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A friendly budget Rescue it! |
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Peace, or a mirage?
The Spanish dancer
Stage-managed by army It’s never too early to start learning about money Delhi Durbar
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A friendly budget Mr P. Chidambaram’s is not a dream budget, but he has thoughtfully extended a friendly hand to a large section of society: the jobless, the salaried class, women, senior citizens, farmers, dalits, adivasis, minorities and business bigwigs. His proposals are bound to earn him widespread goodwill and also help him give a boost to the economy. The salaried class particularly benefits as the Finance Minister has raised the income tax exemption limit to Rs 1 lakh from the present Rs 50,000. Besides, a tax payer can save up to Rs 1 lakh, which will be deducted from income before tax is calculated. While scrapping standard deduction, Mr Chidambaram has retained only six deductions, including those on housing loan interest and medical insurance premia. The only budgetary announcement that provoked howls of protest, and rightly so, is the levy of a 0.1 per cent tax on cash withdrawals of Rs 10,000 a day. He calls it an anti-black money measure since “large cash transactions become part of black money”. If black money is kept in banks, it should be welcome. This will hit individual, but mostly corporate transactions and create unnecessary paper work. This Budget stands out for its tax reforms, thrust on employment generation and infrastructure development. The most important of the reforms, VAT, will come into force from April 1.The Finance Minister has not succumbed to the pressure from certain states that wanted it postponed again. Answering the criticism of reforms ushering in a job-less growth, the Budget has announced concessions for industries that create employment. Job prospects are maximum in areas like IT, textile, food processing, construction and irrigation works. The existing food-for-work programme will get a boost as it will be covered under the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme. As part of “National Nirman”, the government plans to provide additional one crore hectare of irrigation, build 60 lakh houses for the rural poor and connect all villages with at least 1,000 residents in the plains and 500 in the hill areas with roads. There is a daring proposal to use part of the foreign exchange reserves, estimated at $132 billion, for developing infrastructure. For this the Budget proposes the creation of a special purpose vehicle, which can borrow up to Rs 100 billion. This is the brainchild of Planning Commission Deputy Chairman Montek Singh Ahluwalia. India Inc. has largely hailed the Budget with some of the industrialists even calling it as “Chidambaram’s real dream Budget”. There is no harsh proposal to spoil the party currently at the stock exchanges. Moreover, corporate tax has been reduced. Customs and excise duties have been cut on several commodities, including petrol and diesel. The Bombay sensex went up, marking the Budget’s approval. Even the Communist-wary foreign institutional investors escaped unhurt. Since there is no new tax on foreign companies and foreign direct investment will be encouraged in pension funds and mining, FDI inflows can only accelerate. The Budget keeps on track growth-oriented reforms while addressing Leftist concerns, maintaining a fine balance. For Punjab and Haryana, the good news is that the existing procurement policy for wheat and paddy has been left untouched. There were fears that the Centre might dilute or scrap the MSP (minimum support price) regime. The new agriculture policy will boost crop diversification to promote fruits, vegetables, pulses, oilseeds, poultry and dairy. A national horticulture mission will be launched on April 1. The benefits to the ailing sugar mills should raise the spirits of sugarcane-growers as well. What the Finance Minister has not announced in the Budget is no less important. For instance, he makes no mention of controlling government expenditure, trimming babudom or shrinking the role of the State in business. Disinvestment or privatisation of state-owned enterprises, a piece of reform pushed by the previous BJP-led NDA government, finds no mention in the Budget. The Budget’s figures usually do not tell the whole truth. The Economic Survey projects a growth in monsoon-dependent agriculture at just 1.1 per cent, while the Budget pegs the GDP growth at 6.9 per cent. Will this be possible. Last year the Budget expected an 8 per cent growth, the actual figure was 6.5 per cent. The government, however, does deserve praise for keeping inflation at an acceptable level despite a sharp increase in the global oil prices. Even the fiscal deficit at 4.3 per cent of the GDP is reasonable. This means the government is spending less than before. How the funds required for the budgetary initiatives will be arranged is the real mystery. Perhaps, the Finance Minister is depending on higher revenue accruing from an accelerated growth. That is a risk in a largely globalised economy. |
