006, just before the meltdown. In his book, Greenspan viewed instability analytically and wrote, “Regulation, by its nature, inhibits freedom of market action, and that freedom is what rebalances markets... I fail to see how adding more government action can help.” Dr Y V Reddy was India’s central bank governor.

He viewed the undefined issues of instability intuitively and wrote, “The challenge shifted from managing the successful integration of the Indian economy with the global economy to managing the impact of the global crisis on India.” Very different ways of seeing the same thing.

Indian events are a Grand Spectacle where a few are doers; a few more are lurkers, while many are watchers. For example, think of the doers, lurkers and watchers at our airport security, at a district government office or at an Indian wedding. Even cricket fits the doer-lurker-watcher pattern: four doers, 18 lurkers, and thousands of watchers!

Although the Mughal Empire had long spent its course by 1857, when the soldiers of the Gangetic plains wanted a leader for their movement, they agreed on an illogical choice: the defunct Bahadur Shah Zafar. Dynastic choice was thought to be less unacceptable than a merit-based choice.

Why institutions matter: Politics and government are poor examples of governance. The government is a poor custodian of public assets.

In a recent case at the Panaji bench of the Bombay High Court, the local government lawyer unabashedly stated that “the ants had eaten up 24 kg of charas from the official godown where the government had stored the charas seized from drug traffickers .” The drug racket by local public functionaries is not Goa’s best-kept secret!

Political leaders preach corporate governance , but are silent about political governance . Party accounts are never published, let alone quarterly or being audited by rotating auditors. Parties expect Anglo-American corporate governance but practise Indian political governance.

A few years ago, the government sold a majority shareholding in a PSU through an open process; the concerned minister was unhappy about the buyer and he expressed his unhappiness in several ways. Memorably , he wagged his finger that he would not allow the buyer to implement changes as it was ‘his money’. The 26% owner was warning the 45% owner that he would thwart attempts to change! And he got away with it.

The high-handed behaviour of some government directors on PSU boards and indeed the very functioning of many PSU boards set a poor example to the private sector. The message is right, but the messengers are not credible. How do we live with such contradictions?

It may be because of an awe of rulers. For 25 of the last 30 centuries, citizens’ local issues were sorted out by local panchayats. The ruler or king was a remote person, even thought to be God. Be it the Mysore Dussera Festival or the Nizam of Hyderabad, royalty has always been awesome to common folk.

May be that is why industrial captains are in awe of leaders either or may be for reasons of enlightened self-interest . Exceptions apart, many corporate leaders subconsciously adopt a subservient role in their interaction with ministers.

Politics and business share some things: dynastic leadership, confounding arrangements , one-upmanship and disdain for rules at higher levels. There is a further implicit connection between politics and business. Politicians used to view business as an akshaya patra for funds.

As deregulation denuded the akshaya patra, politicians themselves entered business with benamiidentities — as suggested by the ownership of IPL cricket — the mushrooming higher education colleges and private airlines. Though most politicians avoid garlands of currency notes publicly, they do possess enough currency to make many garlands!

While government pretends to govern, influential citizens pretend to obey them. Highly-connected offenders roam freely with the attitude that they can expose others or that the law is corruptible and inefficient, so nothing can happen to me.

In the US, allegations of the misuse of corporate funds or insider trading, like with Vinod Gupta or Anil Kumar, are brought to speedy conclusions. India cannot emulate this despite adopting the American corporate governance principles.

Like other institutions of democracy, the corporate sector too is flawed. The relationship between shareholder democracy, authoritarian leadership and company growth is not linear and it defies a neat mapping. Some thoughts: I am not sure how, but corporate governance practices need to be tweaked from being precise and prescriptive to being directional and intuitive.

Investors and independent directors should watch behaviour, not only compliance. A structural weakness in India is the poor performance of the institutional shareholders . They need training and encouragement.

They must focus on honesty of purpose and intent rather than just on the rules and regulations. The hard truth is that if the owner, CEO and CFO conspire, no corporate governance system can work. You can arrest the auditor and jail the director, but that will not prevent the next incident where evil intent is present. The Satyam case is the best evidence of this.

The giveaways of bad governance lie in behaviour. Pratip Kar, while at Tata Management Training Centre, showed that one or more of five signals from the C-Suite provide early warning: constantly being applauded by the media as being visionary and daring; displaying excessively risky but exciting ambitions ; showing high connections and lifestyle ; being hubristic and egoistic; being surrounded by ‘non-smelly’ individuals, yet appearing ‘smelly’ .

As former Sebi chief M Damodaran has said, Indian executives regard the boss or the promoter as the karta of the Hindu Undivided Family. The promoter is the ultimate. The top leadership may have managers who kiss up and kick down; who are eager to please the boss. These are telltale signals that need to be considered by intelligent investors.

Review related party transactions with care like a Lakshman Rekha. All related party transactions are not bad or suspicious. But this is the line that is normally breached to achieve differential enrichment . Just as Lakshman drew the line for Sita for her protection, independent directors should regard related party transactions as the watch-line for shareholders and be very alert in an intuitive way.

Independent directors need to be emotionally accountable to minority shareholders. Independent directors represent the interests of minority shareholders. They are elected by the shareholders. The role of the lead director can be strengthened and the lead director should feel accountable for initiating steps to protect minority interests. He can be answerable in writing or in person where necessary.

Focus the rule book on what a board cannot do. There are too many regulators and rules, but too little regulation. Corporate governance rules describe in minute detail how a board is to be composed and all that a board has to do.

In sports, the rule book tells you what you cannot do, and the rules are, therefore, simple. In football, you cannot touch the ball with the hand, you cannot physically push the opposing player and you cannot be ahead of the last opposing player (other than the goalkeeper) before receiving a pass to shoot for the goalpost.

Western intellectuals are reviewing their own model. Sir David Walker, the senior guru of UK’s corporate governance, has wondered whether the western system should be copied by the developing world because the eastern model seems to have advantages.

Magdalene College senior research fellow, Stefan Halper, has wondered in his new book The Beijing Consensus whether the market authoritarianism of the east has some virtue. I wonder whether India needs a modified kind of corporate governance rule book.

Coupening the Public Distribution System

2010-04-27T20:38:00.000-07:00

The Public Distribution System (PDS) operating through the fair price shops are the single most crucial outlet to address the poverty and hunger in the country. Unfortunately money hungry corruption rats have not spared this vital instrument to help the poor people in the country. From top level politicians to the bottom level fair price shop sales personnel, swindling the food resources meant for the extremely poor people is order of the day. So much so these corrupt rats have bulged in their physique and wealth beyond the known sources of their income. There is no way so far these rotten rats could be controlled. The Government announces its genuine intention to rein in these rats publicly. So the sweet word goes. But nothing happens after the announcement. The recent news about the UPA II’s reform agenda to clean up the PDS is welcome. Let us wait and watch how this is going to work.

T. Nandakumar writes in The Economic Times on 27 April 2010

The government seems to be considering a new system to replace the present system of targeted public distribution system (TPDS) with food coupons or direct cash transfer. The ills that plague the present TPDS are well-known and well-documented.

The two national surveys, one by Programme Evaluation Organisation of the Planning Commission and the other by ORG-Marg, both at the instance of the Union government, have identified the major problem areas in the present system. These can be summarised as follows:

Exclusion errors: Families who deserve to be in the BPL list are excluded,

Inclusion errors: Families who are not eligible are included,

Ghost cards: Ration cards in the name of fictitious/non-existent families,

Leakage at fair price shop: Simply stated, the quantum of food grain leaked/stolen by transporters/shopkeepers, and

Unacceptable quality: Complaints of quality sometimes due to the replacement of procured stocks by lower quality at various levels.

Does the proposed system of food coupons address these deficiencies? The system of food coupons cannot address the issues of exclusion and inclusion errors since these emerge from the process of identification. Who would not like to be included in the BPL list, especially when many goodies flow from the welfare state, be it subsidised health care or an Indira Awas?

The chances, therefore, are that the errors in identification will remain. Add to this the arguments for increasing the scope (read: size) of the BPL list (Tendulkar committee, Saxena committee et al). Ghost cards, however, could be minimised if the payment systems are designed properly.

The food coupons can effectively break the hegemony of the present set of fair-price shopkeepers, who, over a period, have developed vested interests and have also managed to gain substantial political clout. In fact, most of the ills of the present system can be attributed to the patronage in allocating fair price shops.

To be fair to these shopkeepers, the commission they get is so low that they are compelled to resort to malpractices, which over a period of time has become a habit driven mostly by greed. The resistance faced by the government of Chhattisgarh in moving to a new system of shops is ample testimony to this.

