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Pakistan’s positive move
The Telangana tangle |
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Trillion dollar question
Poor state of Indian Railways
‘Justice’ for underworld
To be his equal
Banking on the fair sex
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Pakistan’s positive move Pakistan has at last realised that it will be a gainer by according the most favoured nation status to India in matters of trade and commerce. India took such a decision in the case of Pakistan a few years back. Two factors are believed to have influenced the Pakistani thinking on the issue.
One, Pakistan’s relations with the US have been under tremendous strain after the Taliban attack on the US Embassy in Kabul in which Washington sees the ISI’s hand. This has given strength to the argument advanced by some influential people in Pakistan like Maulana Fazlur Rehman of the Jamiat-ul-Ulema Pakistan that Islamabad’s attitude towards India must soften in view of the changing regional and global reality. Two, Pakistan’s business community has made a strong recommendation for MFN status to India, saying that it can confidently compete with Indian business houses in the changed scenario. This newfound confidence could be noticed during last week’s Indo-Pak trade talks in Mumbai. The Pakistani decision — to be announced most probably in November when India’s Commerce and Industry Minister Anand Sharma will visit Islamabad to hold talks with his Pakistani counterpart — may increase the annual bilateral trade to $6 billion from the present $2.7 billion by 2014. Efforts are on to work out the modalities for trade in new areas like the energy sector. Pakistanis are happy that India has not opposed Islamabad’s efforts for tariff concessions from some European Union (EU) members. A new climate is emerging in South Asia in which India and Pakistan appear to be heading towards a liberal business visa regime also. Once India and Pakistan develop greater stake in economic growth, the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) will be in a better position to realise its dream of growing into a grouping like the EU. The two countries have wasted their energy considerably on issues like Kashmir. Now the time has come for focussing on economic issues. People in South Asia, home to a vast majority of the world’s poor, need the availability of employment opportunities more than anything else. This is essential so that no one takes interest in destructive activities like terrorism. Better trade relations between India and Pakistan can also help the cause of peace in the region.
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The Telangana tangle The Congress party’s continuing dilemma over whether or not to grant statehood to Telangana is seriously affecting growth and impacting governance in its bastion of Andhra Pradesh. With the ongoing agitation for Telangana showing no signs of abating, it is time the Centre took a decisive call but so emotive has the issue become that whatever be the decision taken, some section of the people would be aggrieved with it.
While members of Parliament and state legislators from Telangana cutting across party lines are demanding Telangana state, those from the coastal Andhra and Rayalaseema regions are vehemently opposed to it. Yet, in the interests of the state and its people this continuous state of flux cannot be allowed to virtually destroy a state which was in the forefront of the new economy and was once held out as a model for other states. The biggest bone of contention is the status of Hyderabad which falls in the Telangana region. Giving Hyderabad to Telangana would invite strong reaction from the rest of the state and could well jeopardize Congress sway over the state as a whole. That explains the recent revival of interest in Congress circles in the proposal to make Hyderabad a Union Territory and/or as the capital of both a newly-carved Telangana and of a conglomerate of the rest of the state. All said and done, the Chandigarh model under which Chandigarh is a Union Territory and is also the seat of power of Punjab and Haryana has worked well. Replicating the model in Hyderabad is worth considering as a compromise between the two contending sides. This is not to say that such a solution would please everyone, but this may well be a possible way out that may evoke the least resistance. By mere procrastination, the Centre cannot hope to solve the festering problem. It is indeed imperative that the issue be addressed with a straightforward approach keeping the interests of the state in mind rather than calculating who would gain politically and who would lose. There is too much at stake to allow things to drift.
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Trillion dollar question Now, everyone knows that we Indians gave the world the zero. But, if you always suspected that there can be too much of a good thing, here is proof, brought to us by a department not known for its funny bone, the Directorate General of Economic Enforcement (ED). Thanks to them, we know that a man who was once of humble origins is now worth a stupendous 1.1 trillion rupees.
