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Friday,
May 16, 2003, Chandigarh, India  
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The Burning Train Pakistan’s perfidy Free them from fees |
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The Media Lab controversy
“Additionals”
edition
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The Burning Train THE news about fire on a train somehow generates the image of the Godhara arson in one’s mind. If it is any consolation, sabotage has been ruled out in the horrendous fire that broke out in the Amritsar-bound Golden Temple Express on Thursday morning at Ladhowal near Ludhiana. The exact death toll may not come by because the ill-fated coaches have been totally destroyed. Considering the fact that the coaches had more than the listed passengers, the actual figure may be higher than that mentioned by the official agencies. That will compound the tragedy for some of the victims. Most of the bodies have been charred beyond recognition. Entire families have perished in the inferno. Mercifully, relief and rescue operation has taken off fairly quickly, mainly because the accident took place close to Ludhiana. The presence of mind of some army personnel travelling by the ill-fated train who detached the coaches which were on fire from the rest of the train might have saved many lives. Equally praiseworthy has been the role of the people from the neighbourhood, who extended all help to the victims on their own. But the fire was so intense that it was not possible to pull out many passengers. Preliminary reports suggest that the fire might have started either by a short-circuit or a lighted cigarette thrown by a careless passenger. If the latter is the case, it is a sad commentary on the sense of responsibility shown by some passengers. They always blame the railways or the government for various shortcomings, but never care to do what is expected of them. It is common to see some passengers carrying inflammable material with them despite strict warnings against this practice. Even otherwise, some travellers show utter disregard for elementary safety rules. That does not mean that the railways has been doing its duty diligently. This particular accident may have been caused by a passenger’s folly, but many others take place because safety standards in the country are woefully lax. After each one of them, enquiries are ordered but the reports are dutifully put in the cold storage along with earlier tomes of a similar kind. No lessons are learnt from the mistakes with the result that these are repeated ad infinitum. No senior officer ever gets the boot for dereliction of duty. Gone are the days when ministers used to tender resignation owning moral responsibility. The laying of new tracks or the starting of new trains earns more headlines than taking care of the safety aspect. That is why this vital sector is neglected. Many tracks, bridges and culverts are in bad shape and pose a danger to the passengers. But their replacement is not getting top priority at a time when almost all VIPs have begun to fly instead (with President A.P.J. Abdul Kalam making a welcome departure). The Indian railways runs such a vast network of trains that it will be impractical to expect it to have an accident-free record. But when the frequency of such incidents tends to be much higher than the international averages, there is need to sit back and take notice. More than 1,500 persons have lost their lives in train accidents during the past 10 years alone. |
| Pakistan’s perfidy AS has been noticed time and again, there is a great difference between Pakistan’s promises and performance. The latest proof is its demand during Tuesday’s Security Council meeting that there should be a UN-supervised plebiscite in Jammu and Kashmir to end the dispute between India and Pakistan. This had been stated by Pakistan in the past too followed by a befitting reply by India. So, this time again Indian representative Vijay K. Nambiar told the world community that Pakistan’s argument was meaningless in view of the ground reality in the valley. The point is that during the recent South Asia tour of US Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, Pakistan had promised that it would not insist on the UN resolutions on Kashmir calling for a plebiscite there. Why then did it make such a mention at the Security Council? Of course, there was no hot debate on the issue like what happened in the past. The world community has realised that the Kashmir issue, which is wholly bilateral in nature, can be resolved under the Simla Agreement. Viewed against this backdrop, all talk of Pakistan readying itself to “freeze” the Kashmir issue in the interest of peace seems unbelievable. Forgetting the UN resolutions for the sake of starting a dialogue process was supposed to be one of the two initial “goodwill gifts” from the other side, the second being dismantling of militant training camps to stop terrorist infiltration into Jammu and Kashmir. Now India will be forced to conclude that the situation will remain as it is on the infiltration front too. And this is an essential requirement for India agreeing to engage Pakistan for resolving the disputes between the two neighbours. Pakistan’s conduct at the Security Council raises doubts about its intentions with regard to the
much-publicised bar on the entry of Jaish-e-Mohammad chief Masood Azhar into occupied Kashmir. Ideally, he should have been handed over to India. The action against him is definitely aimed at misleading the world on the issue of cross-border terrorism. The terrorist mastermind may not be able to address the gatherings he was supposed to do in PoK, but his destructive outfit is active throughout the area as it had been in the past. Jaish and the Lashkar-e-Toiba function under different names after a ban imposed on them under international pressure. One fails to understand how Indo-Pak talks can begin when Islamabad is not serious about creating the atmosphere essential for the purpose. |
Free them from fees AT least two of the recent decisions of the Punjab Government have come under attack — not from the Opposition — but from the ruling Congress’ own senior leaders. The one on casinos has been debunked, and rightly so, by Mrs Mohsina