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Rescue it! While laying the foundation of Sri Dasmesh Academy near Anandpur Sahib on September 24, 1978, the then President, Mr Neelam Sanjeeva Reddy, had said: “I congratulate the founders of Sri Dasmesh Academy for the very sound foundation on which this important edifice of learning will rise in due course. Here academic knowledge is to be integrated with basic training to introduce and adapt tender minds to the complexities of later life…. It is a far-sighted experiment in the field of education”. The experiment did succeed, making it one of the finest residential schools in Punjab, but only for a brief while. Today, the picturesque academy spread over 215 acres is on the brink of closure, putting the future of hundreds of students in jeopardy. Equally dark is the future of 120-odd staff members who are going from the proverbial pillar to post without any redressal of their grievances. If nothing is done at once, March 31 may mark the end of a laudable experiment. With so few prestigious educational institutions around, that will be a matter of shame for everyone connected with its functioning. Although acute shortage of funds is given out as the cause of its poor health, insiders say that its sorry state is actually the result of political bickering between the present Chief Minister and his predecessor. Capt Amarinder Singh and Mr Parkash Singh Badal should put their rivalry aside to rescue this school. As far as financial difficulties are concerned, they can be easily surmounted because as little as Rs 1.5 crore can revive its fortunes. All that is needed is political will. If the state government cannot spare even that much, there is no reason why the academy should not be handed over to the Army. It had made an offer in 2003 to take over the academy but was never obliged because the management committee was then not agreeable to the takeover. At least now the latter must realise that the Army control is any day better than the imminent closure of the prestigious institution. |
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There are plenty of difficult obstacles in your path. Don’t allow yourself to become one of them. — Ralph Marston |
Peace, or a mirage? THE bomb blast in Tel Aviv was a sobering correction to exaggerated hopes of peace breaking out in West Asia. There are many ways of looking at the central Palestinian-Israeli conflict. And there are many tragedies: Palestinians denied their land and freedom; the corrosive effect on Israeli society of their government behaving like a brutal colonial power, claiming a state as a badge of their past suffering but now inflicting suffering on sons of the soil; the shielding by the only super power of all Israeli acts; the Palestinians’ fellow Arabs torn between their dependence on the United States and deep resentment over the humiliations being heaped upon the native inhabitants; and generations of Palestinians raised in refugee camps across the Arab world, tolerated by their host governments with varying degrees of hostility. We have had four years of the first George W. Bush administration virtually giving the Israeli government a carte blanche for doing what it pleased. And Israel went about crushing the Palestinians, destroying their infrastructure, repossessing their towns and consigning Yasser Arafat to his battered headquarters. All this was in aid of ensuring security for Israelis by suppressing the intifada, the second Palestinian uprising, The strategist Ariel Sharon did two things to build the Israel of his dreams. He built a wall to expropriate more Palestinian land and announced the unilateral evacuation of the Gaza Strip, a drain on Israeli manpower and resources. Arafat finally bade goodbye to a people he had given the most precious gift, the idea of nationhood. The Europeans have largely been bystanders watching the rape of Palestine, but now took heart. A re-elected President Bush bestirred himself. Thus far, he had intervened only to gift illegal Israeli settlements to Sharon and to pronounce that the Palestinians had no right of return — all those who were kicked out of, or fled, their homes in the wake of the formation of the State of Israeli in 1948. There is a new Palestinian leader now, Mahmoud Abbas, and Sharon and Bush are condescending to deal with him. The shrivelled tree of peace, such as it is in these parts, is sprouting leaves. Or is it a mirage? President Bush is on a democratising spree and after invading Iraq and receiving some hard knocks, he wants to democratise Palestine and indeed the whole of what he calls the Greater Middle East. And there is the forgotten “road map” being resurrected. Lest the uninitiated be taken in by the new spin being given to events in Washington and elsewhere, it would be useful to spell out the kind of peace the various parties desire. Let us start with Sharon. His plan is clear: leave the Gaza Strip while squeezing it around its land borders, and in the sea and in the air, give up symbolic settlements in the northern West Bank, proclaim a Palestine consisting of Bantustans along “provisional” borders in the hope that they will in time become permanent. Since such a scheme would provoke a permanent Palestinian intifada, the Israeli Prime Minister has a fallback position. The Wall will expropriate 7 per cent, rather than the present 15 per cent, of occupied territory and will redraw the 1967 borders, the large settlements will stay, and the puzzle of what to do with occupied East Jerusalem will remain to be resolved. The Bush administration will probably go along with this fallback position and will help evolve a formula for joint control of the holy city of Jerusalem, provided the Israelis agree. The Palestinians will