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Rescuing agriculture
Little to talk |
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Baby comes home
Questionable defence acquisitions
Do less, think and talk more
CINEMA:
NEW Releases
Nicholas Hoult
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Rescuing agriculture
The
need for crop diversification has caught the attention of Union Finance Minister P. Chidambaram, who has allocated a small amount of Rs 500 crore to promote it in Punjab and Haryana. Half-hearted efforts at the state level to wean farmers from paddy have failed and Central aid too is unlikely to make an impact. Farmers grow crops that give them maximum returns. As long as paddy fetches better income than other kharif alternatives, farmers will stick to it. The damage caused to the water and soil resources does not figure in their calculations. Therefore, the need is to offer better minimum support prices and assured procurement for alternative crops. The budget has earmarked Rs 200 crore to encourage “nutri-farms” where bio-fortified crops rich in iron, zinc, protein and vitamins will be grown. Such farms should be promoted at the state level since malnutrition is widespread in the country. Even if farmers produce fortified food for their own consumption, it would mean better health and save them money and time wasted in fighting disease. To improve the health of livestock, the budget has proposed a National Livestock Mission with Rs 307 crore. Punjab and Haryana can take advantage of this and spread awareness about animal nutrition since animal sickness or death can jeopardise a farmer’s financial security. The budget has also tried to encourage the construction of silos and godowns, particularly at the panchayat level, for better food storage. Similarly, panchayats or farmers’ cooperatives can be helped to set up agricultural biomass-based power units which can meet local needs. This will check air pollution since farmers tend to burn paddy straw in their fields. A budget can help up to a point. States have to chip in to address farmers’ concerns. The Centre is trying to replicate the Green Revolution success in Bihar, Chhattisgarh, West Bengal and Assam. Chidambaram has offered Rs 1,000 crore this time for its success. One hopes the eastern states will take care to avoid excesses associated with the Green Revolution like indiscriminate use of chemicals and consequent pollution of water resources.
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Little to talk
Haryana
Chief Minister Bhupinder Singh Hooda has reiterated his call for ‘sitting across the table’ with his Punjab counterpart to settle the water disputes between the two states. The proposal sounds perfectly reasonable, and no one can be seen saying no to it. Punjab Deputy Chief Minister Sukhbir Badal has on an earlier occasion said his government is ready too. But looking at the ground situation and all the discussion, debate and bickering that has happened over this in the past, the proposal for talks can move little beyond that. Even if one were to ignore the bad blood that exists, the very nature of the logjam would suggest no solution is possible without arbitration. One state has to give and the other take. This hardly makes for any negotiation, which requires a ‘give and take’. As seen in the Karnataka-Tamil Nadu feud over Cauvery waters, in the end it was the Supreme Court that ordered implementation of the final award. Even that has been appealed against. Water means life, and states would go to any length to protect their interests, as it affects people directly. That takes such disputes beyond party lines. So it does not matter which party is in power in Punjab or Haryana. Unfortunately, the heightened emotions and parochial twists to such disputes make for very incendiary politics, which in the past has led to Punjab losing nearly two decades and thousands of lives to terrorism. No matter what the dispute, leaders as well as people have to repose faith in the constitutional scheme of things, which provides for a whole chain of appeals. Water being the precious resource it is, states — just as the entire mankind — have to learn to live on as less as possible. The total availability is not going to increase in future, but the demand is. That means ways have to be found to be increasingly efficient in use. Israel is an example to follow. At present both Punjab and Haryana, as well as Delhi, have extremely wasteful policies on agriculture and urban water use. Unless we learn to be more economical, the feuds are only going to get more vicious.
