 |
|
Explosion in Lanka Paper tigers |
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Burning evil Banish even the thought of Sati One more incident of a possible Sati has come to light, this time of a 77-year-old woman at Imamganj in Gaya district in Bihar. The National Commission for Women has taken it seriously enough to ask the Bihar government to ascertain the facts and send in a report within 10 days.
Indus water woes
Festering wounds
The curse of
‘giganticism’ Overhaul the civil
services Indo-US nuclear
deal helps non-proliferation
|
|
Paper tigers The
Union Minister for Panchayati Raj and Youth Affairs, Mr Mani Shankar Aiyar, now knows first hand what the common man knew all along that the much tomtommed empowerment of panchayati raj institutions (PRIs) is, to a great extent, an eyewash. The utter disillusionment he faced in a Bathinda village the other day is the rule rather than an exception almost in all states of the country. The devolution of power has been carried out indeed, but only in government files. In reality, PRIs continue to be non-entities. Not only have they been deprived of their legitimate power, they are even being taken for a ride by self-serving bureaucrats and politicians. As it emerged during Mr Aiyar’s Punjab visit, they are systematically deprived of funds, in the absence of which they are as helpless as a car without an engine. Red tape has tied them in knots so badly that even routine matters suffer. As is their wont, ministers and senior officials paint a rosy picture. But the tempting picture does not solve the problems of millions of people condemned to live a life of penury in rural ghettos. Mind you, Punjab is one of the more prosperous states. The situation is even worse in less fortunate regions. While the bureaucracy ignores elected panchayati representatives, they themselves are unable to assert their authority because of illiteracy and other such factors. Proper training can improve their lot, but then why would the bureaucrats harm themselves by making them aware of their rights? The PRIs also defeat their own cause by precipitating a situation in which women are in the seats of power on paper but it is their husbands who wield the levers of power in their name. That problem too cropped up during Mr Aiyar’s visit. Then there is also the difficulty of panchayats being hemmed in by petty rivalries. The minister’s annoyance will be worthwhile only if he puts in place a corrective mechanism. |
|
Burning evil One
more incident of a possible Sati has come to light, this time of a 77-year-old woman at Imamganj in Gaya district in Bihar. The National Commission for Women (NCW) has taken it seriously enough to ask the Bihar government to ascertain the facts and send in a report within 10 days. But television channels have shown one of the old woman’s sons claiming pride in his mother’s decision. While the gruesome practice of burning a widow on the husband’s funeral pyre has now largely been done away with, it is disturbing that virtues like pride and honour are still being invoked with regard to Sati. Witness, for example, the Rajasthan government’s recent endeavour to put “Sati temples” on the tourist map, lending legitimacy to the glorification, indeed deification, of unfortunate Sati victims. Politicians claiming to be upholding Hindu values and traditions have been known to offer veiled and not-so-veiled defences of the practice, doing credit to neither themselves nor Hinduism. Most civilisations and societies give up negative or barbaric practices at some stage in their evolutionary development, either from internal pressures, the dynamics emerging from interactions with other cultures, or a simple tryst with modernity and more enlightened sensibilities. State governments, with regions where people are vulnerable to thinking that there is something desirable about Sati, should do more to highlight its innate inhumanity and the risk of criminal prosecution besides emphasising its dubious status as a virtuous tradition. As a practice against women, Sati also reflects the domination of male concerns. A continued stress on women’s education and empowerment will also ensure that Sati as a concept and practice is consigned to history. |
|
Soap and education are not as sudden as a massacre, but they are more deadly in the long run.