The first step in the food coupon system, therefore, has to be the closure of all existing fair price shops - they can continue to be normal grocery shops if they wish - in the area and giving a choice to the coupon holders to buy their food grain from any 'designated' grocery shop in the region. I use the word designated because the payment mechanism for the proposed coupons will need financial oversight.

If there are too many choices, managing the accounts could be problematic. Ideally, the coupon holder in a ward/area could be given an option to purchase her food grain from a set of identified grocery shops - not less than three and not more than five - every month. The coupons shall carry a fixed value - the value will have to change at least every year to take care of inflation - and the shopkeeper permitted to encash these coupons from designated bank branch(es) in the locality. The coupons should also have a validity period to allow the shopkeepers to deliver food grain every month. The success of the scheme will depend on a caveat that there will not be any scrutiny of the items purchased by the family as long as the coupon has been used in the designated shop and during the month for which it is authorised.

Most importantly, the coupon gives a choice to the family to choose the grain it prefers. This should take care of most of the quality complaints. Even if the coupon has been used to buy other things such as pulses, edible oils, sugar etc, it is worth the effort. All the coupons for a year should be given to the family at one go. This will facilitate verification where required every year as well.

Given the propensity of the male members of the family to misuse the coupons and exchange them for money - even if this happens, the government should not bother - the cards and the coupons should be in the name of the female member of the family. There is likely to be an argument that food-deficit regions will be adversely affected by this system. The success of the coupon system will depend on providing choices to coupon holders at the point of purchase.

Therefore, adequate availability of food grain is a sine-qua-non for the success of this initiative. It would, therefore, be prudent to start this initiative in big towns and in food-surplus states. However, states with universal two-rupee rice schemes may not be too keen to accept this scheme. It would be necessary to incentivise the states that agree to implement this scheme.

Is there a possibility of spurious coupons getting into the system? Yes, there is. The traceability of the coupons has, therefore, to be built into the system. What will then happen to FCI and procurement? In the new system, the government can fix MSP without looking at procurement targets. The market will determine the actual prices. FCI can continue its MSP operations and also keep the buffer and strategic reserves for the government. FCI, hopefully, will become a lean and efficient organisation. The excess stocks, if any, can be offloaded into the market at suitable intervals to keep a lid on prices.

While food coupons is a good idea, one must understand that this does not remove all the ills in the system: but is better than the present system by all means. However, direct cash transfers to the beneficiary (women) will be a much better option. This could even attempt to reduce the inclusion errors since bank payments can be tracked easily. With so many ATMs available in cities, this could be the best available option at this point in time at least for the cities. The success of the scheme will depend on its design and, more importantly, its phasing.

Needed Caution in the Foreign Universities Bill

2010-03-16T09:23:00.000-07:00

In a hurry to add achievements to his ministerial performance list, Kapil Sibal had pushed the Foreign Educational Institutions Bill in the Cabinet. India can truly benefit from a foreign university to serve its people with better education. But to difficult to experience such good intended universities from abroad. We can give encouragement to the HRD minister provided he argument for better bargain. Unfortunately the lawyer turned politician has let down his country’s higher education system and the youth. By capping the corpus to be deposited by the foreign university to a peanut of Rs.50 crore he had done a great injustice.

The minister should have fixed a minimum of Rs.200 crore deposit, the fee limit of not more than Rs. 2 lakh and other safeguard mechanisms. Good that the minister had pleaded for the non plying of profit out of the country. Even in this trial and error game of foreign education in India the minister needs to exercise utmost caution. Just to add his namesake achievements the lawyer minister shouldn’t play with the future of the country’s children.

The Times of India writes on 16 March 2010

The country just took a big step for dramatically enhancing the profile of higher education in the country. On Monday, the Union cabinet cleared the Foreign Educational Institutions (regulation of entry and operation) Bill, which aims to allow foreign universities to set up campuses in India.

The bill, which was adopted without changes, is expected to be introduced in Parliament after the recess of the budget session. If cleared, it would widen the definition of FDI in higher education and is expected to not only shake up the market but also throw up exciting possibilities for top Indian teachers. An excited HRD minister Kapil Sibal said the bill would lead to a ‘‘larger revolution than even in the telecom sector’’.

While the bill will be opposed by the Left, it shouldn’t face any serious obstacle in Parliament because the BJP is also in favour of the move, even though it might raise some objections on a provision or two of the bill.

Once it is cleared, some of the top foreign universities, said to be waiting in the wings, are expected to set up campuses in India. The Atlanta-based Georgia Tech University has already bought 250 acres in Hyderabad. Although Yale University is interested in having a presence in India, and welcomed the cabinet clearance, its assistant secretary George Joseph told TOI that there were no plans as of now to set up a campus here.

While the foreign universities would follow the national laws, they will not have to give reservation in admission to SC/ST/OBC students. The bill treats them as private universities. Even Indian private universities are free of quota-based admissions.

Similarly, foreign universities will have freedom to fix fees and decide their admission process.

The Foreign Educational Institutions (regulation of entry and operation) Bill makes it mandatory for foreign universities to publish a prospectus. Also, the bill disallows foreign educational providers from repatriating profit made from Indian campus through education.

With foreign direct investment in higher education already allowed since 2002, the bill stipulates that any
foreign university interested in setting up a campus in India will have to deposit a corpus of Rs 50 crore with the body that will register them. The registering body will be the University Grants Commission (UGC).

The bill promises time-bound registration to foreign universities, although they will have to go through a series of registrations at various levels. The registering body after going through the application will advise government whether the foreign university be allowed or not.

Asked what happens in case a foreign education provider sets up a campus in collaboration with private Indian university, ministry source said, ‘‘It is the foreign education provider who will have to come for the registration with details of collaboration.’’

Kapil Sibal was quick to welcome the cabinet approval. He said, ‘‘This is a milestone which will enhance choices, increase competition and benchmark quality. A larger revolution than even in the telecom sector awaits us.’’

AVerage monthly salaries

($ 2008 purchasing power parity)

Saudi Arabia 6611

Canada 6548

United States 5816

Australia 4795

New Zealand 4490

U.K 4343

Germany 4333

Japan 4112

South Africa 4075

India 1547

China 1182

Source: Rumbley, I Pancheco & Philip Altbach

Glossary of the Maoists

2010-03-12T05:25:00.000-08:00

The Union Government does not sound to be professional in handling the Red Guerillas. It is highly unfortunate on the part of the Government to leak the confidential letter written by Kishenji, the Maoists leader to P.Chidambaram. In order to solve this major trouble the Government must conduct in a highly sensitive manner not like leaking bucket. If the media got the letter from the home ministry then Mr.P.C must plug all the loopholes in the North Block first. In the Telegana crisis too the media brought out the advanced information. With this kind of glaring loopholes the home minister cannot solve the major problems.

The Times of India writes about the vocabulary of the Maoists,

"Baraat aa gayi hai (The marriage procession has arrived)," one Maoist told his leader over cellphone on seeing cops marching towards their base camp in Jamui recently. "Dulha gora hai ya kaala (Is the groom fair or dark)?" he was asked.

That's only a small part of the conversations intercepted by the Bihar's Special task Force (STF) in Maoist-hit areas. 'Baraat' is Maoist codeword for police force and 'gora' for district armed policemen who wear khaki. STF or Central paramilitary forces are 'kaala' for those who wear black dungarees.

"Maoist jargon. That's what we call it. To camouflage their movement and operations, the extremists have evolved their a coded system of words for almost everything — from explosives and arms to areas of their operations," said a top Bihar cop associated with anti-Maoist operations.

To the guerrillas, 'DVD' means 'karrwai' or action and 'mela mein chalna hai' or 'we have to visit a fair' means a police picket has to be stormed. When there's a plan to ambush a police party, they say 'paidal jana hai' or 'we have to walk'.

Satyendra Singh, Maoist suspect caught from a house in Patna's Kankerbagh Colony with a laptop and Rs 18 lakh, also rattled off before cops several codewords used by his comrades. Potassium chlorate, ammonium nitrate, potassium nitrate and aluminium powder, used in making IEDs, are 'soda', 'sabudana', 'mishri' and 'cement' respectively in Maoist parlance. 'Sindoor' or vermilion means potassium dichromate while concentrated sulphuric acid is 'gulabjal'.

Their weaponry has also been code-named. M16 rifle is 'Mohan'; AK-47 'Akash'; Insas rifle 'Indrajeet'; SLR 'Sabarmati'; 9mm pistol 'Navin' and 12 bore rifle is 'Brahmadev'.

Bullets are 'dana' or grains; RDX is 'ghee' and cordex wire 'makkhan' or butter. Ordinary detonator is 'pencil' and electric detonator 'dot pen'.

