The Tribune, Chandigarh, India

Where do the poor live?

THERE is a significant passage in the Economic Survey. It casts doubts on the National Sample Survey (NSS) assessment of a sharp fall in the percentage of the very poor. This despite the Planning Commission’s full-throated endorsement. The NSS says the proportion of the absolute poor has come down from 36 per cent in 1993-94 to slightly more than 26 per cent last year. The Survey notes that analysts have questioned the changes in the methods and partially accepts their argument that these could have determined the final outcome. All this is extraordinary. Normally, it must be music to the ears of the Finance Ministry bureaucrats that their anti-poverty efforts have borne fruit. The reason for the public expression of misgivings lies elsewhere. Expenditure on the social sector has languished at well below 2 per cent of the GDP during the past decade. And this spending covers much more than guaranteed employment or food-for-work programmes. In view of this it will look incongruous to subscribe to the overly optimistic NSS report. Hence the reticence.

The Planning Commission, however, went ahead and released statewide percentage of the poor. Not surprisingly, Orissa and Bihar head the list with 47.5 and 42.60 per cent. What this means is that in the tribal-dominated state every second man, woman or child is very poor and the super cyclone is not the cause of misery. Add to this the near-total absence of schools, dispensaries, pucca houses and at many places even roads; it is easy to guess the quality of life or lack of it in that state. Bihar stands on its own. With the carving out of Jharkhand, its position has only become more precarious. From all indications the next comprehensive survey may find Bihar emerging as the champion in this depressing catalogue. Not only the residual state has no natural resources except exceptional irrigation availability and fertile soil. But the concentration of land and decades of agrarian unrest have combined to stall any breakthrough in the farm sector. Political wrangling and bureaucratic apathy have done the rest. Goa, as is to be expected, has only 4.2 per cent of its people falling in the category of poor. But it is Jammu and Kashmir which boasts of the least poor — 3.48 per cent. This is an eye-popping revelation and is not because of either the generous Central aid or lavish expenditure by the Army and the paramilitary forces. Alas, it is actually because of sloppy enumeration. The NSS officials confined their work to a few places thanks to militant violence and that has badly distorted the final picture.

The North-East, despite the Centre pouring in money in the name of fighting local insurgency, has slipped in the poor chart. One junior Minister said famously sometime back that if the grants are airdropped and miraculously reach every resident in equal proportion, the region would record the highest per capita income of more than Rs 8000. Obviously, quite the reverse is happening and that is a serious cause for concern. Everyone knows that administrative cost and corruption — and maybe waste — drastically reduce the benefit to the targeted people. Yet the North-East story warrants a deep investigation. In the South, Kerala has only 12.72 per cent of its population which can be bracketed as poor and Andhra Pradesh 15.77 per cent. The three other states, including Pondicherry, have around 20 per cent. One conclusion is inescapable: the step to climb the development ladder is almost exclusively human resource. The states with better education and a lower birth rate do very well in helping the people come out of poverty than the educationally and population-wise arid zones.

A peep into Chandrababu’s functioning
His strategies and achievements
C. Narendra Reddy

MR Nara Chandrababu Naidu is one of the younger and upcoming leaders on the Indian political firmament. As the Chief Minister of Andhra Pradesh since September, 1995, he has emerged as a model. He has many achievements to his credit and is envied by his contemporaries. His sheer survival in the political battle will remain an example for one’s adroitness and tact. He has not wasted an hour of the opportunity gained to govern the state in consolidating his political power and also to modernise and develop it. He achieved all this by sheer hard work, commitment, the will to achieve and organised orchestration in all fields.

First take his political achievements. Andhra Pradesh has been a politically volatile state. For example, since 1980 when Mr T. Anjaiah was the Chief Minister till Mr Chandrababu took over there had been 11 changes in the chief ministership in the state in 15 years. It was no mean business to dethrone a charismatic Chief Minister like N.T. Rama Rao, who had just a year back won a major election to the state assembly by trouncing the Congress party. It was a family feud that erupted into a split in the ruling party and pushed Mr Chandrababu to power.