— Mark Twain |
Indus water woes Pakistan’s
water worries should concern India. Both sides share the Indus and it is only if they join hands that its potential can be optimised with sustainability to combat the common peril of climate change. Three separate reports by parliamentary, technical and international expert committees set out Pakistan’s water future. Sharp inter-provincial differences, largely revolving around Punjab’s dominance, and the need to accommodate Afghanistan’s demands on the Kabul river have shaped the discourse. Strangely, both sides have ignored the idea of maximising mutual benefit through further Indo-Pakistan cooperation under the Indus Treaty. Hopefully, the impending report of the Neutral Expert on India’s Baglihar project on the Chenab will signal a change from confrontation to cooperation as the futility of beggar-my-neighbour policies will soon become apparent. Pakistan has a cultivated area of 40 m acres and an irrigable potential of 38.86 m acres. (West) Pakistan’s population was 34 m in 1951, but had risen to 146 m by 2003 and is likely to touch 221 m by 2025. This will mean a per capita water availability of 1200 cu m by 2010 and 800 cu m by 2025. Like India, Pakistan is a wasteful water user and has to improve use efficiency. Canal modernisation, including lining and a telemetry system, are under way. Pakistan currently diverts 117.35 MAF from the Indus, two-thirds of this during the kharif season. Another 8 MAF is used for drinking, sanitation and industrial purposes. A further average daily flow of 5000 cusecs (10 MAF) is required to escape to the sea below the Kotri barrage for the purpose of fisheries, coastal and delta management, preservation of mangroves and to prevent saltwater intrusion. The entire 33 MAF flow of the three eastern rivers has been allocated to India under the Indus Treaty, but apart from regenerated supplies, about 3 MAF still flows into Pakistan. Additionally, while India is entitled to irrigate 1.34 m acres of land in J&K from the three Western rivers, it has still to irrigate some 0.52 m acres and Pakistan estimates it will never use more than 2 MAF under this entitlement. Currently Pakistan uses almost 90-95 per cent of Kabul waters. However, Afghanistan has started on the road to development and has arid areas to irrigate. A UNESCO-Iran study on possible Afghan uses is under way; but Pakistan believes that this requirement will not exceed 0.50 MAF. Pakistan has no storage sites on the Chenab and only one site on the Jhelum, at Mangla, just within POK. It has lost 30 per cent of the overall storage capacity at Mangla, Tarbela and Chasma (the latter two on the Indus) on account of sedimentation. It is raising Mangla by 30 feet to store an additional 2.9 MAF and is desperately looking for other sites on the Indus. Kalabagh, below Tarbela, marks the lowest possible storage site (6.1 MAF, 3600 MW). But this dam is strongly opposed by the NWFP and Sind. The Federal Government has recently approved the Basha-Diamer dam, near Chilas in the Northern Areas, 200 km upstream of Tarbela (7.34 MAF, 4500 MW, $6.7 bn as of 2002). The NWFP supports Basha but Pakistan feels that Basha and Kalabagh should go together and can be completed by 2011-2014. The Basha-Diamer project entails widening and upgrading the Karakoram Highway from Manshera to Chilas, itself a considerable undertaking. A 905-foot high dam appears problematic to some who advocate phased construction, going up to 600 feet in the first instance. Basha lies beyond the arc of the monsoon and will therefore be entirely snow-fed like the proposed mega Katzarah dam (35,000 MAF, 15,000 MW), near Skardu, or the more modest Skardu dam alternative (8000-15,000 MAF, 4000 MW). The two latter dams would require even more elaborate highway improvements over a longer lead and entail high transmission costs over a bleak landscape to distant load centres. All three dams, and even the Kalabagh dam, would only fill in years of high flood, being essentially carryover dams to hold such “surplus storage”. The Katzarah dam would submerge much of the Skardu bowl, the best of Balti civilisation and Pakistan’s strategic communications. It has accordingly attracted considerable opposition even at the conceptual stage. Nevertheless, A.N.G. Abbas, Chair of the Technical Committee on Water Resources continues to champion it, along with Sind, as Pakistan’s carryover solution to wide annual flow variations, capturing 84 per cent of the available “storable surplus” in the system. He believes that a detailed project will be ready by 2009; work can commence by 2015 and be completed in eight years. However, a consultancy study for the World Bank by Wallingford of the UK suggests that climate change and glacier melt could reduce Indus flows at Skardu by as much as 30 per cent within the next 30-40 years. Several run-of-river hydel sites are available and a substantial dam at Ghazi Barotha on the Indus was commissioned some years ago. But the only other storage sites of any significance are at Yogo on the Shyok and Akhori, on an “off-channel” taken from the Tarbela lake. Cooperation with India in developing an Indus-II on the foundations of the 1960 Indus Treaty would probably yield Pakistan better and surer dividends, at less cost and sooner. India too would stand to benefit as it could then jointly survey sites with Pakistan for potential storages on the upper Indus in Ladakh and investigate the possibility of building or augmenting storages on the Chenab and Jhelum that are currently barred by the Indus Treaty beyond stipulated limits. The surplus waters of the Ravi and the other two eastern rivers that India cannot utilise could perhaps also be harnessed through joint cooperation, which could extend to developing the potential of the Indus system in the Northern Areas and POK, on Pakistan’s side of the LOC. Exploration of this idea, whose time has come, could add a most useful and creative dimension to the current India-Pakistan peace process in J&K, covering land use, sediment control, agriculture, forestry, hydro energy, transmission and eco-tourism on both sides. This would make the J&K border “irrelevant”, help build trans-border institutions across it and yield a huge peace dividend with manifold benefits to all the people of J&K.