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Baby comes home
A
baby will come from a foster home in the US to the welcoming arms of his grandmother soon. Indrashish Saha, who is less than two years old, was injured in his head. His mother said he had fallen from the cot, but as a matter of course the hospital where he was admitted alerted child protection services who decided that the injuries were deliberately caused. Pamela, the child’s mother, was charged, even as she vehemently protested her innocence. Eventually, she had her day in court where the case filed by the New Jersey child protection services against the parents and even grandparents was dismissed. Apparently the parents felt that even after this dismissal they would have a fairly long battle on their hands to get the custody of the child in the US. Thus the child will now be sent to India, even as his parents continue to fight to clear their name. As the Indian diaspora grows, there are bound to be run-ins between the NRIs and local authorities. Recently, there was the case in Norway in which a couple from Andhra Pradesh was convicted of "gross or repeated maltreatment of their children by threats, violence". The couple was convicted and sentenced to jail, and their children are with their grandparents in Hyderabad. This case was marked by a noticeable lack of hype that had surrounded an earlier case involving Norway's parenting laws. In April last year, two children were taken away from their parents, who were accused of ill-treating them. Following high-profile media coverage and some intervention by the Indian government, the children were finally handed over to their uncle and allowed to return to India. Indians abroad need to be mindful of the local laws and customs. They must realise that when they are abroad, they are subject to the laws of the land. Indeed, they must ensure that they do their best to conform to the local norms. While there may be some difference in child-rearing practices in various cultures, ultimately everyone is working for the same goal, that is of providing a safe and nurturing environment to children.
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To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already three parts dead. —Bertrand Russell
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Questionable defence acquisitions
Allegations
of corruption in the VVIP helicopter deal have once again brought to the fore the fragility of India’s defence acquisition process. Corruption appears to be endemic in defence procurement and a structural overhaul is now necessary. India is expected to spend approximately US$ 100 billion over the 12th and 13th defence plans on military modernisation. As 70 per cent of weapons and equipment are still imported, there is an urgent need to further refine the defence acquisition process and insulate it from the scourge of corruption. The Defence Procurement Procedure (DPP) being followed now was introduced in 2005. Since then it has been revised and modified several times based on the experience gained in its implementation. The current Defence Production Policy (DPrP) was unveiled in 2011. Its objectives are to: achieve self-reliance in the design, development and production of weapons systems and equipment required for defence in an early time frame; create conditions conducive for the private sector to play an active role in this endeavour; enhance the potential of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in indigenisation; and broaden the defence research and development base of the country. While the objectives are laudable, the achievement of self-reliance remains in the realm of wishful thinking as most weapons and equipment continue to be imported, the defence PSUs have a stranglehold over contracts that are awarded to Indian companies and defence research and development is the monopoly of the DRDO. The Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) has been conducting research at all levels of technology development – from the strategic to the mundane. It should actually concentrate its effort only on developing strategic technologies that no country will provide to India. The report of the P Rama Rao committee had reportedly asked the DRDO to identify eight to 10 critical areas which best suit its existing human resources, technical capability and established capacity to take up new projects. Since its inception in 1958, the DRDO has achieved some spectacular successes but also has many failures to its name. The successes include the Integrated Guided Missile Development Programme that produced the Prithvi and Agni series of ballistic missiles and, subsequently the BrahMos supersonic cruise missile in a collaborative venture with the Russians. Among the failures are the main battle tank Arjun that took inordinately long to meet critical General Staff requirements of the Indian Army despite huge cost overruns. The LCA (light combat aircraft) still appears to be many years away from operational induction into the Indian Air Force. However, to the DRDO’s credit, for many decades it worked under extremely restrictive technology denial regimes and with a rather low indigenous technology base. The time has come for the MoD to outsource defence R&D in non-critical areas to the private sector so as to encourage the development of indigenous technologies. In fact, funds should be allotted to the three Services for research aimed at product improvement during the life cycle of weapons systems and equipment. The defence procurement and production policies (DPP and DPrP) continue to pay lip service to public-private partnerships and have so far failed to encourage India’s private sector to enter into defence production in a substantive manner – either on its own or through joint ventures (JVs) with multi-national corporations. The large-scale procurement of weapons and equipment from defence MNCs has been linked with 30 to 50 per cent “offsets”; that is, the company winning the order must procure 30 to 50 per cent components used in the system from within India. This will bring in much needed investment and will gradually result in the infusion of technology. However, MNCs do not find the