Kidwai. Another leader, Mrs Ambika Soni, described as “a wrong step” the Punjab
Government’s decision to stop free education to girls and hoped that the facility would be restored soon. There is hardly any valid reason for discontinuing the exisiting facility of giving free education to girl students. According to present indications, while the government may drop the casino idea, it is going ahead with the plan to collect enhanced charges from students, including girls, making education more expensive. Although the universities in Punjab have been granted autonomy, that is on paper only. None of the universities will resist the state government’s decision. To meet their fat wage bills and ever-rising overheads, the universities depend
heavily on grants from the government. In the absence of any alternative source of income other than the student fees, they are forced to take unpleasant, anti-student decisions. While in its advertisements in the media the government keeps boasting that the state’s financial position has improved — “revenue receipts increased by Rs 540 crore in the first nine months” — the reality appears otherwise. The tax burden on citizens has been on the rise. Power tariffs and bus fares have gone up. But lack of funds cannot be allowed to come in the way of spread of education, which is a priority area of any welfare state. By increasing fees, the government may put education beyond the reach of many deserving students, particularly girls. Girls in general and in the rural areas in particular face many social hurdles. Still there are parents who like to educate sons more than daughters. Girls cannot travel freely or conveniently to study in educational institutions located mostly in cities. Besides, the fact that in literacy Punjab ranks 16th in the country is a blot on its image of being a progressive state. The situation is worse on the female literacy front — it is 63.55 per cent compared to the 75.63 per cent male literacy level. The state government, therefore, should not only launch a vigorous campaign to banish illiteracy from the state, but also take particular care that girls are not left behind. |
The Media Lab controversy IT is business as usual on the website of Media Lab Asia, the world's biggest academic research programme for bridging the digital divide and taking high technology to the masses. The messy divorce last week between its parents, the Union Communications Ministry and MIT Media Lab, has left almost no trace behind. There is only one sign that all is not well: the 'About us' page, where one expects information about the people behind the project, is missing in action. Media Lab Asia is no longer sure who it is but, as Mr Arun Shourie has been assuring everyone, it now knows where it is going. However, his audience is not entirely convinced. In a rare public display of provincialism, Mr Shourie has declared that Media Lab Asia failed because Mr Nicholas Negroponte, founder of the original Media Lab at MIT, is clearly not interested in the Indian masses - he spends much of his time in Greece and Switzerland. This implies that only total immersion in rural India can equip him to address its problems. The logic of the argument is quite bizarre. Since Mr Negroponte is of Greek origin, it follows that Mr Shourie should be equally upset about NRIs coming home to India. And as for Switzerland, holidaying there isn't exactly a crime. In fact, a large number of Indians now do it every year. Media Lab Asia (MLAsia) went belly-up for far less colourful reasons than Mr Shourie imputes. It was doomed, more or less from Mr Pramod Mahajan's time, by conflicting operating styles and methods, visions and perceived objectives. Mr Mahajan had promised that the government would not interfere in the project for one year from its inception in 2001. But after that a clash of civilisations was inevitable. The original Media Lab in Cambridge, Massachusetts, was conceived as a 'pre-competition' space where researchers could tinker with ideas and collaborate across disciplines without being constrained by the bureaucratic fetters of academe or pressures from an increasingly competitive corporate sector. The idea was to take a longer view than project-specific research and develop technologies that may be profitable in the future. The organisation believes that giving researchers time and opportunities to innovate is ultimately more cost-effective than pinning them down to immediate goals. The corporates who flock to help fund the lab are similarly not looking for immediate gain, but investing in 'unselfish' research in the hope of future profits. This work ethic is completely at odds with that of government-funded applied research, which is completely goal-oriented and evaluated on the basis of returns on investment. Besides, the government's confidence in the India project has never really been shared by the private sector. The Media Lab model relies heavily on corporate funding. It has been forthcoming in the US partly because the lab constantly attracts media attention, some of which rubs off on the sponsors, and partly because these corporates feel that outsourced general research works for them. When Media Lab proposed offshoots outside the US, problems were anticipated. The first offshore lab in Dublin went through pretty smoothly but the next one, in India, came up against culture shock. Typically, Indian corporates invest a fraction of the budgets their peers in the US routinely put into research. Traditionally, they have invested largely in reverse engineering and even after the WTO regulations kicked in, they are reluctant to invest without some assurance of certain and immediate returns. There are no such assurances in the Media Lab model. Anyone who cares to invest in MLAsia has the right to license and market any product it develops, no matter how much they pay above the floor price of Rs 5 crore. By Indian standards, Rs 5 crore for a non-exclusive licence on a product that may or may not materialise as expected is a steep price. Also, it is not clear whether licences remain non-exclusive in perpetuity, or if one funder has the right to buy the others out. Under these conditions, in a market beset by every disincentive from scrip volatility