|
Festering wounds It
was an arduous journey. Not so much for the miles that lay between the source and the destination as for the flash of distressing images that it brought back at every crossroad. I was returning after meeting the widows of Punjab — a land at cross with her peasant sons who had once enjoyed her undivided affection. As jewels in her crown, they had prided and rejoiced in their glory while the nation had celebrated a Green Revolution. I looked hard for the famed glints of green but didn’t find any. What I found instead were swathes of dull, dreary, almost gray land that no longer wore a verdant look. Under a strikingly blue sky, I gazed at the sombre earth and its bitterly sulking soil. I knew, like the widows of dead farmers, they were telling the truth which official statistics had long concealed. If only surveyors for the state had an eye for precious detail, they would know where the root of evil actually lay… Just as we knew, even before we had the chance to witness brutal reconstruction of tragedies at Lehragaga. It was no normal reiteration of facts. It was courageous to the core and poignant to the hilt. Almost all the women, many with children clasped to their breasts, were in attendance at the remote village only to prove to the data-hungry that their men really did die. That their pain was not a product of imagined situations or conspicuous consumption as the critics of “death-due-to-debt” theory love to state, that theirs was virgin pain. And to those that chose to differ, they had come to bare all, to tell tales of agony fresh from the lamenting farms of Punjab. The painful recollections were heartbreaking indeed, as they mirrored a deep rot in the social and political system that loves to treat human lives as statistics. At Lehragaga that day, I witnessed a tormenting battle not so much between right and wrong as between true and false. I saw all kinds of people — some who commiserated with the suffering multitude and wanted to help them in all earnest, some who had made a living out of suicides by “researching the trend” and analysing it for others, some who were hounding the organisers to know if there was anything new in the “story”. To my discomfort, the latter outnumbered the former. And as they went about socialising with experts, asking them embarrassing questions about the profile of dead farmers, the mode of their death and the update on numbers of the dead, I sat in a corner unable to reconcile with the casual indifference to human suffering. “Story?” I thought to myself, and went quiet. I couldn’t possibly have argued with those who thought nothing much of the tears and tragedies of others. And with those who were so very desperate to prove how routine deaths were passing off as debt-related in Punjab. I wondered if they had ever seen the point at all, if they had ever tried to look beyond numbers. The answers remained elusive as the glints of
green… |
The curse of
‘giganticism’ Narmada
Bachao Andolan leader Medha Patkar has drawn support from a
cross-section of society in her long struggle for the rights of
tribals and marginalised sections of society. Articulate, persistent
and affectionate, Ms Patkar feels the need for people’s movements in
order to exert rightful pressure on political decision making. Her
recent fast against the decision to raise the height of the Sardar
Sarovar Dam put the government on the backfoot. Excerpts from an
exclusive interview: Q. How do you see the stand of the UPA
government on the raising of the height of Sardar Sarovar Project?
A. The UPA government has created a mess for itself because of
the Gujarat Congress position and because of the decision of
bureaucrats to raise the dam’s height based on the false reports of
the state governments. The UPA government is in a leadership position
on all the monitoring bodies related to the dam. Its powers are coming
from the tribunal award on the one hand and Supreme Court judgements
on the other. The highest of the authorities is the Prime
Minister. The Supreme Court judgment of 2000 says that Prime Minister
is to intervene if there is a dispute in the Review Committee of the
Narmada Control Authority. The Prime Minister he did not intervene
under pressure from both the Congress in Gujarat and the Narendra Modi
government. I think they are also finding it hard to take a position
thinking that it will affect other dams and projects. If they had gone
legally, rationally, scientifically, they would have taken a decision
and neither made Modi a hero nor created a mess for themselves. Q.
Is NBA against big dams? A. NBA is against those projects
including dams, reservoirs and related works which cannot rehabilitate
people who are ousted, which cannot ensure environmental compensation
of the losses, which is bad economics and which has distributive
injustice in its water management and allocation. Whether in CAG
reports, Home Ministry’s reports or the World Commission on Dams
report reviewed all large dams in India, there is unanimity that the
dams have not given the benefits as planned and promised.
Rehabilitation has not taken place of all affected populations.