present level of 26 per cent FDI exciting enough. There is no credible reason why overseas equity investment cannot be raised to 49 per cent immediately for a JV to be really meaningful for a foreign investor. As a growing economic powerhouse that also enjoys considerable buyer’s clout in the defence market, India should no longer be satisfied with a buyer-seller, patron-client relationship in its defence procurement planning. In all major acquisitions in future, India should insist on joint development, joint testing and trials, joint production, joint marketing and joint product improvement over the life cycle of the equipment. The US and other countries with advanced technologies will surely ask what India can bring to the table to demand participation as a co-equal partner. Besides capital and a production capacity that is becoming increasingly more sophisticated, India has its huge software pool to offer. Today software already comprises over 50 per cent of the total cost of a modern defence system. In the years ahead, this is expected to go up to almost 70 per cent as software costs increase and hardware production costs decline due to improvements in manufacturing processes. While the need for confidentiality in defence matters is understandable, defence acquisition decision-making must be made far more transparent than it is at present, so that the temptation for supplier companies to bank on corrupt practices can be minimised. For example, tenders should be opened in front of the representatives of the companies that have bid for the contract. Before a contract is awarded, the file should be reviewed by the Chief Vigilance Commissioner (CVC). If the CVC has reservations about such scrutiny, either his charter should be amended or a group of eminent persons should be appointed to vet large purchases. Surely, many such persons with unimpeachable integrity can be found in India. The frequent blacklisting of defence companies is having a deleterious effect on India’s military modernisation. Perhaps monetary penalties can be built into the contracts instead. The MoD must immediately undertake a structural overhaul of the defence procurement and production process. The aim should be to streamline it so that the armed forces get high quality weapons systems and equipment at competitive costs, preferably from indigenous suppliers. Soldiers must not be called upon to fight the nation’s enemies with inferior rifles made by the lowest bidder.n The writer is a Delhi-based strategic analyst.
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Do less, think and talk more Not many days ago at an international conference, the question of the relevance of academic research to the world outside was brought up. Research cannot be confined to the ivory tower pursuit of the academia, it was alleged. Engagement with social concern cannot be overlooked. Imagine a scenario where a teacher wakes up from a nightmare that a clerk in the university administration has suddenly discovered that teachers in the social sciences, particularly in the English Departments, get paid for reading poetry, drama and fiction or doing research on the phenomenology of despair in “Desperate Housewives” or on the politics of body piercing. This spurs the clerk to hurriedly make an urgent call to the concerned authorities to either stop their salary or order them to do some work of a more tangible nature. The only answer to such a misconception would be to come to grips with the deep concerns of literary critics with important issues of evil, violence, religion, atheism or other socially germane questions of race, gender and class. To say that this is limited to the four walls of the lecture theatre is somewhat fallacious. To corroborate what I am arguing, allow me to go back more than a hundred years to the writing of Karl Marx. As is well known, Marx came from a prosperous family and in his early years joined the Young Hegelians at the University of Bonn as a revolutionary. But apart from this early dabbling in political activism, there isn’t any firsthand experience that he had had in interacting with the working class, though the issue of labour and its painful drudgery obsessed him throughout. Supported by his friend Engels, he laboured in the British Museum for most of his life enunciating a monumental theory of capital and labour that would have a huge impact on global politics. Interestingly, the only two working class people that he ever met were his maid Helen Demuth he had an adulterous relationship with, and their illegitimate son, Henry Demuth, who worked as a mechanical fitter. If this is the reality, would it not be justifiable to argue that academic research done within the four walls of libraries could be as vital as activism for social change? A much-proclaimed Marxist at the conference countered: “But what about Marx’s contributions to the First International”, a body representing the workers of the world? Well if you go deeper into history, Marx was a member figuring at the bottom of the list. He prepared one speech which was read by someone else, and when he was asked to attend the conference at Lausanne, he showed his inability for he was busy reading the manuscript of Das Kapital. After a year the headquarters of the First International moved from London to New York and Marx lost contact with it. One should not be criticising Marx for his self-imposed isolation from the working class if one was to agree that armchair scholarship is a plausible activity of bringing social change and resistance through the written word. Marx was a true scholar devouring books from where he would formulate his thesis on communism. This only corroborates Slavoj Zizek’s argument that the commonplace saying “Talk less and do more” has to be countered by “do less and think and talk more” so as to “think things through”. Too much of “doing can become an escape from talking about the problem.” Research in the university is, therefore, not always speaking in an airy insubstantial vein; Matthew Arnold’s view about Percy Bysshe Shelley as “a beautiful and ineffectual angel beating in the void his luminous wings in vain” is not true if one was to grasp Shelley’s politically charged
writings.