There's more. Maoists refer to their bases located in Patna, Ara, Gaya, Aurangabad and Tatanagar as Arjun, Munna, Pankaj, Satendra Singh and Bajrangi respectively. Cops are yet to figure out how Patna is even remotely similar to Arjun or Ara to Munna and so on.

Encouraging Budget 2010

2010-02-25T23:28:00.000-08:00

With the union budget presented in the Parliament few minutes back, optimism has been revived. The Finance Minister had dispelled doom predictions circulated by the usual fear mongering economics crowd and put a strong hope forward. Tax concessions and special allocation to revive the green revolution in Bihar, West Bengal, Orissa and Jharkhand and creation of oil seed villages are highly appreciable steps.

An inspiring road map to rebuild the agriculture and long term strategies to checkmate the prices of food grains and essential items are missing from the budget. All the loopholes are glaring in the major social sectors like education, health and women's development, budget 2010 deserves encouragement to pullout the society from deep crisis.

The Times of India writes

Finance minister Pranab Mukherjee on Friday began the presentation of Union Budget 2010-2011 with a renewed sense of optimism over the country's growth and clear signals from policymakers to bring deficits back to manageable levels.

Referring to tax slabs, the finance minister said tax on income up to Rs 1.6 lakh would be nil, above Rs 1.6 lakh to Rs 5 lakh would be 10%, above Rs 5 lakh to 8 lakh would be 20% and above Rs 8 lakh to be 30%.

Over and above Rs 1 lakh deduction on tax savings, an additional deduction of 20% for investment in long-term infrastructure bonds would be allowed, Pranab Mukheree said.

Maninimum alternative tax (MAT) increased from 15% to 18%, direct tax concessions worth Rs 26,000 crore:, was another highlight of the Budget.

In his speech, the finance minister also said cars would be costlier.

Earlier, Mukherjee exuded confidence of introducing major reforms on direct and indirect taxes front in the form of Goods and Services Tax (GST) and Direct Taxes Code (DTC) from April one, 2011.

"I am confident that the government will be in a position to implement DTC from April one, 2011... It will be my earnest endeavour to implement GST along with DTC from April one, 2011," finance minister Pranab Mukherjee said in his Budget speech.

This means that GST would miss its earlier introduction deadline of April one, 2010, by a year.

While DTC will replace the archaic Income Tax Act, GST will replace most indirect taxes at central and states levels like service tax, excise duty, VAT, cesses, surcharges and local levies.

Govt extends interest subsidy for exporters for 1 more yr
The government proposed to extend the concessional export finance regime for select exporters for one more year till March 31, 2011, thus giving the slowdown-hit sector further relief.

"I propose to extend the interest subvention of 2 per cent for one more year for exports covering handicrafts, carpets, hand-looms and small and medium enterprises (SMEs)," finance minister Pranab Mukherjee said .

The scheme was to expire on March 31, 2010. With a view to insulate the employment-oriented sectors like hand-looms, handicrafts, carpets and leather, from the impact of demand slowdown the government had extended the scheme for concessional export finance in the last Budget till March 31, this year.

Beginning his speech, the finance minister said the Indian economy had weathered the crisis well but the main challenge was to make growth inclusive. The focus is to get a double-digit GDP growth rate, he said. Social sector reforms will also be on the agenda, Mukherjee said.

Economic growth in 2009-10 may turn out to be higher than 7.2%, the finance minister said. We hope to breach the 10% mark in not too distant future, he added. He said the need was to make growth more broad-based.

Pranab Mukherjee said Rs 400 crore to be allocated for green revolution in Bihar, Jharkhand, West Bengal and Orissa, and Rs 300 crore for creating 6000 pulse and oilseed villages.

In his Budget speech, the finance minister said allocation for roads has been raised by 13% and allocation for power sector doubled. 46% of total plan dedicated to infrastructure, he added.

Pranab Mukherjee said listing of PSUs will improve corporate governance.

Expectations are high from the 74-year-old veteran politician, who has tabled four budgets in the past, that he will address the twin issue of bringing down prices while ensuring higher overall growth for the economy.

At the same time, he is also under pressure to roll back, albeit gradually, the $37-billion stimuli announced since December 2008 to help India weather the global economic slowdown.

The Economic Survey 2009-10 presented on Thursday favoured the gradual rollback of stimulus measures that were introduced following the global economic meltdown in late 2008. However on the eve of the Union Budget, Mukherjee talked about the measures that would be taken by the government to deal with 17.85 percent food inflation and certain aspects of the economy.

Latest Confusion from the HRD Minister

2010-02-20T22:08:00.000-08:00

The union HRD minister Kapil Sibal is caught between the whirlwinds of private education providers and state control desiring politicians. One day he wants all the private establishments in the education to be brought under the total control of HRD ministry and the other day he wants total freedom for the private education sector. His unbalanced and weak position puts the students and parents under stress. Without understanding his responsibility and power, the minister skirts and fumbles his position which is the government's one.

The latest confusion created by Sibal is the school fees in private establishments. In a conference organised by the private education providers in New Delhi on 19 February 2010, he said that private sector is free to fix the teacher's salary. No questions asked if they give peanuts for teaching! This irresponsible statement will dilute the quality of teachers in private institutions who won't stay for a long time. Teachers can be recruited by the private schools may be for weeks but they will migrate to better paying institutions sooner or later. This will surely dent the smooth functioning of the schools and affect the students parents psyche.

If Sibal can't do something to better the education system it is good for him to keep quite rather than kicking controversy after controversy and confusion after confusion.

The Times of India writes on 20 February 2010

In what comes as a blow to the efforts of city parents' associations which have been campaigning for reining in school fees, Union HRD minister Kapil Sibal said on Friday that the fees of private schools cannot be regulated and that each school had the right to fix the salaries of its teachers.

Sibal's claims contradict provisions in the Delhi School Education Act, 1973, which stipulate that remuneration of teachers in private schools cannot be less than their counterparts in government schools. The minister said this contradiction will go away once the Right to Education Act is implemented from April 1 this year ^ implying that the central Act will override the state law.

``There is no such provision in RTE,'' Sibal said about the salaries of teachers while addressing principals at the 37th annual meet of National Progressive Schools' Conference -- a group of nearly 110 private unaided schools in the city.

``The salaries of teachers in private schools do not have to be according to the government. They will decide to pay what they want to pay,'' he declared, while countering a speaker at the meet who had earlier said that small schools, which are now mushrooming in the city, did not have quality teachers because they could not afford to pay good salaries.

While all schools were not required to pay Rs 22,000 (the minimum basic salaray as per the Sixth Pay Commission) to their teachers, there should be no compromise on the qualification of teachers, he added.

The minister's new announcement indicates that private schools in the city may finally get a free hand in deciding teachers' salaries and consequently the fees, much to the dismay of parents. There have been many protests against schools hiking their fees last year. After the Sixth Pay Commission was implemented in the second half of 2008, schools sought to hike their fee to generate revenue to pay the teachers more.

Delhi government then formed the Bansal Committee to decide how much fee a school could be allowed to increase and issued a notification in this regard on February 11 last year.

According to section 9 of chapter IV of the Delhi School Education Act 1973, private schools need to pay salaries at a par with government schools. ``The scales of pay and allowances, medical facilities, pension, gratuity, provident fund and other prescribed benefits of the employees of a recognized private school shall not be less than those of the employees of the corresponding status in schools run by the appropriate authority.''

However, according to Sibal, this act will be rendered ineffective from April 1. ``Once the Right to Education (RTE) is implemented, the Delhi School Education Act will not apply.'' RTE Act has already been notified.

On regulation of fees, Sibal referred to the T M Pai case saying, ``The Supreme Court has also said that fees of private schools cannot be regulated and yet some state governments have passed such acts,'' he told the teachers present.

The minister said he has also moved a malpractices bill under which all schools will have to give details of their infrastructure, number of students, salaries of teachers etc on their website. If the online information is found to be false, the school can be prosecuted.

As per the provisions of RTE, all unaided private schools operating in a city should be recognized. Sibal said that the bill did not aim at shutting down unrecognized schools. ``Our purpose is to enhance infrastructure and quality of private unaided schools,'' he said

Ripening Relations with Bangladesh

2010-02-02T08:30:00.000-08:00

Sheikh Hasina, the Prime Minister of Bangladesh is a natural ally for India. When her father was fighting for freedom, India helped adequately. To repay the debts she wants cordial relationship with her neighbor. But how far India is ready to take forward her genuine desire? She was well received and awarded Indira Gandhi peace prize recently. This is not sufficient. India should move up to dispel the wrong impressions created by it and by the opposition parties in Bangladesh about its interests in the Eastern nation . As a bigger nation, India should give wider concession to Bangladesh keeping long term benefits and geo political strategies in mind.