Environment losses go uncalculated. Clearances are given with
pre-conditions which are not fulfilled. For any scientific minded
person, the generalisation is that big dams are not the best option to
solve water related problems. Q. Are there any alternative models
to replicate? A. Yes. The best models are in Kutch and
Saurashtra, using watershed and small dams. Micro projects, if linked
together, will create a macro experience. Corruption and political
rhetoric is not possible with these decentralised projects which are
more equitable. We are not only saying small is beautiful but small is
more sustainable, more manageable, more democratic and more
equitable. Q. Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru said that Bhakra
Nangal project was a temple of modern India. A. That was his
statement in 1955. You should also look at his statement of 1958 when
he visited Kerala. He said we have a disease of giganticism. We have
quoted it in our petition. He had revised his views. Anyone would
change their views after considering the research work conducted by
our colleagues, which has exposed Bhakra Nangal. Q. How do you
respond to allegations by BJP leaders that NBA has come in the way of
people accepting compensation for their lands? A. We never
opposed anyone even if they were fooled and cheated in the whole
process. Otherwise, how would 11,000 people have been
"rehabilitated" by now? Gujarat oustees joined NBA after
getting cheated. In Maharashtra, those people who decided to go away
joined back. The cash compensation by the MP government has been
ridden with corruption. An officer got suspended in 2004. CAG reports
also point to corruption. We opposed cash compensation in this context
but we did not stop anyone. Many of those who have taken cash
compensation are willing to give it back. Many were given only half of
the cash compensation. Q. How effective is the Gandhian way of
protest today? A. This is the time when non-violence needs to be
stressed. The government did not respond to pleas under the Right to
Information Act for getting the report of the three union ministers
who went to a few project affected areas in the Narmada Valley. Though
we face threats and our office in Gujarat was vandalised by workers of
political parties, people are with us in Gujarat also. Q. Can’t
rehabilitation go alongside construction of big dams? A. Human
problems are unmanageable in the present politico-economic context.
There is no political will and no resources are made available for the
poor. The adivasis are waiting for their land rights even when they
have been cultivating the land for generations. Even before an area is
declared a reserved forest, the adivasis were there. But they are
treated as criminals inside. You just draw a line on your map and say
that everyone inside is a criminal or encroacher. So, when you don’t
have resources to give to such generations-old communities who are
waiting for their land rights and there are crores of people
unemployed in the country, can you really give an alternate source of
livelihood? Villages are crying for water, power, sanitation and
infrastructure. If government has not improved its capacity towards
this end, then it has no right to take away the life-support of
people. Nobody will destroy a city like Delhi even if they find gold
underneath.
|
|
Overhaul the civil services Over
the last few years, there have been several cases of misconduct and misuse of official powers by officers belonging to the civil services. People have been mute witnesses to cases such as a Director General of Police pawing a teenager in his office and an Inspector General in charge of prisons himself being thrown behind bars for the murder of a journalist. The only service to remain publicly unscathed all these years was the Indian Foreign Service (IFS). But that has now suddenly changed with no fewer that three IFS officers figuring in the news for all the wrong reasons. In the first case, India’s ambassador to the UAE was officially reprimanded for including his newly married daughter’s name on an official invitation card for Republic Day, which amounted to using the country’s name and money for a private celebration. Another senior officer was stripped of his post as the Indian High Commissioner to New Zealand and recalled to India after he mounted a virtual mutiny against his superior, the Foreign Secretary. And then there’s the case of a special secretary-rank official in the Ministry of External Affairs who has been charged by the CBI of abetting human trafficking during his tenure as Director General in the Indian Council of Cultural Relations. It was against this backdrop, which is no doubt just the proverbial tip of the iceberg that the Prime Minister recently spoke up. Addressing a gathering on the occasion of the first-ever Civil Services Day on April 21, the PM asserted that the civil services needed to be ‘reoriented’. “Are performance assessment and appraisal methods for preparing the civil services for the emerging demands on them and the government appropriate? How do we make the civil services an attractive career proposition for a talented young person?” And the billion-rupee question: “Is the present method of recruitment appropriate for inducting the right kind of persons into government?” Many people feel that the induction method followed all these years has now overgrown its usefulness, pointing out that an individual’s academic prowess in a written examination does not prove that he or she is ‘officer material’, especially when everyone gets multiple chances of having a crack at it. There is of course, an interview, for those who are successful in crossing the first hurdle, but critics argue that it isn’t enough, and that there should perhaps be a psychological evaluation or even a polygraph test to try to determine a candidate’s sense of integrity and character. There is also a school of thought which