It was the pre-eminent role that NTR had given to his new wife, Mrs Lakshmi Parvathi, in the party and governance that had annoyed Mr Naidu. Even though Mrs Parvathi belonged to the same community, she was an unknown entity and her role had annoyed many of the TDP’s supporters inside and outside the party. Those opposing forces had rallied round Mr Chandrababu, who was also a key minister then in NTR’s Cabinet. It was NTR who had given not only his daughter in marriage to Mr Chandrababu, when he was a minister in the Congress government in the state but also later brought him to his party and gave him the important portfolio of Finance, to the annoyance of his other sons and sons-in-law.

The political ferment in the Telugu Desam Party was so much then that Mr Chandrababu could not but accept to lead the revolting forces and oppose his father-in-law. He did it coolly and efficiently, knowing that a majority of the 213 TDP MLAs were with him. It did not take long for him to annihilate the splinter forces by playing one against the other — Mrs Parvathi and NTR’s sons and other sons-in-law who were opposed to her. The Congress then had been reduced to a rump with just 26 members in 292-member assembly and had no leeway to play role. The road became even smoother for Mr Chandrababu after NTR’s death on January 18, 1996.

Though the charge of back-stabbing has died down, it still seems to haunt him. While extending full support to the BJP-led Vajpayee government at the Centre, he has kept his party out of it. It is reckoned that he had done so deliberately so that none of his partymen grew too big to backstab him at any stage. Even now there is strong pressure within his party to join the government at the Centre that he seems to be resisting.

Mr Chandrababu was known to be a strong organisational man even as student leader at Sri Venkateswara University. Hailing from a poor farmer’s family in the drought-prone Rayalaseema district of Chittoor in which the university is situated in the temple town of Tirupati, he rose to become the president of the students’ union. The district Congress leaders who were impressed by his organisational abilities drafted him to the Congress government in the state.

This was proved again in the state assembly elections last year. Lacking the charisma of NTR, Mr Chandrababu was thought by the Congress leaders to be a sitting duck in the elections to be taken easily. But Mr Naidu proved too clever for them. Not only had he assiduously built up his party organisation at the grassroots level, he took the precaution of forging an electoral alliance with the BJP. It was a calculated move that paid dividends. He had to delink from the communist parties to back the BJP. But the communist parties were depending on the benevolence of the TDP and were not much of a force in the state. The BJP was gaining strength in the urban areas. The new alliance gave him the much-needed marginal edge to gain majority in the assembly to give him a stint of another five years.

Mr Chandrababu is an equal match to the BJP in building his party organisation. Unlike the Congress which is said to have many bogus members enrolled in its recent party organisational elections, the TDP is very strict in giving active membership to committed party workers. Regular training classes are held at various levels.

His another success is in involving the party cadre and workers in public works and programmes. The Janam Bhoomi Programme of the government was meant to ensure people’s participation in local development schemes with the party’s help. This has brought the charge from opposition parties that government funds are being used to benefit the TDP. More than the party workers, it was the contractors who had gained entry to the schemes which otherwise is to have a minimum of one-third people’s contribution or participation. The modus operandi is to inflate the bills by one-third and show it as people’s participation. This has forced Mr Chandrababu now to raise people’s contribution in the schemes to 50 per cent.

The weakness of the TDP as a political organisation is that it is perceived as dominated by one community and that it lacks an appealing ideology. Though it might not be totally true, it was the perception that the TDP belonged to a particular community that led even NTR to lose assembly election in 1989. Though all communities are represented in each party, they try to project each other as being sectarian to gain political advantage.

As far as ideology is concerned, Mr Chandrababu is strongly pledged to secularism and the party had made it a condition in supporting the BJP-led government at the Centre. It is this commitment to secularism that enabled him to split the minority vote in the state election to gain a marginal advantage in the last elections. Regarding political ideology he is on record having said that today there were no isms, “neither communism nor capitalism.” Mr Chandrababu that way could be classified to belong to “post-modern” political thinking which rests on contingency, pluralism and change.

