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South African safari No easy bail |
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Lage raho Lalu A no-frills rath on rails Lalu Prasad Yadav has just given the folks at the Indian Institutes of Management a little more to chew on. His much-touted “turn-around” of Indian Railways has won him kudos all around, besides becoming a case study at top-flight management schools.
Air chief’s anguished cry
Twist of fate
Human Rights Diary Musharraf looking for an additional “nine lives” DELHI DURBAR
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South African safari Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s successful visit to South Africa may go a long way in improving India’s relations with this largest economy in the African continent. The tremendous goodwill for India in South Africa — because of historical and other reasons — can help in increasing bilateral trade considerably. Last year it stood at $4 billion, which is too little if we look at the opportunities available for trade and investment there. The present trade volume is only 1.4 per cent of the total exports of South Africa. According to one estimate, bilateral trade may triple by 2012. The rise in trade can be much faster if both countries concentrate a little more on this aspect of their relationship. South Africa’s significance for India lies not merely in the fact that Mahatma Gandhi forged his weapon of Satyagraha there. It has a large population of those who trace their origin to India. A large section of the people in both countries can easily communicate in English. South Africa is known for its diamonds. It also has large deposits of uranium. India is in dire need of uranium for its peaceful nuclear energy programme. South Africa can provide as much uranium as India wants but only after the Indo-US nuclear deal is cleared by the American Congress. It has made this commitment as part of the Tshwane Declaration signed by Dr Manmohan Singh and President Thabo Mbeki in Pretoria. South Africa can be the gateway to the rest of the African continent. Having close relations with Pretoria reflects New Delhi’s search for key allies in various regions. The future may see greater cooperation between the two countries as they have agreed to support each other’s case for permanent membership of the Security Council whenever it is expanded. If it is India’s rightful claim, South Africa, too, deserves it as it is the most important country of Africa. Long ago Pretoria demonstrated its commitment to a nuclear weapon-free world by dismantling its nuclear programme on its own. India and South Africa complement each other in many respects.
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No easy bail THE Supreme Court has directed the high courts to exercise judicious discretion while granting bail to those charged with serious criminal offences. The apex court was forced to issue such a directive as the high courts have been granting bail indiscriminately without applying their mind. Deprecating this trend, it said that the high courts should hereafter explain the reasons for granting bail in their orders more elaborately, rather than putting them cursorily as “in the peculiar facts and circumstances of the case”. The Supreme Court has laid down three guidelines on the granting of bail. One, the high courts should specifically indicate in the order reasons for prima facie concluding why bail was being granted. Two, an accused cannot cite the superior court’s judgements granting bail to other accused as a precedent and claim equality for grant of similar relief. And three, the courts should weigh whether there are reasonable apprehensions about the accused tampering with evidence or threatening complainants. In principle, bail should not be granted to those charged with serious criminal offences if the court is prima facie satisfied with the evidence. Linked to the ruling on bail is another direction of the Supreme Court to the Centre and the states on the need to prevent unreasonable delay in the disposal of criminal cases. There is no point in keeping the undertrials in jails for years without they being charge-sheeted, let alone given a hearing. Along with judicious grant of bail, trial of some cases should be expedited by putting them on the fast track. This would prevent overcrowding in the jails as also save the prisoners from avoidable mental agony and torture. Having recognised speedy trial as a constitutional guarantee, the Supreme Court has said that the right to such a trial begins with the arrest of the accused and continues at all stages — investigation, inquiry, trial, appeal and revision. To help the detainees languishing in jails without being charge-sheeted, the Manmohan Singh government has proposed an amnesty plan. It remains to be seen how the government would succeed in its endeavours.
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Lage raho Lalu Lalu Prasad Yadav has just given the folks at the Indian Institutes of Management a little more to chew on. His much-touted “turn-around” of Indian Railways has won him kudos all around, besides becoming a case study at top-flight management schools. Now, the first of several “Gharib Raths,” — three-tier air-conditioned trains with fares 30 to 45 per cent cheaper than regular AC trains — has been flagged off from Saharsa in Bihar to Amritsar. The train will smoothen the flow of migrant labour on whom agriculture in modern-day Punjab in totally dependent. Its populist packaging, right from the name, is deceptive. But the point is not that the truly poor will be unlikely to afford even the few hundred rupees that will be required. Lalu may have actually hit on something special here. Increased mobility is always an excellent driver of an economy and with growing middle-class incomes, larger sections of people are demanding and willing to pay a little extra to travel in comfort. Airlines have successfully introduced low-cost flying by doing away with frills. The same can be done for AC trains. In the coaches of the Gharib Rath, built at RCF Kapurthala, the number of seats has been increased by marginally reducing their size. The linen storage section has been eliminated — so no blankets. The railways are already talking about a “20 per cent profit.” If AC trains are to truly wrest passengers away from low-cost airlines, more such “no-frills AC trains” may play a role as well. Given India’s size and diversity of terrain, no single transportation sector — road, rail or air — can truly fulfil its mobility needs. And if each sector has to fulfil its potential for contributing to the economy and to people’s quality of life, each has to be managed innovatively and efficiently. Of course, even the premium trains struggle to maintain standards and keep time. If that can be sorted out, Indian Railways will truly be on a roll.