Mahfuz Anam writes in the Times of India on 2 February 2010

The history of mutual suspicion, petty bickering on trade negotiations, cavalier attitudes on border killings, dangerous gamesmanship with arms smuggling, etc, of the last three decades of Bangladesh-India relations would not normally justify the agreements that Sheikh Hasina penned sometime ago in Delhi. Only vision would. A vision of a South Asia doing what ASEAN did several decades ago, of trusting neighbours rather than of subverting them, of fighting poverty and not using it to justify other failures, of a thriving marketplace of goods and services rather than of counting items in the negative list. In the latest agreement, Bangladesh has moved towards such a vision. Has India responded? For us, the jury is still out.

Take the two biggest concerns of the two sides: for India they are security and connectivity with the north-east; for Bangladesh water sharing and trade imbalance. There is a feeling that the clarity and precision with which Bangladesh responded to its neighbour's concerns were not reciprocated in equal measure by India.

On Indian security concerns, Bangladesh's commitment was unequivocal: it will not permit the use of Bangladeshi soil for activities inimical to any other country, basically meaning India. It was in dramatic contrast to the past when India's worries about terrorist links and arms transit fell on deaf ears. India desperately needed friendly borders in the east that Bangladesh has now assured and is following up by decisive deeds. Sheikh Hasina has launched the most determined and widespread actions against internal militants and extremists and is systematically dismantling the terrorist infrastructure.

The permission for the use of the Chittagong and Mongla ports for shipment of Indian goods to the north-east is a very important step forward. With Bangladesh's present position on Asian highway and railway routes, the regional and sub-regional connectivity scenario is set to undergo a fundamental change.

On Bangladesh's priorities water sharing and trade imbalance there is no dramatic progress. On Teesta water sharing, the positive development is that the ministerial level joint river commission meeting will be held within March, 2010. But it still leaves us with an uncomfortable ambiguity about the outcome.

On the Tipaimukh dam issue, sadly, there was nothing new. The Indian prime minister reiterated his government's earlier stand that India will do nothing that will harm Bangladesh's interest. Such broad and generalised expression of good intention is definitely welcome. However clearer wording that further activity on Tipaimukh would only be undertaken after consultation with Bangladesh would have helped assuage remaining worries.

On enhancement of economic and trade relations, especially giving Bangladeshi exports (which are meager to start with) zero tariff access, the issue remained mired in the politics of an ever narrowing negative list which will now come down by 47 from 260 items, which earlier was higher still. The absurdity is that India earns a meagre $10 to $15 million in taxes from exports from Bangladesh of around $300 million. That is what it would have cost India to give Bangladesh zero tariff.

The promise of rebuilding of our railways, roads, bridges including the two ports, is welcome. The $1 billion credit line will serve to stimulate early action. However, all these are ancillary to both the functionality and efficiency of connectivity, which is a euphemism for 'transit'. The offer of 250 MW of electricity is of extreme relevance and among the most significant gains Bangladesh stands to make. Another hopeful sign is the agreement to amicably demarcate our maritime boundary.

Predictably, the Bangladeshi opposition, led by Khaleda Zia's Bangladesh Nationalist Party and supported by Jamaat-e-Islami, have called the agreements a total surrender of Bangladesh's interest to India. They have called for opposition unity and are clearly marking time for an appropriate moment to strike against Sheikh Hasina's government.

Manmohan Singh's government must guard against the agreement getting entrapped in a bureaucratic maze, implementing its provisions soon. As a first step, India should formally assure that, as an upper riparian state, it will always consider Bangladesh's interest and display maximum openness and transparency on water sharing. Killings on the border must immediately stop and the promised 24-hour access to Tin Bigha implemented. On maritime boundary, it should go for a liberal interpretation and allow Bangladesh access to all available hydrocarbon and fish resources. Zero tariff access must be granted to all Bangladeshi exports. This must be followed by elimination of all inter-state taxes and non-tariff barriers. We must institutionalise annual summit and informal meetings in-between, for a few hours on one-day trips, as EU heads of governments have done. Such a step will do wonders for our relations.

The moment is opportune for India and Bangladesh to lay the foundation of a durable, mutually beneficial relationship that will transform the region's strategic and security scene. Now is the moment for grand visions and grander actions. If Bangladesh was guilty of being shackled to the mindset of the past, let India not be accused of having failed to think outside the box when opportunity beckoned.

The writer is editor, Daily Star, Bangladesh.

Private Investment or Disinvestment in Education?

2010-02-01T00:45:00.000-08:00

Private investors are queuing up to lock their wealth in the galloping education sector. Will this new found craze for educational returns for the investors will pay their gamble? or the recent steps by the union government to crack whip on the extra charging private educational providers will dent the interest among the private investors in education? One needs to wait and watch the results.

Reeba Zachairah writes in The Times of India on 1 February 2010

The evergreen and recession-proof characteristics of the education sector are drawing interest among private equity firms. Billed to be a $80-billion market, the number of private equity deals in the education space has grown four-fold in the last four years.

According to Venture Intelligence, a Chennai-based research firm focused on private equity and mergers & acquisitions, eight deals worth $121 million were sealed in 2009, compared with just two deals worth $73 million in 2006.

The first educational institute to get venture capital funding in India was Career Launcher from Intel Capital as early as in 2000. And last week, India Equity Partners invested Rs 172 crore for a 26% stake in IL&FS Education and Technology Services, which provides training to schools, colleges and to the government and corporate sector.

Unlike other sectors such as steel and automobiles which bore the brunt of economic slowdown, the education sector stood out as many professionals chose to go back to school as they waited for the gloomy scenario to change. Moreover, the government's thrust that every child should have the right to education and the enhanced outlay to develop infrastructure reflect the growth potential of the sector.

Also, education occupies a top slot in a typical Indian household budget. A cursory look around any neighbourhood would highlight the mushrooming of educational institutes and coaching centres in the last few years.

Says Rajesh Singhal, managing partner, Milestone Religare Investment Advisors, "The sector offers investment opportunities across the entire value chain, from basic to higher education, training and skills development."

Milestone Religare has invested in IMS Learning Resources, a test preparation firm for aspiring students across management, engineering and law streams. According to Singhal, the annualised return on investment could be between 25% and 30%. Funds typically have an investment horizon of 5-6 years.

Devilish Status Updates: Social Networking Sites Perils

2010-02-01T00:19:00.000-08:00

Presidents, Prime Ministers, ministers, high officials, anyone and everyone are in the social networking sites. They don't just spend their leisure time in these sites but from the time they take position in their offices till they get out, updating status, playing poker, commenting on friends photos and sharing sensitive information are routine affairs among the high profile official cyber citizens. The danger is that they are leaking official information and it is available for the public information. A terrorist can peak into their status updates and take enough hints to attack.

It is high time to end the kiddish play of people in high positions to save the world from the perils of cyber terrorism. The first step is to be block these social networking sites in offices and public places. Any officer still doing it should be punished adequately. The government must issue an order immediately regrading this problem.

Could you get arrested, fired, or even get divorced because of a humorous status message or innocuous tweet? You just might, say cyber lawyers, as status messages and tweets are admissible as electronic evidence under Indian IT laws.

Even as Microsoft’s Bill Gates and Barack Obama joined the Twitter fraternity this week, a dozen other celebs have been creating controversies over the Web. People are even getting arrested for creating contempt of court, by tweets or wall posts, or creating trouble for governments, notwithstanding the Desi Tharoor saga.

However, for the common Tweeter or Facebooker, daily updates about what’s on his or her mind may lead to robberies, thefts, arrests, break-ups and of course a divorce, suggest statistics.

UK-based Divorce-online last month said that 20% of all divorce petitions it is handling currently contain references to Facebook status messages. “One can also take a print out or screenshot of a Twitter or Facebook post and can use it in any court proceedings either against or for you. Cases where social interactions on internet are used as evidence will only rise in the near future in India,” says cyber lawyer Pavan Duggal.

But more than courts and spouses, your innocuous Tweet or status messages are being scanned by employers, before doling out job offers. While LinkedIn is a common social networking tool for professionals, employers sneak on the Facebook or Twitter personality of the candidate to read — “what’s on his mind”.

“Assessing the soft skills of a person is very important both for the HR manager and the recruiter. It shows how a candidate communicates to people around him. It also shows his interests on a daily basis. Often the demand for profiling social networking behaviour comes from the client’s side,” says Vikram Bhardwaj, CEO of executive search firm Redileon.