The success in public life, as in any other field, largely depends on learning from not only one’s own mistakes but also those of others. This quality in Mr Chandrababu accounts for his sustained success. He had seen from close quarters the methods and the schemes that NTR had launched which though accounted for his growing popularity with the people at the same time had proved to be a cause for frustration with the administration for their ineffectiveness in yielding the desired results. Mr Chandrababu modified those schemes to be more effective while retaining the popular edge.

The pet scheme of N.T. Rama Rao had been the Prajalavaddaku Palana. It literally meant taking the government to the people. NTR used to take almost the entire Secretariat with senior officials to the districts with the purpose of knowing the problems of the people and trying to solve some of them on the spot. The large retinue of officials that used to accompany him and the bulk of petitions that he used to receive from the public satisfied his large ego. But neither it solved people’s problems nor did it make things easy for the administration. Only a couple of petitions received were used to be disposed of on the spot to give an impression of the government being nearer the people while bundles used to rot on government racks or warehouses. The administration also had not gained anything, as despite all the popularity of the leader, they could not mobilise the public for any useful purpose. Towards the end people used to call him as “Drama Rao,” rather uncharitably.

But NTR was a hero to the people even before he joined politics. Having played the lead roles, mythological and otherwise, in hundreds of films, he was himself worshipped as a demigod by the people. All his faults were forgotten except when all other communities combined to defeat him in the 1989 elections when he was perceived as partisan. It is no mean achievement on the part of Mr Chandrababu to have regained that popularity and to have also improved in performance of the government in spite of not having that kind of charisma as NTR had.

It was the multi-media information technology spreading to these parts just then that came to the rescue of Mr Chandrababu. He was quick to seize on it. It was as though information technology and Chandrababu had been made for each other. He built a local area network within the Secretariat, connecting it to district centres in a wide area network to have direct personal audio-video dialogue with senior officials and the people with himself at the centre. The lower district-level administration and people were enthralled that they were in direct communication with their Chief Minister.

With information technology, Mr Chandrababu gained three advantages straightaway. He established direct communion with the people by regularly hearing their grievances and at the same time explaining to them his government’s policies. He was also able to mobilise the district administration to meet the challenges. He rose to stardom.

But there are side-effects to the IT medicine. Passing orders on the video screen directly to the district administration has marginalised all his ministers and senior secretaries. The scores of orders issued and decisions taken orally on the screen also have disrupted the government run on GOs and proper financial sanctions. It has led to a highly centralised and personalised administration. Mr Chandrababu seems to have realised the situation and has made a New Year resolve to decentralise the decision making by entrusting the supervision of each district administration to separate ministers. It is to be watched how the coordination, which is lacking, will be built between the fast moving IT channels and slow-struck government procedures.

But if he had relied only on IT technology he would not have gone that far as he had done. He is basically an achiever, who takes pains as well as risks to get things done. The other schemes and efforts that he has been making during the last five years can be grouped under seven heads. These are (1) enrolling people’s participation, (2) administrative reforms, (3) infrastructure development, (4) globalisation, (5) giving a long-term perspective of 20 years; (6) providing an open government, and (7) introducing fiscal reforms.

Where NTR had failed in mobilising public participation in building social and economic infrastructure Mr Chandrababu is succeeding through what is called Janmabhoomi programmes. Though the opposition charge that it is all a publicity stunt may not be correct, the hurried and unplanned manner these programmes are being taken up is leading to wastage of funds. One example is a recent programme launched for rain harvesting, according to supervising engineers. Now these programmes are proposed to be extended to constructing school and hospital buildings, etc. The Panchayati Raj institutions now having a statutory basis will have to be mobilised for all these programmes.

Similarly, his file clearance programme has been highly successful in at least removing the cobwebs in government departments.

Mr Chandrababu is one of the Chief Ministers who have realised the importance of foreign private and institutional investments under the liberalisation and globalisation policies. He used his clout with the Central Government to pave the way for the visit of US President Clinton to the state. That visit has put Hyderabad on the itinerary of other foreign dignitaries, public and private.