be content with receiving back the pre-1967 borders of the West Bank and will seek land compensation for the appropriation of land occupied by the main illegal settlements around Jerusalem. They will seek a symbolic right of return for the refugees, the bulk of them to be absorbed in the new State of Palestine or compensated financially for permanently settling in host countries. East Jerusalem must return to the Palestinians. The Europeans, who largely funded the infrastructure of the Palestinian Authority merrily destroyed by Israel under the benign gaze of Bush, will again perform a subsidiary role. They will be expected to provide money and perhaps peacekeeping troops. The European Union knows to its cost that the United States is zealous in guarding its exclusive right to mediate between Israel and the Palestinians, and the Israelis are, of course, delighted that the only game in town is mediation by Uncle Sam, their benefactor and protector. Nothing moves in straight lines in West Asia. The American crusade against terrorism, which has been subsumed in the promotion of liberty American style, will change course in line with Washington’s interests. Iraq remains an albatross around America’s neck while the US is aiming new barbs at Iran and Syria. Partly, the future map of West Asia will be determined by how long and arduous America’s tryst with Iraq is. It is already clear, however, that the promotion of democracy and liberty will vary greatly from country to country. Ideologically, these concepts are instruments in the pursuit of the neoconservative Bush administration’s own interests. Tension will continue to exist not merely between the United States and the Arab and Muslim worlds but between Washington and the European Union. No one in Europe has been taken in by the change of tone during President Bush’s peace mission to Europe. There is no change in the substance of Bush’s policies and Europeans have gained new self-confidence now that Cold War constraints no longer exist and are unwilling to be mere foot soldiers of America’s missionary imperialism. On the Palestinian side, it remains to be seen how long the new Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas can keep the lid on militant groups’ agenda and the frustrations of his people suffering sky high unemployment rates and living in cantons guarded by Israeli roadblocks, divided from their brothers by the ugly Wall which has swallowed their olive trees and land. Even the Israeli Supreme Court had had a few pangs of conscience in seeking a realignment of the Wall. But compassion comes in small doses in Israel, if at all. The Wall will not follow the 1967 boundary; the grace extends only to the release of 8 per cent of occupied
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The Spanish dancer Today when I was getting ready in the morning to go to work, I opened the almirah and reached out to the shelf where I keep my perfumes. My hand touched a rounded white bottle of hard ceramic — Anais Anais. Memory cells exploded and I was transported to an age when numbers (as in growing older) did not mean much. That perfume was a gift from a very dear and old friend. In fact, in graduate school at Louisiana State University, where we both studied political science, one of the younger professors used to refer to us as the Siamese twins. Christina went on a European trip one summer, on a fellowship, and brought me back two gifts. One was this bottle of Anais Anais, a French perfume, which I have held onto till now, and it still trickles out a few drops now and then. The other gift, which I have lost to time and trans-Atlantic travels, was a laminated poster of a Spanish Flamenco dancer dressed in the traditional gown embellished with layers of red and green ruffled trims swirling in the air. Her face had exaggerated lines, as if she had put on makeup for the stage, a mocking, secret smile dangled from her scarlet lips. The programme was printed below — in Spanish and I believe it said “Sreedhara Sen (that is me) is going to present an enchanting evening of dance and entertainment.” I put up the poster on the wall of my small bedroom. I could see the gleaming poster while lying on my creaky and extra-cheap bed. Christina and I spent countless days and evenings in that room, poring over political theories, evening plans, world poverty, totalitarianism and heartbreak. We planned grand tours of Europe — going to Paris, visiting the Louvre together — gazing at Monalisa and Florence — admiring David in the Galleria dell’Accademia. We live in two different continents now. We never did get to go to Paris together. She is in Liberia, Africa, trying to promote peace as a Public Affairs Officer for the American Embassy. I am in India pursuing interests of an American computer company, with an eye on the balance sheet. There is not a shred of doubt in our minds as to what life is all about. Many of us have our Spanish dancers — a totem pole, a symbol that made our youth effusive and full of optimism and desires to reach out to uncharted territories. Life, as you live it longer, has a surreptitious way of making you succumb to what is prosaic and well-tested. I just couldn’t bring myself to use up the last few drops left in the bottle. It would then mean the token end of my youth. I am ready to make life-altering decisions, maybe change the continent that I live in. But, I am not yet ready to finish off those last few drops — not
today.