While 12 zeros may not mean much by themselves, when preceded by even a lowly digit like one, they become a mind-boggling sum indeed. So must for stud farm owner Hasan Ali’s claimed wealth! What incompetence! Forbes and others who keep track of such individuals singularly failed to look beyond a stud farm, the presence of the individual on the Bombay Race Course, lavish parties, etc, all the signs of a well-heeled person. In their defence, it may be said that these are but the accruements of the merely rich, not the ultra rich dollar billionaires. It is quite true that the eight billion dollar man did not own a company that made cutting-edge products, or stores that sold such products, like a Bill Gates or a Warren Buffet. He was not in the service industry, but was a one-man industry that serviced the rich and the powerful, with due help from the normally inscrutable Swiss bankers. Now that the long arm of justice has reached out to him, he finds it difficult to wriggle out of the very system that he helped to subvert with his long history of illegal activities. The mystery still remains to be solved. How did an individual get so much money, and where did it come from? If the nation could survive with such a massive drain of wealth, surely it would thrive if the wealth were to be seized and brought back to India. The lives of the urban and rural poor who survive on less than Rs 32 and Rs 26 a day would forever be changed by these 12 zeros and others like them. |
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Attitude is a little thing that makes a big difference. — Winston Churchill
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Poor state of Indian Railways
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the last three months 89 persons lost their lives and over 300 were injured in passenger train accidents. The recent Chennai accident has happened only one and a half months after the ghastly Guwahati train accident in which 80 persons lost their lives. Mr Dinesh Trivedi, shortly after his appointment as Railway Minister, announced that those found responsible for the Guwahati mishap would be punished irrespective of rank. This gave the impression that all that was necessary to correct the system was to punish callous railway employees. Railway Ministers have made such statements in the past also but accidents are not abating. Clearly, the reasons for frequent accidents lie beyond human failure. Precarious financial health is pushing Indian Railways (IR) towards systemic drift into failure. Poor political direction for years is largely responsible for shaky financial health. The tendency of recent Railway Ministers has been to focus on their narrow electoral interests and use the resources of IR for benefiting their constituencies by building projects of doubtful utility. They have been introducing new trains without matching investments in operational and maintenance facilities and have been balancing the budget by debatable means. This has seriously impaired IR’s organisational behaviour to operate in an environment of scarcity of facilities and resources, leading to safety issues. IR, like any complex system, has three types of constraints. There is the financial boundary, beyond which the system cannot sustain itself. It seems that for IR this has been surpassed. Then there is the workload boundary outside which technology and people cannot work. This also seems to have been exceeded. Finally, there is the safety boundary, which must not be crossed, otherwise safe functioning of the system cannot be ensured. This too seems to have been crossed. The conclusion, therefore, is inescapable: IR needs immediate inflow of resources, reduction in workload to match with what the technology and people can handle and build-up of new capacities to ensure safe working of the system. During the last two years 92 new passenger trains have been added without substantial investment in capacity and maintenance infrastructure. The system is being pushed beyond what technology and people can maintain, leading to slow disengagement of actual maintenance practices from established safety norms. The shortage of resources is compelling managers to squeeze out the capacity from what is available, calling it optimisation. Such an approach ultimately leaves the system so stretched that there is little room left for avoiding error. Over the years input costs have been rising but Railway Ministers have been reluctant to increase fares. Passenger fares have not been increased for many years, making it very difficult for IR to provide adequately for maintenance and investment. Last year, some railway zones had exhausted their maintenance grants by October. Poor financial health should logically have led to curtailment of new investments. Instead, it has led to curtailment of operation and maintenance expenses because ministers do not want to abandon the projects that they feel will affect their electoral prospects. The result of this has been depletion of all the essential reserve funds. There is no money in the Depreciation Reserve Fund used for asset replacement. Similar is the condition of Development and Capital Funds used for passenger amenities and certain new assets. And the most alarmingly of all is the negative balance even in the Pension Fund. In the past, railway zones knew at the beginning of every quarter the amount they could pay out to suppliers and contractors during the next three months. Today they get to know on a month-to-month basis. This has upset the procurement of operational supplies and maintenance spares. In short, IR is truly into bankruptcy, which is apparent from the severe cash crunch that it has to manage. Something has to be done urgently for the reason that people in the field are now being compelled to take decisions, which are trade-offs between operating safely and operating at all. A new affliction that has been growing in IR for nearly a decade now is keeping vacancies, even those of General Managers and Members of the Railway Board, unfilled. IR has been without a Member (Traffic) for over a year. Railway zones and production units are headed by 26 General Mangers and as of today, a little less than half of these key positions are vacant. And there seems to be no urgency in positioning new incumbents. Another reason for this state of affairs is the breakdown in the management of the cadre because of numerous court cases. Most of these cases have arisen from bending rules when promoting individuals. This needs urgent attention at the highest levels of government if higher direction of IR is not to suffer. IR has been drifting into overall failure owing to the lack of appropriate political direction. Like any complex organisation, IR has to survive in an environment where resources are scare, especially capital. Imprudent and thoughtless expenditure of resources for some time has resulted in the difficult situation IR finds itself today. It is for the political executive to provide a vision, the resources required for achieving the objectives and for its protection from harmful outside influences. Perhaps for sound electoral reasons, political direction has focused more on social justice than on the operational, maintenance and investment needs of IR. This cannot go on any longer since the system has no further capacity to absorb such expenditure. Hopefully, Mr Dinesh Trivedi will re-visit many of the earlier decisions and provide a political direction, which is free of haphazard investments. There is need for a vision that gets away from narrow planning and is driven by the transportation requirements of 21st century