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All professions are conspiracies against the laity. — George Bernard Shaw
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Air chief’s anguished cry THE biggest surprise about Chief of Air Staff Air Chief Marshal S.P. Tyagi’s agonised and agonising letter to the Defence Minister, Mr Pranab Mukherjee, is not that it was written but that so little notice has been taken of it and of the deeply depressing state of affairs it reveals. To be sure, there was a 15-minute sensation when three TV news channels somehow got hold of the letter — couched in courteous but candid language — and went to town on it. But that was about all. The next day most of the print media shoved the story to an inside page; political parties remained preoccupied with their petty and usually partisan pursuits; the general public was busy with Dasehra festivities and Ramzan fasting; and even those duty-bound to safeguard the country’s security and supreme interests seemed unconcerned. Strange though it may seem, the crowning irony is that what the Air Chief has submitted respectfully to “Raksha Mantriji” — that the way things are going at present, this country would “lose” its air superiority over Pakistan in just 10 years — has been driven home to the powers that be repeatedly over the last decade. Retired air power experts have written and publicly spoken about this prospect but to no avail. Remarkably, no one talks about China that is making stupendous strides in aerospace and could easily become the biggest air power in Asia in not too distant a future. The fundamental reason for all this is that decision-making on defence acquisitions, painfully slow and slapdash even at the best of times, has become appallingly dilatory because of the dark shadow of Bofors. Shockingly, successive governments took 15 long years to decide on the purchase of the badly needed advance jet trainer (AJT) whose price inevitably soared as a result. Whether the new structures and procedures for defence purchases that Mr Pranab Mukherjee has put in place would improve matters time alone will tell. But the fact is that even on the issue of floating a global tender for buying 126 fighter aircraft, first discussed in 2001, a decision has yet to be taken and could be delayed for years. What is the Air Force to do in the meantime? One of the sops being offered is a promise of 100 Light Combat Aircraft (LCAs) in the next five years. This only causes laughter in Air Force messes. A project that hasn’t yielded a single aircraft over 20 years cannot possibly produce 20 each year all of a sudden. To illustrate how casually even the most vital issues of national security are being handled, let the story begin from the beginning. In the traumatic aftermath of the 1962 border war with China, it was decided that the IAF must have 45 combat squadrons. To this day, 44 years later, this target has not been achieved. For, no government was willing to issue the requisite “sanction” in pursuance of the decision taken “in principle”. And this has happened even though the famous JRD Tata Committee recommended that the combat element in the Air Force should be 65 squadrons, not 45, and another committee, headed by the veteran C. Subramaniam, suggested later that the number of combat squadrons could be lowered to 55, “in view of resource constraint”. Only in 1982 did the Indira Gandhi government sanction the raising of the combat strength to 35 squadrons. Four and half more squadrons (some of them for training purposes only) were added later, making a total of less than 40. Unfortunately, some of these squadrons are more notional than real. Moreover, several of the combat squadrons consist of MiG-21s that are 40 years old and have to be phased out. The really effective number of combat squadrons is thus down to 34. Notwithstanding all this, the other, positive side of the coin is that in all the wars after 1962, the IAF has given an excellent account of itself. This could be possible because of the bravery and professionalism of its officers and men, of course. But an equally important reason has been that the IAF is bigger than its Pakistani counterpart. During the 1965 war, a number of avoidable mistakes were made. Yet the IAF prevailed on the strength of numbers. In 1971, this country’s Air Force enjoyed air supremacy in the east and air superiority in the west. Any foreign country wanting to send an aircraft or ship to evacuate its nationals from Bangladesh had to take the permission of the Indian command. During Pakistan’s perfidy in Kargil in 1999 it was the combination of the Army’s brilliant use of artillery, the raw courage of the soldiers who climbed the bleak heights, and the IAF’s deft use of the air power that defeated General Pervez Musharraf’s designs, no matter what he says now in his work of fiction. From the foregoing it clearly follows that unless the strength of the combat element in the Air Force is augmented quickly, the result will be dismal. With the rate of obsolescence rising, the number of combat squadrons would fall below 32 in 2011 and to barely over 26 by 2016. That would just about equal the strength of the Pakistan air force that already has 32 F-16 aircraft and is promised another 44 of these multi-role warplanes by the US, for which Pakistan has already paid the money. The formal clinching of the deal, delayed during General Musharraf’s visit to Washington, has been completed for 18 F-16s. Formalities about the rest will also be gone through soon. This is by no means all. China is transferring to Pakistan 200 JF-17 fighter aircraft that the two countries hope to produce jointly in Pakistan later. According to experts, this China-developed warplane is an equivalent of the fourth generation of F-16 class. China is also building aircraft with Russian engines. There is no guarantee that these wouldn’t find their way into Pakistan. Sadly, New Delhi is not paying adequate attention to the Beijing-Islamabad military transactions that include transference of nuclear and missile technology as well as missiles. One final thought. While the maintenance of superiority over Pakistan in air power, naval power and land power is vital, India’s future plans cannot be based on this factor alone. A country of a billion plus people that has a fast growing economy and hopes to be a major power with a much wider international role than hitherto must also have a wider
vision.