On the other hand, just updating your location every time on web 2.0 sites and sharing it might not be a great idea. While you might be busy posting the beach photos while on a vacation with family, your house may be getting burgled in the meantime. A man in Arizona recently blamed his social updates, as a reason behind the theft at his house.

Experts, however advise, that it’s best not to add your boss on your network, and even if you have already done, its best to put her in a separate list. Close family members like a spouse, should be avoided. A status message implying single even though you are married or in a relationship can definitely cause a turmoil in your home network, if not the social network, says Bangalore-based Parvati Kumar, an avid social networker.

Defence personnel and spies too are not allowed to reveal their field location or unit or its commander’s name. Posting pictures in a uniform is not allowed. But many army and intelligence officials are often seen on Facebook with their profile and photo completely hidden.

Ironically, discussion forums related to Indian intelligence works and their job postings are available on some Facebook groups. Even though a user may post any objectionable or anti-national content or even organise a rally against the state, on Twitter or Facebook, the new laws make them immune to action.

“The social networking sites hosting such content are not liable to penal action under the recent amendments to Section 79 of the Indian IT Act notified in October, last year,” says Vivek Sood, a Delhi-based cyber lawyer.

Meanwhile sociologists say that the web 2.0 behaviour will increase in coming years. “Human beings are generally gregarious. Since, now the shackles of family are breaking down, people want to express themeselves more often, even what they are thinking. It is a compensatory mechanism for the non-existence of face-to-face communities. The phenomenon will increase,” says Dipankar Gupta , professor of sociology at Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University.

Social Networking Sites are Dangerous: Who Cares?

2010-01-29T00:26:00.001-08:00

Children were addicted to video games in the past. Now they are swapping their addiction to social networking sites with a bang. None other than the Google co-founder, Garry Page who is starting and buying a social networking site (SNW) every day expressed anguish over the children's maddening engagement with the SNWs. Not only SNWs but anything in excess is dangerous for the health of human beings. Capitalising on the addictive habits of human beings online business houses are thriving.

I found SNWs as a vital tool to conduct my cross country and cross cultural research to document the developments in digital society from 2000. Then it was a minor happening in the cyber space without much sensation. Today any one and every one is dancing in the SNWs. From grand ma to grand child, Facebook, Orkut, myspace are the ones where there is life. This craze will end one day like other sensational fashion tech developments. But when is that one day?

The Times of India writes

Google founders have warned that social networking sites are proving to be the biggest threat to While hitting back at critics who accused the search engine of "spying” on users, Larry Page, one of the founders, said that social networking sites are the biggest threat to people's privacy on the internet.

"The No 1 privacy issue is stuff that gets posted on networking sites,” the Mirror quoted Page, as saying.

"Especially if you're young and go to parties and get drunk and people take pictures, these things can pop up and hurt you.

"There's also an issue with people posting things about people that turn out not to be true," he added.

Page had set up Google with pal Sergy Brin in 1998. The statement came after Google was blasted for allowing clips of people having epileptic fit to appear on its You Tube site.

"I don't know about the epilepsy thing but I imagine if I saw someone who was going into a seizure and I wanted to be able to diagnose them it could be very useful to see a video on line that shows me what a seizure looks like,” said Brin.

The critics have also blamed Google of giving user details to advertisers, however the founders strongly deny.

"Some companies have aggressively pursued commercial deals and done things in a creepy, scary way that has set back the industry. But we need people to trust us and can't compromise the business in that way," said Brin

Though he admitted that he holds a responsibility to users, he said that it was impossible to monitor everything.

"There's something like 10 hours of content uploaded on You Tube every minute," he said.

"But we have good guidelines which are enforced by everybody.

"If you see a video you don't like you can just tag it and we may take it down," he added

Inability to Handle Emails

2009-12-17T05:23:00.000-08:00

Too many emails, forwards, spams and junks are crushing the instant communication network through email. Despite all anti spam wares and anti junk filters there are many unwanted messages keeping jamming our inboxes. Mostly our office updates, mass emails, birthday reminders, event reminders, anniversary wishes and social network updates are the major villains of the electronic communication system. I spend more than 30 minutes to delete the junk messages. Most of these forwards are repeated by friends. No wonder Netizens are not able to handle this trouble. This problem is common among the public figures, bureaucrats and professionals. Those who have wide network also face the same problem.

times of India writes on 17 December 2009,

Computer technicians have found 22 million missing White House emails from the administration of President George W Bush and the

Obama administration is searching for dozens more days’ worth of potentially lost email from the Bush years, according to two groups that filed suit over the failure by the Bush White House to install an electronic record keeping system.
The two private groups — Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington and the National Security Archive — said they were settling the suits they filed against the president’s office in 2007.

It will be years before the public sees the emails as they will go through the National Archives’ process for releasing presidential records.

Time Killing Networking Sites

2009-12-13T05:56:00.000-08:00

Social networking sites are the current trend setters and techno fashion definers. But the craze for social networking sites has crossed all limits. These sites are not only killing work time of the office employees but also damaging the health of the onliners. Too many games and interest pulling subsites are eating heavy time of the netizens. Soon netizens are going to say 'na na networking'.

Times of India writes on 11 December 2009

Facebook makes you despair? Social networking makes you want to end it all? You may be ready for online ritual suicide with the aid of a "Impress your friends, disconnect yourself," is the slogan on www.seppukoo.com, a site that aims to subvert Facebook by offering its millions of users a glorious end and a memorial page to match. "Rather than fall into the hands of their enemies, ancient Japanese samurai preferred to die with honour, voluntarily plunging a sword into the abdomen and moving it left to right in a slicing motion," the site notes.

This form of ritual suicide was known as "seppuku".

"As the seppuku restores the samurai's honour as a warrior, seppukoo.com deals with the liberation of the digital body," the site says.

Today the enemy is not other bands of noble warriors but corporate media who use viral marketing to make huge profits by connecting people across the globe.

"Seppukoo playfully attempts to subvert this mechanism by disconnecting people from each other and transforming the individual suicide experience into an exciting ‘social' experience."

The site, which uses its own viral marketing strategy to lure in disgruntled social networkers, is part of a protest wave that sees Facebook as a potentially dangerous entity beholden to corporate interests.

But seppukoo.com has some way to go before it attracts anything near the more than 300 million users Facebook currently boasts. On Wednesday it pulled in only half a dozen Facebookers ready to end it all.

Its owners said by email that over 15,000 people had done the deed and over 350,000 Facebook users had received an invite to follow suit.
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Ageless Aamir Khan and India

2009-12-06T23:47:00.000-08:00

The cool heart throb of the Bollywood - Aamir Khan is a measured man. Without hyping his social work and public commitment the quiet Khan rolls out his charity. Not only his movies are fussless flickers but also his personality. This cool cucumber style of Aamir endears him to the masses.

In an interview to The Times of India on 6 December 2009, Aamir Khan says,

Aamir Khan refuses to be bound by conventions. In his forthcoming film, 3 Idiots, the 44-year-old plays a 20-year-old management student. Not surprising, as he is one Bollywood actor who believes in taking up challenges, on screen and off it. Whether it is to raise his voice in support of Narmada Bachao Andolan or demand that Kiran Bedi be appointed as Chief Information Commissioner (CIC), Khan actively involves himself in various social causes. However, he has steered clear of politics till now and tells Meena Iyer that it doesn’t excite him. Excerpts from the interview

Recently you wrote to the Prime Minister asking for the appointment of Kiran Bedi as Chief Information Commissioner. You’re passionate about this cause, aren’t you?
I’ve been in touch with Arvind Kejriwal, one of the people who has been instrumental in getting the Right To Information (RTI) Act passed. I think the RTI Bill/Ordinance is probably one of the most important achievements in Indian democracy since Independence. The RTI is a very important right for every Indian. The commissioner, who is meant to overlook the entire process, should be someone who is upright, honest and has a high level of integrity so that the spirit of RTI is maintained. If the PM feels that there is someone more qualified than Kiran Bedi, then he can choose that candidate but the process of appointing the CIC should be transparent.

You’ve been involved with several social causes like Teach India, Teach for India, Association for Democratic Reforms. Do you nurse political aspirations as well?
The reason I don’t make my political views public is because I feel that politics is private business. Being a celebrity, I do have a certain influence on a certain section of society. It is, therefore, all the more important how I express my opinion or what I express my opinion on. As far as the politics of this country is concerned, if ever there is a political party or an individual who I feel I must support, someone who can take India where it ought to be going, then I will support them. I am yet to come across a political party that will take India where the country should be. It is not as if I want to stay neutral. Tomorrow if we have an Obama, be sure I will be speaking for him.