says that the age limit for induction should be increased so that a candidate’s character and integrity has developed sufficiently. Yet another suggestion is to induct people, regardless of age, from all kinds of professions and sections of society who are known to have a ‘good character’ and sense of patriotism, perhaps on a ‘short commission’ as in the army, on trial basis. As for those already serving in the services, it might be a good idea to do away with their official ‘immunity’. The knowledge about corrupt officers is known to their superiors and ministers in the ordinary course of work. The real problem is that it is difficult to take disciplinary action against a corrupt officer because he is entitled to protection according to principles of ‘natural justice’. Drastic circumstances call for drastic measures, and the situation facing the country right now certainly qualifies under that category. |
|
Indo-US nuclear deal helps non-proliferation Why
should India, with a spotless non-proliferation record, be denied access to U.S. civilian nuclear technology for electricity, while China — which helped Pakistan and Iran in their efforts to acquire nuclear weapons — can have it? The inequitable structure of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) has resulted in built-in discrimination in favor of China and against India that has made it necessary and justifiable for the administration to conclude its civilian nuclear cooperation agreement with New Delhi. The NPT is based on a legalistic fiction that underpins this discrimination. When it was concluded in 1968, only the five states that had already tested nuclear weapons were permitted to sign as “nuclear weapons states.” China, which had tested in 1964, got in just under the wire. India tested in 1974, six years too late. Article Six of the NPT envisaged an eventual end to this double standard: The United States, the Soviet Union, Britain, France and China pledged to phase out their nuclear weapons. But they have since largely ignored this commitment. Indeed, the nuclear “haves” reinforced the double standard by refusing to accept the same permanent safeguards on their civilian nuclear reactors required of non-nuclear signatories by the IAEA. Without these “in-perpetuity” safeguards, all five, including Beijing, can shift fissile material from civilian to military use whenever they choose. By contrast, India has accepted a rigid separation of civilian and military facilities under its pending nuclear cooperation agreement with the United States by agreeing to IAEA safeguards “in perpetuity.” In fact, the Manmohan Singh government in New Delhi is being bitterly attacked for accepting a “second class” status that does not apply to China. The Bush administration’s agreement with India does not conflict with the NPT. But a 1978 U.S. law went beyond the treaty and does bar civilian nuclear technology sales to non-signatories. It is this legislation that the administration is now seeking to amend. It is often forgotten that India made an extraordinary offer on June 9, 1988, to forgo nuclear weapons in exchange for a long-term commitment by the existing nuclear powers to move toward nuclear arms reductions. The late prime minister Rajiv Gandhi called on the United Nations to negotiate a new treaty, replacing the NPT, that would commit the nuclear “haves” to carry out Article Six by phasing out their nuclear arsenals over a 22-year period ending in 2010. Effective immediately upon conclusion of this “new NPT,” India and the other non-nuclear states would be committed under inspection “not to cross the nuclear threshold.” When the United States rejected this offer, the advocates of nuclear weapons in New Delhi steadily gained ground, and in 1998 India formally demonstrated its ability to deploy nuclear weapons. In retrospect, it is clear that the United States made a colossal blunder by rejecting India’s 1988 offer to stop its nuclear weapons development. The Indian proposal for gradual nuclear disarmament was pragmatic. Indeed, it could provide a basis even now for a new approach to carrying out Article Six. Such a new approach is desirable not only for its own sake, to defuse the danger of nuclear war, but also as an essential prerequisite for a more effective nonproliferation regime. Having implicitly recognized India as a nuclear weapons state, the administration should now give Pakistan and Israel the same recognition by working with all three to map a scenario for progressive global nuclear arms reductions. Only with such an all-embracing approach will the de jure nuclear powers feel that it is safe to wind down their arsenals, and only when the prospect of meaningful nuclear disarmament becomes credible will would-be nuclear powers reassess their ambitions. (The writer is a senior scholar with the Woodrow Wilson International Centre for
Scholars.) By arrangement with
LA Times-Washington Post |
|
From the pages of Goonda nuisance in Lahore
Sir: My attention has been drawn to two letters in the issue dated Friday, May 19, 1944, one concerning the “Goonda nuisance at Lahore” and the other “Tonga fares in Lahore.” In regard to the former complaint we have already taken special measures to deal with persons making a nuisance of themselves in public gardens. When such cases occur the matter should be reported to the nearest police station or post, when suitable action will be taken. Our main difficulty in such cases is that the offence is non-cognizable. The same procedure would be adopted by members of the public in cases where tonga-drivers charge excessive fares from them. — W.K. Manger, Senior Superintendent of Police, Lahore.
|
| HOME PAGE | |
Punjab | Haryana | Jammu & Kashmir |
Himachal Pradesh | Regional Briefs |
Nation | Opinions | | Business | Sports | World | Mailbag | Chandigarh | Ludhiana | Delhi | | Calendar | Weather | Archive | Subscribe | Suggestion | E-mail | |