A major constraint is state finances. The first step he took as soon as he became Chief Minister was to publish White Papers on state finances, irrigation, power, public enterprises, the public distribution system and public employment. He wanted to share with the people the dismal state of the government finances then. He introduced gradually reforms to check the earlier populist measures under which the exchequer was loosing heavily. He lifted the prohibition partially, keeping the wholesale trade in liquor in the hands of the government, and followed it up by raising the issue price of subsidised rice to Rs 3.50 from Rs 2. These were followed by an increase in the irrigation rates by five times. Care was taken to minimise the adverse impact by introducing Water Users Committees and giving powers to these committees to plough back water charges for maintenance. These were followed by power sector reforms by setting up an independent Power Tariff Commission and unbundling the power sector into two separate corporations for generation, and distribution. The power rates have been raised recently by 9 per cent. All these measures raised an outcry when they were introduced. But he stoically withstood all pressure. The results are there for all to see.

The writer, based in Hyderabad, has held senior journalistic positions at The Economic Times and The Financial Express.

Campus scene
S. Raghunath

THE campaign was mean and bitter, but thanks to my well-oiled political machine, the vote-banks among the undergraduates and the liberal use of money and muscle power, I got elected, albeit by a slender majority, as the President of my college’s Geology Association.

During the course of the campaign, the museum housing priceless exhibits was attacked and ransacked by a rampaging student mob and the exhibits themselves expropriated for use as missiles and during a pitched melee, I was struck on the forehead by a rock which a visiting UGC professor later identified as belonging to the pre-Palaeozoic age.

Immediately on ascending the high office of the Geology Association President, I saw as my first priority the healing of the wounds caused by the divisive campaign and I issued a stirring appeal to all the geology students, exhorting them to sink their past differences and stand unitedly behind me as never before in the face of the threat posed by the renegade Geo-Chemistry Association.

My appeal was heeded and under my Presidentship, a two-day colloqium on the geomorphology of igneous rocks thrown by students on buses was organised and a field trip undertaken to collect rock samples for use when the Academic Council and the university senate were next in session.

But dissidence soon began to rear its ugly head and through my trusted servitors whom I had planted in strategic positions throughout the association, I learned that a secret cabal from the “D” section of the evening college had infiltrated the undergraduate ranks — my traditional vote-banks and was planning a breakaway move in cahoots with the turncoat Geo-Chemistry Association.

In a desperate bid to quell the rising tide of dissidence, I expanded the membership of the powerful Finance Committee, accommodating almost all the dissidents in it and I won over the uncommitted undergraduates by promising them future membership of the prestigious Souvenir and Programme Committee. I was so busy containing the threat to my “gadi” that I bunked the first terms semester exams and acquired a martyr’s halo of sorts.

But the fragile facade of unity soon cracked and the Geology Association suffered a vertical split with the dissidents breaking away from the parent body and joining hands with the Geo-Chemistry Association and entering into an adjustment to fight the next college union elections on the basis of a common minimum programme.

The once monolithic Geology Association suffered a further jolt with the rebels forming a splinter Geomorphology League and Forum for the Study of Palaeolozoic Fossils.

I am now presiding over a rump organisation, deserted by time-servers and facing a bleak political future on the hallowed precincts of learning. How have the mighty fallen!

I regret having to paint such a dismal picture of the campus scene, but I am sure you will agree, facts have to be faced.

Bottom waters of Antarctica

The dense, cold, basal waters of the Southern Ocean surrounding Antarctica-so-called “bottom waters” — have suddenly become a top priority for Australia’s Antarctic researchers. It is their possible link with global climatic change, which has led Australian research ships to make perilous mid-winter voyages to study the contact zone between the continental ice and the sea.

“There has to be a better name for it,” says researcher Dr Ian Allison, “but we have been putting more urgency into studying it than renaming it.” In what he describes as “the most miserable voyage you can possibly make on this planet”, a ship has to contend with nearly continuous darkness and towering waves and navigating through masses of gale driven icebergs.