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Twist of fate IT was 2 a.m. when the earth rumbled with fury and the township of Latur in Maharashtra lay in shambles. Heart-rending cries echoed in the night sky. Kutcha houses in smithereens — human bodies under debris, household goods peeking out from under the boulders. Wailing shrieks broke into the eerie darkness. Munni and her two siblings had survived this catastrophe, having slept in the courtyard of their single room tenement. When Munni woke to reality she wailed — “Ma.......Baba........,” but her voice was drowned in the din of chaos. Bhure Lal and Devi had won over their worries. Having gone to a final sleep, they no longer needed to worry about the “Mahajan” or the “contractor.” Munni looked dumbstruck. Mothering her siblings to sleep, the nine-year-old girl felt lost in the sea of humanity. The daylight broke, the administration swung into action and the hordes were bundled off to rehabilitation camps. The hungry mouths savoured the “bhaat” and became a listed number on the official records. The extent of loss was more than she could define in words but the official register wanted to calculate it in rupees. She could not name a thing of “value” to qualify into the list. A few sunsets later it was grim reality staring at her. To ease her apathy, she took place of her mother to work under the contractor. The dam needed cheap labour and she had to feed hungry mouths. Her uncle came forward to help but his designs would make her Munni Bai. The gutsy girl’s inner conscience strengthened her to snub the overtures. Then came a godly blessing in the disguise of Pratibha didi, a local social worker. Working under the aegis of “Sawera”, this woman had helped save many a hapless woman in distress. Munni had to flower, she resolved, and intently took up her case with gusto. Social organisations came forward with their offers. Didi finally zeroed down to “SOS Villages” scheme. The twins who were only four years old were to be adopted by a “mother” at Jamnagar, till they could go to the Kindergarten. Munni was to move into the vocational training centre and learn Kutchi (mirror work). There was no place for sentiments in her life. Survival instinct was more forceful than pain of departing from the twins. They too were snug in the new-found comfort. After the initial “celebration” of home, food and new clothes, the children were steered towards the goal of an independent future. Pratibha didi was devoted to her cause like her mentor Herman Gmeiner. This German has consistently put in decades of organised work to establish “SOS Villages”, for supporting orphans. Years slipped by and Munni’s survival instinct made her rise above her circumstances. She proved to be a focused student and learnt her “trade” with finesse. Her teachers marvelled at her work. Exhibitions were put up at the centre on. Durga Pooja, to generate funds. Munni’s work was an instant sellout. The visiting delegation from Germany was gifted her work. On January 26, 2005, she was among the contingent of artisans, going to Germany for the “Festival of India”. Her siblings are training to be mechanics and Munni has pride written on her face as she reflects on years bygone. The “samaj” recently organised a function for mass marriages at its Gandhinagar centre and Munni found a life companion in Kumar, who works as a driver with the Municipal Corporation. The twins came to attend the function and brought along “gifts” from their savings. Life has been generous to her, says Munni. Pratibha didi is catching up with age and Munni has extended her help to promote the cause dear to her. She owes it to society to return a little of all that she has got. Life has turned a full circle. Munni has a family and friends to call her own and continuity of life hasn’t
ebbed.