India. The writer is a retired General Manager of Indian Railways and a former Member, Central Administrative
Tribunal. |
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‘Justice’ for underworld
Appropriately said, perfection is a cap which fits only the highest. Human minds have been found to react differently to the same situations. How else does one reconcile the variation in approach of the establishment and the civil society over the drafting of the Lokpal Bill when the common man in the street is given to understand that their aim is common i.e. to eradicate corruption? As and when that enactment comes into play, I would like to retrospect and go into convulsions at the very thought that the Republic had been run all along without either the desire or law to stem the rot. Laws have always been in existence. Law has been taking its own course as well, sluggishly though. The Tihar list of incumbents bears testimony to it. Justice does not care for the placement of the individual facing the charge. How else does one explain the simultaneous lodgement of A Raja, Kanimojhi, Balwa, top cop R.K.Sharma, Tandoor murder case convict, etc, in the jail at Tihar. Those sceptical of the efficacy of the law would do well to revisit their thoughts. Nonetheless, little ‘heart search’ on our part too is required. The Constitution guarantees equality of treatment to all similarly circumstanced. This dictum does not, however, answer the ‘unjust’ attitude we adopt towards the ‘underworld’. The nomenclature we use for their identification is ‘demeaning’ qua them, particularly in view of the ‘accusation’ against them that they rule the ‘earthly’ world. Interestingly enough, the water-borne species do not fish in the troubled waters as much as the humans do. The members of underworld can perhaps legitimately lodge an accusation that they are being differently treated. If we want them to ‘surface’, we should provide reservation in residential plots to them. There could be reservation for them in jobs too. Those masquerading as members of civilised society cannot honestly be allowed to occupy the seats meant for the ‘armed’ members of the underworld. The ‘real’ stuff must get it. Whenever, the investigating agencies all over are not in a position to zero in on the real perpetrator of the crime or when the machinations of the power brokers disable the agencies in nabbing the ‘criminal’, the underworld is announced to be the ‘culprit’. The underworld may raise an indefeasible claim for a swap. What if the non-intriguing water-borne species and the underworld segments, whose very existence stems from mutual trust, take over our dispensation and prove
better?
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To be his equal
While the Constitution granted her equal rights with men in arenas of employment, education, freedom of speech, personal liberty and so on, later constitutional amendments have further consolidated her human rights. While issues of imperfect and half-hearted implementation, along with the politicisation of gender issues in a populist democracy have frequently been highlighted in various discourses, the fact remains that women in this country have already made their visibility felt in local, regional and national political bodies, sports, bureaucracy, academics, art and literature, science and technology, defence services, corporate sector and so on. But the question is: can the state alone empower women? Caste and gender equality The Indian state, democratic in spirit and secular in nature, as envisioned by the Preamble of Constitution, operates through a political process that assumes extremely undemocratic and non-secular positions during elections and later. Hence the target of gender equality shall, as in the past, continue to be enmeshed with the identities of caste, religion, class and so on. We have witnessed poor Dalit women, aspiring to achieve political power, being harassed by not only upper caste men but women too. A large number of women convicts flock the prisons having abetted their male accomplices to rape helpless women. The judges in the courts of law are tired of handling cases where young brides have entangled their husbands and their relatives in fake cases, misusing the legal provisions, to extract huge amounts of money. There are numerous cases of women who misuse their gender for promoting their career, often at the cost of other unsuspecting women. Such and other cases lead to intense public criticism of statutory provisions protecting gender equality and gender justice. As a result, there is going to be a severe backlash to the very issue of gender equality necessitated by the opportunistic misuse of statutory provisions such as Protection of Women against Domestic Violence Act, Dowry Protection Act, Protection of Women against Sexual Harassment at Workplace and so on. Women victims of gender violence at home and at work place therefore are going to face suspicion and mistrust from different quarters, making their struggle even more painful. Is higher education a catalyst? A second issue that the struggle for gender equality is going to face, especially in South Asia, relates to the capacity of women to sustain or preserve the empowerment achieved by them. Here I would specially like to mention educated women in the higher education. Statistics from all over the world reveal that women’s proportion in higher education both as students and teachers has increased manifold in the last few decades. In Arab states, enrolment of women in higher education has more than doubled between 1975 and 1988. In Indonesia, there are more women in 19-29 years age group than men in higher education. In U.S. since 1979 more women than men enrolled in College Programs. In France and Germany 15 per cent of 18-25 years old are in higher education, half of them being women. But does that imply that gender equality has been achieved in higher education? In all these countries, women are concentrated in specific fields and underrepresented in technical fields, apart from mathematics, engineering