So politics doesn’t excite you?
I have no political aspirations. Politics doesn’t excite me. What excites me is the creative work I do. Story-telling excites me; making people laugh and cry excites me. Being a creative person who is concerned about society, I feel I can contribute a lot to the society through my own profession. Through my professional I can inspire, I can heal, I can influence thought processes.

Salman Khan paints to de-stress. We hear your stress-buster is the piano...
No, no, I’ve just learnt to play two-three tunes on it. My children Junaid and Ira play the piano. My wife Kiran is very good at it. Actually, reading is my stress-buster. I’m a voracious reader. Also, I play chess, badminton, cricket and tennis.

What are you reading right now?
I’m reading the third book of the Millennium Series — the Girl who kicked the Hornets’ Nest. It is a crime thriller written by the Swedish writer Stieg Larrson who died before his series got published.

What has been your biggest challenge as far as films go?
One of the biggest challenges is playing a character who is 20 years old in my next film 3 Idiots when I’m actually 44. I loved Raju Hirani’s Munnabhai series. When I heard the final draft of 3 Idiots, I freaked. But I kept asking him how can I play a character who is less than half my age. But he was convinced. Besides my physical appearance, Raju felt that my screen character, Rancho, is saying some very important things. And he felt I was the ideal choice to be saying those things on screen.

One hears you got jittery before the actual shoot began?
Even before boarding the flight for the first day’s shoot, I sent Raju and my producer Vinod Chopra a text message asking them if they still wanted me or had they had a change of mind. Quite honestly, I’m worried. Until the audience sees 3 Idiots, I won’t know whether we have been successful in this mad experiment of ours. Having said that, it is the job of an actor to play different ages, even different sexes. I played a woman in Baazi. I played a 60-something Sikh in one of my commercials. So, I guess an actor should be open to challenges. But I admit that when you are pushing your physical age, it is tough.

Your character in 3-Idiots is closer to your college going son’s age, isn’t it?
Yeah, Junaid is 16. And the character of Rancho that I play goes from 20 to 23 years.

Besides films, what else excites you?
I am very interested in farming. Kiran and I want to grow our food. The joy of actually being able to grow something and then feeding people is a noble thing. It is also very therapeutic. I’d love to try organic farming. There are so many things I want to do in life. Hazaar khwaishein aise ki har khwaish pe dum nikale, bahut nikale mere armaan, magar phir bhi kam nikale... are the lines that would best sum up my state of mind.

Like Amitabh Bachchan and Shah Rukh Khan, you’ve been offered big money for television. Tempted?
I’ve been offered a lot of money to do TV. But game shows don’t excite me. I will only do TV if the programme I’m anchoring can dramatically contribute to society in some form.

Heard you are writing your autobiography right now?
Nahin yaar, I have just thought of writing my autobiography. I should start the process soon. It is something that I would like to do.

You’ve become a habitual blogger?
I blog because it a way of taking my relationship with my audience forward. I have travelled a long distance in my relationship with my audience in the last 20-years and I feel comfortable sharing certain things with them through my blog.

Your last film Ghajini is the biggest Bollywood hit ever. So, who according to you is the bigger Khan --Shah Rukh or you?
I have never claimed to be supreme.

Have you been discriminated against because of your surname or religion?
I have never noticed any discrimination because I wear the Khan surname. Whenever I’ve been frisked at airports, so have other people. Being stopped at an airport is part of a security drill. Unfortunately, in the times we live in, security is a big concern. It is important for us to support security procedures. As far as the other aspect goes — the Constitution of India doesn’t allow discrimination on the basis of sex, caste, religion or language. But I would be lying if I said that such discrimination doesn’t happen.

Are you a hands on husband or plain indifferent?
When there are guests at home, I’m very helpful. I like to make a good impression on the guests. I can make a cup of tea and boil an egg. And if Kiran wants me to wash dishes, then I do.

Emission Cuts and Copenhagen Talks

2009-12-06T23:19:00.000-08:00

All roads lead to Copenhagen this fortnight. World leaders, scientists, journalists, policy makers and stakeholders are converging in the Danish capital to chart out strategies to control climate change. Whether it is going to be an effective summit or another empty talking time is to be watched. From the current diplomatic war over climate change there is less one can read about the genuineness of the world leaders to sort out this complex matter. Every nation and its leader is keen on scoring popularity points rather than finding a long lasting solution to the climate change.

George Manbiot writes in The Times of India on 6 December 2009

Climate change is humankind’s most pressing challenge; unless we can reduce the amount of global warming gases we release into the atmosphere, the heating they cause will melt the world’s glaciers, create both droughts and floods, drive many people from their homes as sea levels rise and threaten the world’s ability to feed itself. So why are so few people trying to stop it?

We have left the task to governments and experts. Public protests demanding action have been small and muted. Because there is so little public engagement, the governments meeting in Copenhagen are proposing only a fraction of the cuts needed to prevent disaster. They bailed out the banks but seem prepared to let the world’s ecosystems collapse. Surely the world’s people should be hammering on their doors, insisting that they act?

I think there are several reasons why this hasn’t happened. The first is a campaign of disinformation by the fossil fuel companies, whose investments will lose value if a strong climate deal is struck. For 20 years the energy industries have sponsored “experts” to tell the public that climate change either isn’t happening or is no big deal. Some corporations have paid astroturf groups — fake grassroots campaigns — to lobby against action on climate change. They have successfully sown doubt and confusion in people’s minds.

Another reason is that the most common human response to any crisis is denial. Denial is a survival strategy: if we really came to terms with our own mortality, or with the evils of the world, we wouldn’t get out of bed in the morning. The firmer the evidence of climate change has become, the more people have gone into denial; now in some countries nearly half the population insists that global warming is just a scare story, even though you can see the early impacts almost everywhere.

But perhaps the most important reason is that the issue — and the terms used to describe it — are so complex and buried in jargon that many people simply switch off before they’ve understood its importance. When someone tells you that “unless we reduce Kyoto basket greenhouse gas emissions to maintain atmospheric concentrations below 450 parts per million carbon dioxide equivalent, anthropogenic warming will initiate biospheric feedbacks”, you could be forgiven for staring at them blankly. That sentence describes a critically important global issue. But it’s hardly a catchy slogan, is it?

Both the science and the policies needed to deal with manmade climate change are inherently complex. As soon as you get beyond the simple story — that the planet is warming up because we’re burning fossil fuels and destroying natural carbon stores — you start to get bogged down in mind-numbing detail. The fact that some scientists seem to be incapable of speaking any human language doesn’t help, but even when they do talk clearly it’s often hard to grasp.

I believe there is a real democratic problem here, that is not confined to climate change. As we know ever more about the world, as experts become ever more specialized and governments rely ever more heavily on experts, it becomes harder for ordinary citizens to engage with the issues that affect their lives. In Shakespeare’s day, one person could attain the entire sum of human knowledge. You probably could have got it onto a couple of CDs. Today even the specialists can’t keep up with their own field of knowledge.

Arthur C Clarke said that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”. He might have added that any sufficiently advanced expertise is indistinguishable from gobbledegook. We are shut out, by sheer complexity, from the important issues that affect our lives and so can play an ever less meaningful role in their resolution. This allows governments and other powerful players to hide behind jargon. As issues become more complex it becomes easier to bamboozle us.

What can be done about it? I believe that all experts whose work might have an impact on public policy have a duty to speak and write as clearly as possible. I believe that governments have a duty to keep their citizens informed as well as they can, spelling out complex issues in terms that most people can grasp. I believe the media has a special responsibility for investigating and explaining complex stories as objectively as possible.

But not everyone who informs us has our best interests at heart. Where climate change is concerned, some of those who communicate most clearly — the PR companies hired by fossil fuel companies — seek to mislead us. Citizens also have a duty: to be as well-informed as possible, so that they can make sensible democratic choices. But we have to accept that this will become ever more difficult as life becomes more complex.

George Monbiot is the UK-based author of the bestselling books, ‘Heat: How to Stop the Planet From Burning’ and ‘ The Age of Consent: A Manifesto for a New World Order’

Teenage Troubles

2009-12-04T07:57:00.000-08:00

The biggest challenge today for parents is bringing up children. Apart from offering the children best possible education and nutrition, parents are facing difficulties in monitoring children's ethical behaviour. Apart from social ethics learnt from educational institutions children too learn from the family. Learning from the family has been labelled by sociologists like Talcott Parsons as "primary socialisation". But socialisation is under constant threat by technology and consumerism. Whatever ethical norms and behavioural patterns codified by parents and grandparents are on and off broken by the fast moving peers. Curbing this trouble will be the most crucial challenge in the coming days.