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Human Rights Diary IN the name of development, the central government appears to be bent on reducing the area of agricultural land and hence curtailing the quantum of food production. While doing so, New Delhi is also scrapping environment laws, a move that violates human rights. The industry is sought to be located at prime, cultivable fields. In the process, there is no consideration for forests, the greenery and even the renewable sources of water. Special Economic Zones (SEZ) are dream projects of the central government aimed at GDP growth in competition to China. It is a fresh wave of the neo-economic agenda pursued by the Vajpayee-led coalition and eagerly promoted by the Manmohan Singh government. On his return from South Africa, the Prime Minister has re-emphasised the need for SEZs and his plea is that only thus will India get $10 billion to $12 billion from abroad. These projects will not only enjoy huge corporate tax-breaks but easy land acquisition, no environmental regulations and removal of labour protections. SEZs are tax havens which will inflict a loss of Rs 90,000 crore on the exchequer, according to the finance ministry. The promise of creating one million new jobs is more illusionary. Some of us, NGOs, met Minister for Industry and Commerce Kamal Nath the other day to voice our protest against the acquisition of agricultural land in Haryana, Punjab, Maharashtra, and UP for industrialists on less than the market price. He assured us (whatever it meant) that the Government of India did not want this to happen and gave us a copy of the letter he had written to chief ministers. The letter requested them “to ensure that the land acquired for the purpose of SEZs in the state is primarily waste or barren land. Agricultural land may be acquired only if necessary to meet the minimum area requirement.” The minister’s plea to chief ministers to acquire even agricultural land to “meet the minimum area requirement” is playing havoc. They are saying in defence that the centre has allowed them to make up the deficit in SEZs through agricultural land. “I can’t help it,” Kamal Nath says. “Land is a state subject and the centre does not come into the picture.” This may well be the legal position. But it is the centre which is behind industry. Surprisingly, the initiative in this field has been taken by the Congress-headed governments. So pet is this project of the Congress that it took to task a Haryana leader who challenged Haryana’s acquisition of 35,000 acres of agricultural land for Reliance. Congress president Sonia Gandhi must have had second thoughts because she is the one who has expressed her opposition to the acquisition of agricultural land. Strangely, she did not listen to the objectors earlier. Kamal Nath, very close to her, should have cautioned her. I do not understand why the government should come into the picture at all. Even today the industrialists talk to the land owners directly and come to strike the purchase price. What is happening in the name of SEZ is that the government acquires the land at a price which is way down the market price. The SEZ promoters have claimed that they have given the state government higher price than the one at which it was acquired. Where does the margin go? Some of it may have been diverted to the treasury but some has found its way to the pockets of political leaders. The worst part of SEZs is that farmers and the casual labour uprooted from the place have to fend for themselves. There is no proper rehabilitation plan. The government’s plea is when a farmer has been “paid” for the land he has no claim on it. This would have been the case if the government had not requisitioned the land to begin with. After doing so – making thousands of acres available to the industry at cheap price – the government cannot shrug its responsibility. It should tell the promoters to retrieve the same size of plot from uncultivable area to make up for the agricultural land. The centre does not seem to oppose the acquisition of one-produce land, knowing well that two-thirds of land in India is one-crop land. Kamal Nath says that the country needs to decide whether it wants industry or not, and if the answer is ‘yes’, it has to acquire land. His argument would carry weight if he were to exclude cultivable land. There is plenty of banjar land or the one which has been overused. The price for industry cannot be the ruination of farmers. What about the labour? Land creates jobs for them. Equally undemocratic is the manner in which the Ministry of Environment and Forests is pushing through an anti-environment, anti-poor version of the Environment Impact Assessment Notification. The ministry has also given the state governments the status they have accorded the corporate sector. Information provided by the Ministry of Environment and Forests in response to an RTI request has confirmed that the ministry had only consulted the industry and its lobby groups while comments sent by many people’s organisations were not even registered. The ministry also brazenly admits that it has specifically consulted “apex industry associations” such as CII, Assochem, FICCI and CREDAI and that a draft of final notification had been circulated to the apex industry associations and central ministries. The faulty notification issued to hand over the responsibility of granting clearance to a large number of projects to the state governments without any checks or counterchecks means that projects will be cleared indiscriminately. According to new instructions, construction projects need not go for screening. They also do not need to conduct public consultation. Several large capacity projects have been left out of the notification altogether. All building and construction projects with less than 20,000 square metres built up area like Vasant Kunj Square mall are now exempted from the notification. All in the name of development!