through margin crunches to sexual harassment lawsuits, Indian IT companies are not keen to invest. All the other issues that the government has raised in its defence, including the payments demanded by MIT and the use of government institutional resources, are clearly written into the model and, in fact, were operational in Dublin before India signed on. Lack of private investment was the only glitch the government had not expected, and it could have dealt with the situation more honestly and maturely. Instead, left holding the baby, the bathwater and the soiled nappies, it began to whinge about Mr Negroponte's visits to Greece. Given the nastiness of the divorce, a rapprochement is unlikely. Rather than speculating on the possibilities of a resumption of ties, it would be more useful to look at the objectives of the project and see if they can be met by routine government-funded research, and whether tangible goals can be set. The core objectives of the project were to develop cheap computing devices customised for a rural user and a network which could reach every village. Apart from these, the project was expected to spin off learning technologies which encourage rural innovation. All this is rather more complicated than our usual concept of rural connectivity, in which the government can plonk down a PCO in every village, plonk down a computer and a modem in every such PCO, dust its hands off and leave behind a mob of bemused villagers grappling with their e-mail. The first hurdle is that rural telephones are often dysfunctional. Even in small towns with a high Internet penetration - tourist destinations like Pushkar, for instance - connectivity is poor. For villagers to even think of crossing the digital divide, they first need a reliable network. With inadequate landlines and cellular penetration, this means a satellite-based network. Each village would need a small, cheap earth station which is preferably weather-sealed to reduce maintenance needs. Its signal could be shared in the village by a wireless protocol named 802.11b, which is routinely loaded on laptops nowadays. Earlier, Media Lab had experimented successfully with such networks in South America and Greece, and its expertise would have been useful. Then, a small, simple, cheap and preferably maintenance-free computer is required. The technology for this already exists, but it is unfortunately marketed in the form of expensive executive toys. And there is our indigenous Simputer, though it has not been very freely adopted. Additionally, there is the problem of the device interface, which will have to take into account the fact that its user is likely to be barely literate and a complete stranger to digital hardware. And finally, there is the issue of how to power all this hardware, since the rural power grid is notoriously unreliable. Obviously, this is quite a tall order, and the corporate sector is unlikely to be interested in until it can see clear profit margins. Though everyone recognises that the rural market is the next big opportunity, someone will have to jump-start it. This baby is going to remain in the government's hands, and grow poorly, unless it is able to find another agency like Media Lab which can facilitate the process and encourage corporate participation. The writer is the publisher of ‘The Little Magazine’ and author of ‘The Penguin Guide to Using the Internet in India’ |
“Additionals” edition I
am one of the passive commoners who had read in childhood and still believed that he who had a stick in hand could carry the buffalo with him — whether it was a Congress or BJP stick. And my friend in the “living” bureaucracy supports me by changing the colour of his cap with every change in the government. He has a phrase borrowed from Hindi transliterated into English, “I have to straighten my own owl, come who may!” Whenever I see him, I am reminded of an MLA from UP, who once told me, “Do you know that Mandodari married Vibhishan after Ravan’s death? You bureaucrats are like her. The king is Ravana, you are his queen. The king is Vibhishan, you are his queen.” I said to myself: “Yes, but unlike Mandodari, the queen gets transferred here from an exalted chair to a stool with every change in the kingship.” Past is for historians, so forget it. Present is for commoners like me. Thanks to the Congress Government, I have become very active since its recent installation in this tiny hill state. The reason is that my part-time gardener has left me in lurch and my garden today matches the State Exchequer in its barrenness. Perforce, I have to play with the soil from 5.30 to 6.30 in the morning. The newspaper boy who used to deliver newspapers has disappeared from the scene like ex-CM Dhumal’s photographs from the government offices. I walk a kilometre to collect the newspapers from the vendors squatting on the roadside. On top of it my driver, who used to drive my groundnut car (Maruti 800) — I call it by that name because groundnut is poor man’s almond — did not return to collect the keys one fine morning. He, like Saddam Hussein, is supposed to be alive but invisible. I drive it myself now despite the upward graph of hillside banging. These Johnnys have all joined the bandwagon of one million unemployed youths in the state and are waiting for the promised or not promised land of milk and honey. The million-dollar question is where to find the million jobs, especially in this one-horse state where all Brown, John and Robinson want the comfortable government cushions where 142 authorised and half of that number of unauthorised leave could be enjoyed in a year. The only solution that comes to my mind is to create posts of “additionals”. We have two Additional Chief Secretaries, a number of Additional Deputy Commissioners, one Additional Principal Secretary, Additional IGs, Additional Principal Chief Conservator of Forests, Additional Directors etc. We are a Sovereign Socialist Secular Democratic Republic. And a Socialist would always yearn for equal division of unequal earnings. Why can’t we have a new chapter, rather edition, of additional peons, additional clerks, additional drivers, additional malis, additional assistants and so on and on and on and on and further? |
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