The target areas are the mysterious polynyas — areas of permanent open water where the sea temperature is less than one degree above melting point and the air is often colder than minus 30 degrees centigrade.

The polynyas are gigantic ice makers. In theory they shouldn’t exist for more than the few minutes it would take for their surfaces to freeze over.

But despite continuous sea ice formation, the cooled surface is kept liquid by fierce offshore — or katabatic — winds roaring down onto the sea from the high continental ice-cap. The equivalent of up to 50 metres of ice a year is formed by the hundreds of square kilometres of open water. It freezes out as fresh water ice, discharging copious quantities of salt and other trace elements into increasingly dense pools of super-cooled sea water, at just the right temperature to dissolve significant amounts of oxygen, nitrogen and carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

This atmospheric gas and mineral enriched water sinks four kilometres to the bottom and is circulated throughout all the world’s oceans before eventually warming and rising to the surface. Australian oceanographer Dr Steve Rintoul says the sinking of dense bottom water is the overwhelming mechanism by which the seas ‘breathe’ because at warmer latitudes there is little interaction between deep water and surface layers. As the bottom water rises to become top water, it plays a critical role in both cooling the seas and replenishing the concentrations of oxygen, carbon dioxide and other nutrients. (Observer)

Mosques join fight against polio

In an unexpected move, the Muslim Personal Law Board has recently instructed Imams to propagate the pulse polio campaign through mosque loudspeakers before Friday namaz. The largest congregation is on Fridays, and it is hoped that the message will have maximum impact at this time. The step is seen as a last ditch effort to salvage the polio eradication drive, which has not delivered expected results in Uttar Pradesh.

Reactions within the community are varied. Many people feel that there should be a clear divide between religious and secular matters, and only the aazan, or call to prayer, should issue forth from mosques. Some other members of the community are not against the idea of using mosques for propagating social messages, but they question the authority of the Personal Law Board to decide on the issue. The Board should confine itself to matters relating to the Sharia or Islamic law only, they say.

Social workers, however, fully support the move. Begum Hamida Habibullah, former Member of Parliament who hails from one of Uttar Pradesh’s most prominent Muslim families, says that such progressive steps are essential if the community wants to be regarded as enlightened. It is a very healthy sign if the mosques can be used for a positive purpose, she says. (WFS)

Wow! the man on Woolsack wooing donations!
Anupam Gupta

“I do not believe that I have done anything wrong,” said the head of the British judiciary, Lord Irvine, on February 21, “nor do I believe that I have broken any current rule. If I did I would be the first to apologise.”

Walled in by criticism from all sides excepting Prime Minister Tony Blair’s Labour government, it was obvious that the Lord Chancellor had decided to brazen it out, regardless of the damage that may be inflicted on the independence of the judiciary in general and the independence of his own office in particular.

And proffer an amazingly disingenuous interpretation of the nature of that office — one of the oldest in English history — in order to justify his action of appealing to leading lawyers for donations for the Labour Party’s ongoing election campaign.

“It is not the case,” he told a packed House of Lords last Wednesday, standing to one side of the Woolsack, “that the Lord Chancellors are not party political. They are appointed by the Prime Minister, they take the party whip, they speak and vote for the government in Parliament, they sit in (the) Cabinet and they campaign for their party.”

“Every minister (he said) from the Prime Minister down engages in fund-raising as did our predecessors and as do shadow ministers....Fund-raising, unless and until the rules are changed, is part and parcel of the party’s political activities of ministers and shadow ministers.”

Apart from being the head of the judiciary entitled to preside over the final court of appeal from the courts of the United Kingdom, the Lord Chancellor is also a member of the Cabinet, responsible for many aspects of the administration of justice. He is also the Speaker of the House of Lords, the “Woolsack” being his seat as such made of a large square bag of wool covered with cloth.

In contrast to the Speaker of the House of Commons, as also presiding officers of both Lower and Upper Houses elsewhere, the Lord Chancellor may take part in parliamentary debate. While doing so, he vacates the Woolsack temporarily by stepping aside.