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Musharraf looking for an additional “nine lives” General Musharraf has raised this question himself and answered it too in his just-released autobiography “In the Line of Fire”. In the book, he has prayed to God to give him more than the cat’s nine lives because by his own count he has used up all his nine chances. In the Prologue “Face to Face with Terror”, General Musharraf has listed his nine close brushes with death as follows: 1. “I first avoided death as a teenager in 1961 when I was hanging upside down from the branch of a mango tree and it broke. When I hit the ground, my friends thought I was dead.” 2. “In 1972 when I was leading a company of commandos as a Major in the Northern Areas of Pakistan, I should have been on a plane of PIA, [Pakistan International Airlines] which crashed into a glacier on a flight from Gilgit to Islamabad. At the last minute I hadn’t boarded it.” 3. The third life General Musharraf got when he did not board the C-130 transport plane which killed President Zia ul- Haq and the then US ambassador on board. General Musharraf had been shortlisted as General Zia’s Military Secretary (MS) and there was a very strong chance of his landing the job. However, at the last moment, another Brigadier was picked. As MS he would have been with Zia. 4. “My closest call was in 1998 when as Commander of the Mangla Corps I was called to the GHQ for a conference. After the conference I went off with a friend to play bridge but my Commander of Aviation brought a helicopter to fly me back to Mangla. I would have readily gone but since I was not traceable, he flew back alone and the chopper crashed and he died.” 5. General Musharraf sees the day of his coup as his fifth life. His reason is that Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif stopped his plane from landing even when the plane had only seven minutes of fuel left. 6 & 7. His two brushes with death in the Indo-Pak war of 1965 accounted for his 6th and 7th lives. 8 & 9. The count of his nine lives is completed with two meticulously planned but unsuccessful assassination bids by terrorists in 2003. Both times, he survived because of sheer luck rather than any special feats from the security agencies.
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DELHI DURBAR As higher education institutions across the country get ready to implement the 27 per cent reservation from the next academic session, which will increase the intake of students considerably, anti-quota groups have decided to keep the reservation debate going. Unwilling to accept the government’s decision to implement quotas, these students who led the anti-reservation protests under the banner of Youth for Equality (YFE), say they will continue to fight. The YFE’s Delhi University chapter, for instance, is going to publish a wall magazine focussing on the issue of reservation in central educational institutions. The magazine they say will help the YFE stay connected with the educated mass and also help team up with like minded people to eradicate the “reservation hazard” from the society. Future of futures
trading The recent controversy over the impact of futures trading at commodity exchanges, on retail market prices, seems to have encouraged the exchanges to hold media workshops. The aim is to educate the mediapersons about the positive impact of the exchanges on the economy. One such workshop was recently organised by the Multi Commodity Exchange of India – one of the largest commodity exchanges in Mumbai, with a daily transaction of over Rs 9000 crore. The trainers, however, found it tough to convince the scribes as to just how the trading by big players and speculators at commodity exchanges would help the small farmers in villages, who cannot even think of participating. When some journalists grilled Deputy Managing Director of the Multi Commodity Exchange Joseph Massey, he was at pains to explain that “the forward trading at the exchange could influence the market price only in the short-term. In the long term the price will be determined by fundamentals of demand and supply and international factors.” However, he was unable to assure whether with the entry of big players like banks or mutual funds would not result in high volatility in commodity prices in the market. He had no answer when a journalist asked “why does the future prices of coffee move in the range of $ 70 to $ 200 at exchanges abroad despite reports of a normal crop in the world market?” However as the Agro and Rural Industries minister tried to welcome the Finance Minister with a shawl, the tall Chidambaram had to literally bow down in being the guest of honour as Mahabir Prasad is considerably shorter in height.
Amidst the laughter from those gathered, one remarked: “Prasad has forced Chidambaram to bow. Let us see if Gandhigiri prevails upon the Finance Minister.” At a reception hosted at the British Council in the national capital, a black cat made its presence felt in more ways than one. Realising that black cats are generally seen as ill omens, the Director of the Council Rod Pryde, addressing the audience at the launch of the British Chevening scholarship 2007, tried to assuage the fears of those present. Typically tongue-in-cheek, he told the Chevening scholars who will be leaving for England shortly that this black cat was lucky and its crossing their path should not be a reason for worry. The cat proved to be quite a source of amusement when it began mewing aloud in response, when Pryde announced that it had come to meet the crème de la crème as the scholars were earlier referred to.
—— Contributed by Smriti Kak Ramachandran, Manoj Kumar and R Suryamurthy
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As a blind man led by another blind man loses his way, so does a man led by Priya go astray.
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Pakistan
Finance Minister P Chidambaram had to literally bow before Gandhian Mahabir Prasad, minister of Small Scale Industries and Agro and Rural Industries, at the inaugural function of the National Expo of Small, Khadi, Village and Coir Industries. Chidambaram can be considered to be advocating laissez-faire economic policies which are contrary to the ideological convictions of Mahabir Prasad.