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Stage-managed by army Revenue Minister Shaikh accused the Chief Minister of horrible crimes: murder, kidnappings, corruption and misuse of authority. Reports said that the Chief Minister was about to order Shaikh’s arrest, the latter incidentally being the leader of a faction of the ruling PML (Q) while the Chief Minister is the President of the party. Daily statements were being issued against each other by Shaikh and Arbab Rahim until the Centre imposed a ceasefire. The first question to arise is: how could a minister chosen by a Chief Minister be so insolent and out of tune with his Chief Minister that he would accuse him of heinous crimes? It must be admitted that the charges of corruption and misuse of authority are the standard charges that politicians in power hurl against their opponents. But that would be so when a politician has left a party. In this case both remain office-bearers of the same Muslim League faction in the province. How come a minister, if he is supposedly chosen by the Chief Minister, could be so unruly and ungrateful as to so accuse the same Chief Minister? The answer, in this case, is clear. The minister concerned was not beholden to the Chief Minister. The Chief Minister, it appears, had to accept him as a minister on instructions from above: Islamabad. The Ministry in the Sindh province was not put together by Ghulam Rahim. He was brought in later as an act of grace to him by the authorities in Islamabad to replace an earlier nominee. Indeed, the whole Assembly was elected not by voters but was stage-managed by Islamabad. Hence the extreme factionalism within the ruling party; no one is a nominee of party bigwigs. The ruling party, the PML (Q), is itself an interesting case. In the election of 2002 the maximum number of votes was obtained by Benazir Bhutto’s Pakistan Peoples Party. Nawaz Sharif’s PML polled the second largest number of votes. But a sort of political hemorrhage ensued after the poll and a certain friend of Gen. Pervez Musharraf, started to pressurise and cajole the vulnerable members of the PPP and the PML to join a brand new faction of the PML to be called PML (QA), standing for Quaid-e-Azam. That is how a party emerged that was formed by defectors and is now the ruling party. The PML (Q) had a wafer-thin majority of one vote when it took office and now, of course, it has more supporters, thanks to its preferred methods. What are these? These include a carrot-and-stick policy. Many of the PML (N) and PPP MPs had past records while in office. General Musharraf had formed a National Accountability Bureau presided over by a General. Assisted by intelligence agencies, it started making references to courts for accountability of leaders of the PML (N) and the PPP. A wide net was spread. Many were caught within the net. They stayed in jails for long periods. They were offered the choice of making a deal with the authorities and be released, accepted in the ruling party and possibly made ministers. If you refuse, “the law will take its own course”. Many of them fell for the bait. That was the basic formula for the PML (Q)’s rule. The glue that holds the PML (Q) together is fear of the NAB and the expectation of solid gains if its members cooperated. On these rests the central government. As it happens, no civilian of any description enjoys any bit of real power. Everything has been stage-managed by the army’s various intelligence agencies and sometimes with assistance from the bureaucracy. President Musharraf has, no doubt, put together an entire paraphernalia of democracy. In the words of his fan, he has all the hardware of democracy, but the software — the spirit and norms of democracy — is absent. The National Assembly looks rather languorous and bored half the times, where the ruling party members are loathe to attend. There are frequent cries from opposition benches that there is no quorum. PML (Q) MPs usually stay away until forced while the Opposition uses the National Assembly to its advantage. Even the functioning of the government is lackadaisical. It does not give the impression of being a team working towards a definite goal. Each minister, usually a dandy, behaves as if he is answerable to just one man. As it is, the state of law and order has continued to worsen since the day General Musharraf took over. Not that it was excellent before. A descent into lawlessness has been a trend for at least two decades. The crime graph has been continuously rising. A Finance Minister was brought from a New York bank and was made a commissar. He is supposed to have introduced financial discipline in many government departments and ministries and reduced the budget deficit for a time and is said to have turned around the economy. He is now the PM. The World Bank and the IMF do not tire of praising him for brining about a miracle. But critics are not impressed. They point to the galloping poverty that rose from about 33 per cent seven or eight years ago to over 40 per cent now. Unemployment is spreading and inflation is again rising. But the state of the economy is taken to be good by international financial institutions. This is the only achievement. What else has the government achieved is hard to say. Doubtless, it faces fissiparous tendencies in Sindh and Balochistan where sabotage regularly takes place and disaffection is rampant. Some call it alienation. Frontier is the place where the religious parties rule. This and the northern areas are home to Islamic extremism, tinged with traditional Pathan ethos. Similarly, Balochistan is