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CINEMA:
NEW Releases
Little glory in self-love Rest of the story of this triangle we needn't tell you except that it is in the grand tradition of feel good Hindi cinema. Only when you marry the 'all is well that ends well' sentiments with an unconventional story line the result is neither a heart-warming romance nor frothy fun. There are some genuinely sweet moments between Prachi and John. The unusual pairing works well. What doesn't is an attempt to make more than one point. Rather greedily the film swallows too many baits and tries to establish the reasons behind this over grown kid's warped up psychology that finds an echo in all of mama's boys. At another level it's about how one woman who takes his selfish ways in stride brings out the worst in him, while yet another one seemingly as self-centred as he is, transforms him. The one realm in which the movie scores is that it doesn't perpetuate any stereotypes and does present the social matrix of urbane India. Yet the characters don't grow and remain no more than cardboard cut outs. One of the saving graces of the film is that it clocks less than two hours, but rarely moves beyond the surface. Chitrangada is her usual successful, modern woman. John does what can be within the limitation of his role. Prachi is really good. Then there is Raima Sen. In a cameo of a woman boss who knows her mind as well the pleats of her immaculate sarees, she is not bad at all. Zarina Wahab as the over indulgent mother and Mini Mathur as the sister fit the bill. Alas, the narrative falls way short. Watch it for the good looking actors and zara hat ke theme but don't expect any revelations.
A date with terror While many times directors lose their vision while narrating true incidents, RGV has followed a plain and simple formula of think before you leap. An incident that shook the nation has been given a sensitive yet hard-hitting treatment. He has restrained himself from dramatising any incident, whether it was the shoot-out at Leopold Café or VT Station in Mumbai. The scenes have been shot precisely to the point where you can believe them. The director doesn't let the story meander in any other direction where it could lose track. RGV is known to handle 'the dark' - in the role, dialogue or background - pretty well; with 26/11 he displays this yet again. The Attacks Of 26/11 doesn't boast of star names other than Nana Patekar, but in a movie like this it is the story, the incidents and the characters, which are the real heroes. RGV's find Sanjeev Jaiswal, who plays Ajmal Kasab, bears stark resemblance to whatever real of the Kasab we saw in newspapers and on television. Nana Patekar as the police commissioner does a great job. Unlike other times where we have seen him bombarding us with heavy-duty dialogues, Nana Patekar lets his expressions do most of the job this time. Of course he has dialogues mainly with Kasab, which again do not convey hatred or overboard patriotism. There is no gyasn, only simple facts stated the way they are and the way the audiences can accept. Nothing is shoved down the throat! Even for Sanjeev Jaiswal, it is the expressions that take a giant leap once a while. The movie says what we knew; the facts have not been touched to give any dramatic affect. In an RGV film, background score is used as an essential part of the story; here too it blends with the incidents of violence. The director hasn't allowed anyone the luxury of dialogues. The movie doesn't unleash any kind of fresh horror. It would prick you like a needle and make you more alert. As for Ram Gopal Varma, he is on a rebound!
Slayer of sensibility Based on Jack the Giant Killer and Jack and the Beanstalk, the verbose screenplay by Darren Lemke, Dan Studrey and Christopher McQuarrie is meandering, the characters one-dimensional and the film a never-ending 114 minutes, not to mention the choice of an anaemic hero in Nicholas Hoult. Still, Jack the Giant Killer 3D begins promisingly, the rustic setting is good with kids being read the fairy tale by their parents but in hey presto, it exposes its flaws. Far too puny (the cheapest form of humour) for comfort, the screenplay has some terribly banal lines like 'the day your mother died was the weakest day of my life'. None expected it to be the happiest! Jack (Hoult) is a farmer but a dreamer too who enters the fantasy world of dreams where he has to rescue the wandering Princess Isabelle (Eleanor Tomlinson) from giants. Lord Roderick (Stanley Tucci) is one of the hangers on who utters some inanities which are in abundance. The giants, all bald and similar looking, could have been less wooden. Fallen, the two-headed one, with one head on his right shoulder-blade, looks gross, and is given too much exposure. When the princess tells Jack "call me Isabelle" it doesn't take too much intelligence to guess that Cupid is around the corner. But the romance is totally predictable. "Once darkness gets the taste of light it never stops," is the one good line in this apology of a film (the show was not in 3D). As for the acting, it is conspicuous by its absence. Eleanor Tomlinson is pretty and Stanley Tucci, a good cameo performer, is lost behind the shrubbery. Eminently missable.
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