Amrit Dhillon writes in The Times of India on 2 December 2009

It's easy to visualise the Pune teenager who arranged to meet her boyfriend the day before Friendship Day recently. Just 15, she must have been flushed with excitement at the prospect of feeling special and desirable, and coming home later from the rendezvous floating in that delicious dreamy delirium that characterises the early days of a relationship. But the boyfriend brought along three friends for some 'fun' and they raped her in turns. The following day, the girl hanged herself. In their tragic interplay, i imagine she was seeking love while he wanted sex. Her humiliation and death reveal how the dating game in India is going horribly wrong because boys and girls are playing by different rules.

Girls are eager to explore their newfound social freedom to experience the headiness of loving and being loved. Physical desire is obviously an important part of this exploration because the hormones of a teenage girl are fizzing just as furiously as those of any young male. But girls venture into this new world almost utterly defenceless and, as mostly small-town ingenues, are vulnerable to the first predator who comes along.

So girls are filmed undressing by their boyfriends. The MMS clips are sent to friends or used for blackmail. Girls who end relationships have acid thrown on them. Girls who reject boys' advances are stalked and threatened. In the West, young girls absorb vast amounts of information about relationships before acquiring their first boyfriend. From TV programmes and debates, magazines, playground gossip and conversations with mothers and elder sisters, they develop a sixth sense for detecting a false note or a whiff of aggression that could endanger them.

More than information, certain ideas have entered their minds. The theories of the feminist movement from the 1970s onwards in the West made women aware of the power dynamic between men and women. The ideas of Germaine Greer, Simone de Beauvoir and Betty Friedman filtered down into popular consciousness. No doubt, they were diluted and reduced to slogans by the time they reached the woman on the street but they nevertheless coloured the landscape of her mind.

This process has been absent in India where such debates have been largely confined to women's groups and magazines such as Manushi. Here, girls plunge into the dating game intellectually blindfolded, groping (excuse the pun) for signposts as they navigate this new terrain. They possess none of the psychological tools to discriminate between genuine and fake interest. Having had arranged marriages themselves, their mothers and elder sisters are of no help.

Quite apart from the limited help available from their families, even the wider culture around them fails to imbue girls either with sense or suspicion. How can it? For centuries, social norms have imposed strict social segregation. The new freedom for the sexes to mix is so new that society has barely woken up to its implications. Whereas in the West, relations between the sexes evolved gradually, over decades, in India, the process has been squeezed into 10-15 years, jumping from Jane Austen to Paris Hilton in the blink of an eye.

As girls, without being forewarned, rush into the arms of their beaux, they misread the signals. Exacerbating their vulnerability is the desire for male attention that virtually consumes girls at this age. Not all young men, of course, are hell-bent on abusing their new access to women. Plenty of them treat their girlfriends with respect. But many, just like the girls, misread the cues.

They see a woman in a bar wearing attractive clothes as 'available' because they have never been educated by literature, films, books and newspapers to grasp the notion that a woman can be drunk, dressed revealingly and behave suggestively but if she says 'no' to sex, it means no. They too are confused. All the old familiar rules have gone and it's a free-for-all. Just the other day, at least in some circles, they were taught to believe that any woman who displayed pleasure during lovemaking, even with her own husband, was a whore. Now they have to learn that women can pose semi-naked, smoke and drink and yet must be treated as respectfully as they treat their mothers.

India has moved from segregation to mingling between the sexes without any of the attendant debates on sex, feminism and contraception. There has been no transition. Many men have leapt from believing that women should be sequestered inside the home to expecting their girlfriends to take responsibility for contraception. Girls pop the 'morning after' pill casually, rather than as an emergency measure. The boyfriends are happy to be carefree and few even bother to find out whether there could be repercussions on the girl's health.

Young Indian women need to realise that many of the new sexual freedoms that were hailed initially as 'liberating' in the West (such as the availability of the pill) turned out to carry a heavy price. When neither side knows the rules because the rules are still being worked out, the dating game becomes potentially lethal.

Bio Technology in India

2009-12-04T07:43:00.000-08:00

Everyone is eager to see technology solving all the problems faced by humanity. But the response to this mass expectation has been dismal. Bio technology which is touted as the one stop solution for all problems is yet to prove its credentials in a big way. Its achievements so far cannot be belittled. However there is a big mismatch between the hopes and reality.

Along with the developments in bio technology there is a parallel growth of controversies. Especially the food products and medicines. It is up to the bio technologists to sort out these troubles and prove to the world that they are savious of future.

Kiran Mazumdar Shaw writes in The Times of India on 3 December 2009

Biotechnology is aptly described as the "technology of hope" for its promise to deliver food security, life-saving drugs, alternate energy and environmental sustainability. India has many assets in its strong pool of scientists and engineers, vast institutional network and cost-effective manufacturing. Over 100 national research laboratories employ thousands of scientists. More than 300 college-level educational and training institutes offer degrees and diplomas in biotechnology, bio-informatics and the biological sciences, producing nearly 5,00,000 students annually. About 3,00,000 postgraduates and 1,500 PhDs qualify in biosciences and engineering each year. According to reports, outside of the US, India ranks the highest with 61 USFDA-approved plants and in excess of 200 GMP certified pharmaceutical manufacturing facilities.

The Indian government's national biotechnology development strategy is a comprehensive road map for this emerging sector. The document recognises the challenges of building both scale and critical mass in pursuing a global leadership profile. The biotech industry is poised to deliver a size of $5 billion by 2010 with biopharma driving the growth trajectory. However, funding, infrastructure, regulation and skill competency mapping pose obstacles in this path to the future. Conversely, India is uniquely placed to build a strong competitive edge. It offers an attractive cost arbitrage in research & development at roughly a third of that in the western hemisphere. Key enablers include a large, qualified English-speaking workforce, a network of reputed research laboratories and state-of-the-art pharmaceutical labs and manufacturing facilities. Further, the patient population offers a large, diverse pool for effective clinical research and development.

Ever-increasing cost and time involved in drug discovery and development, fierce competition and pricing pressure are all spurring western pharma companies to have an India strategy. A large number of blockbuster drugs are also set to go off-patent, giving the sector here tremendous opportunities. The industry is collaborating with global giants in clinical trials, discovery and development research, and manufacturing, thus rapidly moving up the value chain. In this age of hyper competition and wafer-thin margins, India's biotech sector is poised at an inflection point.

Yet the industry continues to face numerous challenges. Foremost is finance. Venture funding has abstained from investing in this sector on account of its high risk profile. Aversion to risk is also seen within the sector, which prefers low risk ventures based on services and generics, shying away from an innovation-led business model. The department of biotechnology has plugged this deficiency through a number of funding schemes. It is for entrepreneurs to avail of these funds and rise to the challenge of innovation.

The sector also faces the same infrastructural hurdles affecting Indian industry. The country continues to fall short on critical enablers such as quality roads and uninterrupted supply of power and potable water. However, beyond these common issues, the sector has its own problems. It requires a streamlined regulatory framework to accelerate commercialisation of products. Numerous regulatory agencies pulling in different directions slow down the process of growth. Bt Brinjal is a good example of how years of intensive research investment are unable to guarantee commercial returns. Human clinical trials are still an unresolved aspect. Further, essential strong industry-academia connections are sadly lacking.

The government can lead the way in facilitating growth by treating biotechnology as a priority sector. R&D is the bedrock on which biotech rests. The government must enable international patenting, which curiously does not qualify for tax deduction, and encourage investment. A regulatory environment that helps the drug discovery process and approves products without delays is urgently required. A five-year tax holiday on new products developed in-house can be a great incentive for R&D. Profits on such products can be mandated for reinvestment in R&D to encourage development of newer and better drugs at lower costs.

The biotech sector needs creativity to harness its potential and assume global leadership. There exists a huge opportunity for growth but only if innovation becomes part of the business ethic and a primary enterprise driver. It is no longer enough to produce clones of pharma products that have saturated the market, which do nothing to add value. Benchmarks must be set high and out-of-the-box thinking must become the norm. Profit margins can be maintained through contract discovery and manufacturing for foreign firms.

Extensive research requires expensive equipment that needs to be imported. The government can step in again by exempting or reducing import duties. It can also approve the Association of Biotech Led Enterprises's (ABLE) recommendation to set up a biotech fund to support first-generation biotech entrepreneurs up to the 'proof of concept' stage. ABLE has also urged the government to exempt venture funds investing in the sector from capital gains tax. That can act as a reward for longer-term investment cycles.

Already a major hub, India has all that it takes to become a global biotech leader. This will not only spur economic growth and provide much-needed jobs, but also ensure that we find answers to modern-day challenges in healthcare, energy, food security, and the environment. However, biotechnology's promise and India's potential can be realised only if government and industry work together and draw up a road map to facilitate innovation.