teeming with former Taliban in addition to nationalist activists. In Punjab crime is growing while the grip of the army and the government is still strong, though not quite as strong as it used to be. The popularity of the government cannot be ascertained: for 25 to 30 years the government policies fostered Islamic extremism and Jihadi culture, thanks to Islamabad’s Afghan and Kashmir policies. That has brought a strong blowback effect on national politics. They hired the Jihadis, who are even now quite popular, but later betrayed them. They are angry with Musharraf for buckling under American pressure and for betraying Islam. The other democrats decry him for being a dictator. The nationalists in Sindh, Balochistan and Frontier oppose him because he constitutes the strongest central authority where only one man makes all the major decisions, while leaving no scope for the rest of the nation to participate in national affairs that a democracy normally allows. |
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It’s never too early to start learning about money IF my parents had ever tried packing me off to business school during the half-term holidays when I was a teenager, I probably would have left home. At 14 years old, talking about money did not interest me, or my friends, in the slightest. Spending it — maybe. Saving it, learning how to invest it, or discovering how to launch my own business — definitely not. So when last month, I came across YoungBiz — a company which coaches youngsters through "mini-MBAs" and financial literacy courses — my first instinct was to call in the NSPCC. Surely this financial "boot camp" was somewhere parents sent their delinquent children as a means of punishment — not a course to which teenagers might sign up of their own volition? To see for myself, I took a trip to affluent St Albans in Hertfordshire, where YoungBiz was running a one-day course on personal finance. Earlier in the week, the company had also completed a three-day entrepreneurship course, attracting some 40 students, aged between 13 and 15. Financial education is a hot topic in the UK at the moment. With Britain well behind the US and many of its European peers in terms of financial literacy, we now have one of the worst savings gaps in the developed world. If this decline is not stemmed, a generation of people will be faced with the prospect of having to work through to their grave, or accepting a much poorer standard of living in their retirement. More immediately, there is also the issue of the unsustainable rise in UK consumer debt levels, fuelled by low interest rates and increasingly competitive credit card and personal loan markets. These problems have stemmed, at least in part, from the fact that while the joys of consumerism are piped through TV screens, billboards and newspapers every day, messages about financial prudence and responsibility simply get no airtime. St Columbus College in St Albans, where YoungBiz ran its latest round of half-term courses, is one of just a handful of schools in the country to offer the new "financial studies" AS-level. While this newspaper has led the call for a financial GCSE, no such qualification yet exists, with many children subsequently receiving no substantive financial coaching. It was this gap which prompted David Gaze, the head of financial studies at St Columbus, to try to increase the opportunities for British teenagers to get access to financial training. Along with businessman Mark Hare, Gaze approached Texas-based YoungBiz with a view to introducing their courses to the UK. Founded in the US — where finance classes for children are a well-established phenomenon — almost 10 years ago, YoungBiz now coaches a few thousand children through its courses every year. Since moving into the UK market last year, Steve Morris, the company's founder, says he's been impressed by the enthusiasm for financial education over here. "It's still early days, but we haven't come across a single authority or school that has said they're not interested," he says. "It's not just a British thing though, we've found it's the same the world over. Every parent we've ever spoken to says 'I wish I had that kind of education when I was young'." Although Britain may have all the potential to embrace YoungBiz, and financial education in general, back in St Albans I was still sceptical as to how enthusiastic a class of 14-year-olds would be about the idea of giving up their half-term to learn about finance. To my surprise, however, the majority of the dozen or so enrolled on the personal finance course were quick to boast that it was them — not their parents — who had raised the idea of signing up for YoungBiz. Furthermore, those who admitted to some strong-arm tactics by their folks, conceded that now they were there, they were glad to have come. — By arrangement with The Independent, London |
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Hillary goes shopping Senator Hillary Clinton was in the Capital for the India Today conclave. A day before the conclave began, Hillary took people by surprise when she shopped at the Santusthi complex situated right next to the Race Course Road residence of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. Accompanied by the wives of the famous Chattwals from the US, Tina and just-married Priya Sachdev, Hillary picked up two long coats from designer Vijay Lakhmi Dogra’s shop, Tex Indus, which she wore in the Capital. We do not know whether she bought anything for her daughter Chelsea’s birthday for which she flew back to the US after the India Today dinner.