Thus combining within himself judicial, executive and legislative functions, the Lord Chancellor — an uniquely British institution, impossible for any other people to operate — is a curious anomaly under the theory of separation of powers which otherwise underlies the rule of law, England’s enduring contribution to the free world.

Nothing, in fact, marks the “atheoretical nature” of the British Constitution, as Prof Robert Stevens points out, more than the institution of the Lord Chancellor.

And as with much of the country’s unwritten Constitution, the “integrity of the Lord Chancellorship depends on an informal bargain in which the incumbent imposes a rigorous self-discipline” that removes any risk of abuse of his office, to borrow from an editorial in The Independent, a British daily, published on February 21.

Lord Irvine’s fund-raising appeal on behalf of the Labour Party betrays an astonishing lack of self-discipline and amounts to a clear abuse of the highest judicial office in England.

Made in a letter written by him to prospective donees, barristers and solicitors, inviting them to a dinner on February 7 at a fashionable restaurant in London’s West End, the appeal read:

“There is no ticket price this year. We will, however, be making an appeal... for the Labour Party’s general election fund. The minimum amount you will be invited to pledge is £ 200 per person, but we know that many of you will take this opportunity to make a significant contribution to party funds in order to ensure a second term”.

The dinner in question was attended, amongst others, by Lord Irvine, the Prime Minister’s wife, Cherie Booth, herself a Queen’s Counsel (QC), and the Attorney General, Lord Williams of Mostyn, apart from about 120 lawyers, QCs and judges.

None (of those who donated their way to the dinner), Lord Irvine told the House of Lords rather innocently on February 21, could “conceivably have thought that a donation could have brought an appointment advantage.”

The reference is to the immense, awesome power of judicial appointments that the Lord Chancellor wields.

“Since neither monarch nor Parliament nor cabinet nor any other committee ought to be allowed to choose judges, it becomes the task of one man,” wrote Lord Scarman, one of the most distinguished English judges of his time, in 1975. “In the English setting, this man must be the Lord Chancellor.”

In the English practice of judicial appointments, he said, there is no systematised plan. In the modern pseudo-mathematical jargon, its parameters cannot be calculated or drawn. It is a product of experience embodied in conventions that a Lord Chancellor will follow, unless he is persuaded that they, or any of them, have become outmoded or inappropriate.

It is better thus, reasoned Lord Scarman. Judicial appointments are not suitable work for a committee, where compromise is a virtue and mediocrity would be a likely consequence. “They must not fall into the hands of a politician (or a group of politicians) — unless (bless the illogicality of it!) he happens to be Lord Chancellor.”

Contained in his foreward to Prof Shimon Shetreet’s path-breaking work “Judges on Trial: A Study of the Appointment and Accountability of the English Judiciary”, still perhaps the best on the subject, these words afford a just measure of the Lord Chancellor’s power of appointment, and the patronage that goes with it.

And account for the furious “cash for wigs” furore that has broken out in the wake of Lord Irvine’s fund-raising appeal to Labour-supporting members of the Bar.

Asking Lord Irvine to list all those invited to the dinner and to give details of the cash raised for the party at the function, the shadow Lord Chancellor, Lord Kingsland, wasted not a word when he said (as quoted by The Independent):

“Consider the position of barristers aspiring to take silk or to be appointed a judge, who received a letter from the person responsible for such appointments, soliciting a ‘significant contribution’ for the Labour Party. On the one hand, some may feel they might incur disfavour if they did not donate; on the other, others might believe they may ‘catch your eye’ by making a contribution.”

To take silk is to be designated as Queen’s Counsel upon the recommendation of the Lord Chancellor. The “Silks” — referred to colloquially as such because they are entitled to wear a silk gown — constitute the elite among the barristers, and it is from their ranks that judges are mainly chosen.

It is especially important, said Lord Kingsland, that the probity of the present arrangements for selecting judges and QCs is not only above suspicion, but is seen to be above suspicion.

England, India or elsewhere, it is remarkable how that first principle of justice is in such desperate need of reaffirmation.