and technology, which usually lead to positions of power and high incomes. In countries like France and Finland where barriers to women’s participation in non traditional areas have been significantly removed, women are still underrepresented, and this phenomenon has been termed by scholars as “Self Selection” rather than conscious discrimination. Multi-tasking or cheating Women shall have to look for the reasons for this horizontal segregation of gender. It has been quite long since women have been patting their own back for the multitasking done by them. Please do not rejoice, men call your multitasking as “cheating”. We cannot go on prioritising our domestic duties at the cost of efficiency at work, if we really wish to achieve gender equality at workplace. Whether at the policy making bodies of the universities, or administrative positions, women shall have to miss their presence at positions of power. Studies have shown that women accept subordination to men more readily than to women. They find it very hard to push other women to higher echelons, with a complete disregard to “sisterhood”. This is going to obstruct the goal of gender equality most severely especially at the positions of power. Experience in countries like Bangladesh, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, India, Nepal etc. has shown that women have achieved success at the grassroots only as groups, even if it was made possible with the support of their men, who assisted them with their technical skills. Women shall have to emerge as pressure groups in order to get their share. Emotional & physical insecurity Another issue, which although old, is going to persist is the insecurity faced by women. Mrinal Pande narrates a touching incident in her book “Stepping Out” (2003). A mother who had given birth in a government hospital in Warangal, Andhra Pradesh, charged the hospital with having replaced her new born son with a baby girl and demanded that her son be restored to her. The police sent the couple and the baby to Hyderabad for a DNA test and found that the blood samples of the couple matched with those of the girl. The mother then confessed that she had staged the entire drama to escape the stigmatisation and wanted to take a son back home. It is strange that even today a woman’s security at home depends upon whether she has produced sons or daughters. If women, despite all the favourable conditions at the global and local levels, have remained at the periphery, if they tend to withdraw putting brilliant careers at risk, it is only because of the physical insecurity they face in every walk of their life. Confronted by a constant fear of being molested, or teased or even raped, what kind of response do they get to confront such insecurity? Most often, they are counselled to avoid going out in the dark, not to remain in the company of men only, not to look very attractive, but take deliberate steps to look average. Such a response immediately pulls women out of situations that give them centrality be it the economic, the social or the political. Unless physical security is ensured to women in marketplace, at workplace, in a restaurant, in a train compartment, in a taxi, how can one expect them to be competent, outgoing and efficient like men? In a very disturbing example, girls working in a modern city like Chandigarh in jobs that involved odd hours narrated that while going back at night, they wear some symbols of a married woman, e.g. a choora (red bangles) or a mangal sutra, in order to show that they were married and to avoid unnecessary trouble. Where is then the security for the so-called empowered woman? Form a pressure group To conclude, although the state has done a good job, its role in gender equality must not be overestimated. Since it is the women who are to catch up with men in societies that are not used to such equations, be it at home or workplace, in Europe or in Asia, it is the women who shall have to struggle more. Yes, they will have to exert much more than men in the same positions in order to sustain whatever they have achieved. It is women who shall have to break through the glass ceiling and reach the spaces where decisions are made. I do not believe that once women reach there automatically gender equality shall be achieved. Women in decision making positions shall have to remember lakhs of other women who have not yet tasted empowerment either economic or political or individual. It is painful to see women members of Sexual Harassment Committees on the universities ridicule women victims of sexual harassment and siding with men, for small political benefits. If women are not prepared to stand for themselves, no one else would, neither the state, nor men, nor the civil society. While there are a handful of successful women enjoying freedom at par with men, there is a huge majority who have not yet even learnt to dream of possessing such freedom either at home or outside. It is only as a pressure group and in sisterhood that the state and society will be forced to sit up and look at them seriously. The writer is Chairperson, Departments of Sociology and Women's Studies, Panjab University, Chandigarh. |
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India has a rare distinction of having women as President, Speaker, the Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha and, of course, a heavyweight political leader, UPA Chairperson Sonia Gandhi who takes all important political decisions. Still the road to the top is not easy. Studies have time and again proved how positions of real power continue to elude women. Yet women have made their presence felt and broken the glass ceiling in more sectors than one. One sector in which their presence is more than heartening is banking which has seen women like Chanda Kochar, Naina Lal Kidwai and Kalpana Morparia in top positions. Even the Reserve Bank of India, had two women among four of its deputy governors in Usha Thorat and Shyamala Gopinath. In fact, a study of 240 top Indian companies by EMA Partners, the global executive-search firm revealed that more than a half of India's women chief executives are accounted for by the banking and financial services industry. That women have an affinity for numbers is also illustrated by Sushma Nath who became the first ever woman finance secretary. Other noted women bureaucrats are the present and the former US Ambassador Nirupama Rao and Meera Shankar respectively and Sudha Pillai member secretary. Planning Commission of India. The presence of four women chief ministers of four powerful states in the country many may feel is more of a political game than a reflection of genuine women empowerment. Nevertheless, like others in top positions these women too have shown that there is no stopping the fairer sex . |
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