Gayatri Devi still
a charmer Royalty or not, Gayatri Devi is a traffic-stopper. The Rajmata of Jaipur was a guest of honour at a party to mark the end of the polo season. Even though other royals were present, the brand ambassador for a diamond company was a scene stealer. People at the party were awe-struck and could not take their eyes off her. She was dignity and poise personified as photographers had a field day clicking the Rajmata. After a while, the flashbulbs proved to be just too much. In her inimitable and soft style, she requested the photojournos to kindly put a stop.
Mani Shankar’s
oil diplomacy Petroleum and Natural Gas Minister Mani Shankar Aiyar has not lost his flair for diplomacy, having been a career diplomat himself. He has a senior IFS officer who was posted as Ambassador in the Gulf to do the needful for enlarging cooperative endeavours and ensuring a steady flow of crude and petroleum products. Now the irrepressible Mani, who is also overseeing his favourite panchayati raj ministry, wants to appoint officers with an understanding of oil affairs in Indian embassies abroad. This proposal already seems to have had a stormy beginning.
Uma Bharti seeks
CM’s post Firebrand Sanyasin Uma Bharti, who was suspended from the BJP last year and reinstated subsequently, is understood to have started pushing her case for reinstatement as Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister. Although the BJP High Command had declared last month that there was no move to replace Babu Lal Gaur, sources in the BJP say that Ms Bharti is very keen on regaining the Chief Ministership as she has a large fan-following in Madhya Pradesh. Moreover, sources say that she is not very keen on being appointed national general secretary of the party as she would be forced to work with the leaders she had attacked in the full glare of TV cameras. Now, it will entirely depend on BJP President L K Advani whether Bharti will be adjusted in the national team in Delhi or sent to Bhopal or kept as a roving leader of the
party.
Azharuddin in Delhi Former Test cricket Captain Mohammad Azharuddin with wife Sangeeta in tow was spotted in an upmarket shopping complex in the Capital recently. Dressed in designer clothes, Azharuddin was recognised by many people. People in the shopping complex smiled, shook hands and exchanged pleasantries with Azharuddin. All this while Sangeeta was shop-hopping and looking for good buys. The ever-smiling Azharuddin was graciousness personified. Once Sangeeta had done her shopping, the couple bid their adieu without much ado and left. This was quite a change compared to another Hyderabadi Sania Mirza, who was mobbed wherever she went in Delhi. Contributed by Girja Shankar Kaura, S Satyanarayanan,Gaurav Choudhury and Prashant Sood |
All Your names, Devas, are worthy of our homage, worthy of our praise and worthy of our worship. — The Vedas Such is Your greatness, bounteous Lord! Within You are endless forms. Millions are in Your million, or You are a billion in Yourself. — The Vedas According to Karma Yoga, the action one has done cannot be destroyed, until it has borne fruit; no power in nature can stop it from yielding its results. — Swami Vivekananda The One God pervades everywhere and He alone dwells in every soul. — Guru Nanak  |
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IT could only have happened in Pakistan politics. A blazing row broke out last week inside the Cabinet of Dr. Arbab Ghulam Rahim, the Sindh Chief Minister. Dr. Ghulam Rahim has accused his Revenue Minister, Imtiaz Shaikh, of corruption and misuse of authority in allotting plots and transferring properties in various cities. So he sacked him.