The writer heads a biotech company.

18 More Months in Afghanistan

2009-12-04T07:26:00.000-08:00

Afghanistan has been America's curse for the past one decade. What was the last decade misdeeds of America has been paid back. In 80s America trained Afghans with weapons and sophisticated technology to crush Russian forces. The same training is giving nightmares to America for a decade.

Unable to get out of the Afghanistan mess the White House establishment has been clueless. Barack Obama the promised savior of America is trying his best to put an end to the American embarrassment in the troubled Asian soil. He might have bought another 18 months to crush the Al Qaeda network but the troubles will continue to complicate his image and leadership. It is better to phase out Allied troops in 18 months the time he had sought and leave it to the managerial skills of decade long trained Afghan nationals. If America cannot deliver the results and make Afghans to take care of their country it is utter shame. Ten years is not less time for this.

Times of India writes on 3 December 2009

US president Barack Obama's outlined plan for a troop surge in Afghanistan, coupled with an exit strategy setting July 2011 as the kickoff point for the withdrawal of US forces, is likely to attract criticism from both sides. Domestic public fatigue with the war may cause some to say he committed too much, while those wanting the US to stay the course will say he didn't commit enough. But Obama has probably made the best of a bad situation. There are no easy answers in Afghanistan after seven years of mismanagement. Now, to obviate the danger of the Taliban deciding to simply wait out the US presence, a few focus areas are important.

The first is ensuring that the Afghan government is in a position to deal with the Taliban once the US withdrawal starts. And for that, the prime necessity is an effective administration in Kabul. Without good governance, Afghan president Hamid Karzai's government will lack the legitimacy it needs to succeed against the Taliban. How exactly Washington can apply pressure without making Karzai seem a US stooge is problematic, but Obama hinted at it in his speech when he spoke of reaching out to local leaders and elders. It will serve both to build effective local governance systems and exert pressure on Karzai to clean up his act if he does not wish to be left out in the cold.

Another important facet of beefing up the Afghan government is bolstering the Afghan police and military's size and capabilities. At the same time, the complementary task of degrading the Taliban's strength must be undertaken. For this too, reaching out to local leaders is important. But perhaps the crucial factor is Pakistan. If Islamabad allows militants safe havens, all the American efforts will be wasted. A US withdrawal with the Taliban's Quetta shura still intact would mean that a decade of war and loss of life was for nothing. As for hardliners in Islamabad, they would do well to remember that July 2011 is simply the starting point for the withdrawal. The actual pace of the drawdown will depend on the situation on the ground.

New Delhi must not cavil if large amounts of civilian aid flow into Pakistan, since that would shore up anti-militancy forces. It must, on the contrary, stay closely engaged with Washington and with Kabul, keep reminding Washington and other international capitals of the urgency of the task of turning Afghanistan around, and itself remain ready to help.

Ending Terror Menace in Assam

2009-12-04T07:03:00.000-08:00

The north eastern state of Assam has been undergoing tremendous fissures due to the high voltage terrorist activities for many decades. The fragile political situation compounded by the natural calamities and underdevelopment has taken heavy toll on the state. Lack of strong political leadership combined with the total neglect of the centre has made the terrorist control impossible. After Naxal violence, North Eastern terror groups pose major challenge to the Indian security system.

The porous border with Bangladesh, Bhutan and Myanmar has been the worst troubles. Luckily Bangladesh government is ready to cooperate with the Indian security agencies to curb the anti-Indian forces. It is now up to the home minister and his officers to put an end to the terror menace in north-east and save the Indian paradise.

Times of India writes on 4 December 2009

Good news has finally followed bad in Assam. The Nalbari attack and just a few days before that, the burning of 12 tankers and derailment of four

train bogies at Jorhat had created the expectation that the United Liberation Front of Asom (ULFA) would ramp up its activities. But with the detention of Arabinda Rajkhowa, one of ULFA's founders and its current 'chairman', the scenario has been turned on its head. If ever there was an opportunity for New Delhi to make progress in the state, this is it. ULFA's pressure points have become apparent in the recent past, perversely enough after the Nalbari attack. The contradictory crosstalk that emerged from some of the organisation's lower level leaders at that point highlighted the tension between the pro-talks and anti-talks factions within ULFA. Rajkhowa's capture and New Delhi's offer of safe passage he is firmly in the pro-talks camp provides an opportunity to focus on this.

The larger takeaway, however, may be about the north-east as a whole. By some accounts, there are over 120 militant groups operating in the region. At least 30 of them demand sovereignty. Factor in highly porous national borders and it becomes apparent that these are not problems New Delhi can resolve entirely on its own. That is why recent events in Bangladesh are heartening. Rajkhowa was not the first arrest. Biswa Mohan Deb Barman, National Liberation Front of Tripura president, as well as two other ULFA leaders and a Lashkar operative have been captured in the past few days.

These point to a new sensitivity to Indian concerns on the part of Dhaka. Without Dhaka cracking down on cross-border safe havens and training facilities, any north-east initiative by New Delhi would be made more difficult. Cooperation on the part of Nepal and Myanmar is a must as well. The revised extradition treaty with the former could be useful here. Admittedly, it may face hurdles due to domestic opposition in Nepal, but New Delhi must persist with low-key efforts to push it through. As for Myanmar, a potential way forward is one that was, in fact, suggested by Dhaka in 2008 when it mooted a counterterrorism treaty between all three countries.

But these initiatives will amount to little if New Delhi lacks political will in engaging rebel groups who want to talk, while putting pressure on those who don't. Insurgency cannot be defeated unless at least a section of insurgents are weaned away and offered an honourable exit. The offer of unconditional talks with ULFA is a good one, but it is just the beginning. There should be enough of both carrots and sticks to bring rebel groups to the table.

Bad Debts and PSU Banks

2009-12-01T23:20:00.000-08:00

The public sector banks are smashing all doom predictions and leaping forward. Despite the revenue addition and steady growth there are several loopholes. One of the grave gap is that bad debts which are mostly forced by rich, mighty and powerful. Day in and day out politicos and burst out business people bee line PSU banks for loans. Knowing fully well that they cannot repay the loan banks are forced to give them the required amount due to political pressures. I remember the strict saying of a bank manager in Salem to an educational loan request. The boy who applied for the loan belonged to poor economic background. He got 1095 marks out of 1200 in HSLC exam. His parents are long standing small customers in the bank. They make potato chips and live hand to mouth existence. When I pointed out to the manager that he is duty bound to give educational loan to this poor boy, his prompt arrogant reply was "how can this potato maker repay Rs.70,000/- loan? I told him that the finance minister told the Lok Sabha "educational loans must be disbursed without collateral security for high scorers from the weak economic background. He shot at me "oh! finance ministers keep coming and going. Will they rescue if these people don't repay". Those strictness apart PSU banks have return off a whopping Rs.25,000 crores last years as bad debts.

Times of India writes on 2 December 2009

When everyone was raising a toast to the success of government-nurtured public sector banks (PSBs) for their canny business sense and for having posted robust growth backed by huge profits in the downturn, these desi financial institutions quietly wrote off bad debts running into thousands of crores in each financial year just to give their bottomlines a clean look.

According to statistics submitted by the finance ministry before Parliament on Friday, the government banks together in the last three years, since 2007, have written off nearly Rs 25,000 crore.

The figures are alarming when compared against the net recovery of these government entities and the fact that a part of these write-offs included one-time settlements (OTS) that the banks entered with its defaulters by agreeing to take a token amount against their outstandings and close the case.

This OTS scheme of banks had led to the fall of many criminal cases being prosecuted by the CBI in various courts, leading to the intervention of the Supreme Court last year. In many such cases the investigative agency had enough evidence of a collusion of bank officials with the "willful" defaulters.

According to government data, in 2007, against a recovery of Rs 9,200 crore, these PSBs had written off more than Rs 9,400 crore. The story was repeated in 2008 when against a recovery of Rs 9,300 crore these banks had written off Rs 8,000 crore. The net recovery in 2009 was about Rs 11,000 crore while write-offs exceeded Rs 7,400 crore.

The government's claim that it has managed to bring down NPAs from 18% in 1997 to 2% at the end of March 2009 sounds hollow and highlights an alarming trend of "cooking" books to present a healthy status. Though in the previous year, a portion of write-offs also included agricultural loans, the net NPAs of these PSBs at Rs 44,000 crore at the end of last fiscal against an outstanding of Rs 21 lakh crore is likely to see a surge given these banks exposure to commercial real estate.

Total outstanding credit to the commercial real estate of Indian banks, both government-owned and private, at the end of March 2009 was Rs 91,500 crore as against Rs 63,000 crore till March 2008.