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Prime Minister in
waiting! Kalpana to Sunita |
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Crisis in
agriculture States need to supplement Central efforts Agriculture rightly dominated the Prime Minister’s address to the National Development Council, which met in Delhi on Saturday to approve the draft approach paper to the 11th Plan.
A 10-point
imbalance
Tempt fate — and
run hard for cover!
Nobility in
economics: Why Phelps is a deserving winner Is Lebanon for the
Lebanese at all? Delhi
Durbar
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Kalpana to Sunita Always
on the lookout for role models, Indians had felt elated when Karnal girl Kalpana Chawla was selected to go to space in American shuttle Columbia in 2003. Who was to know that her life and India’s hopes were to disintegrate in a horrendous accident? The void that the tragedy left was hard to fill. Three years later, those aspirations for reaching the stars have taken wings again with the “out-of-the-world” trip of Sunita Williams. Unlike Kalpana, Sunita happens to be of mixed descent. While her father is from Gujarat, mother is of Yugoslav origin. While Kalpana had her early education in India, Sunita has been born and brought up entirely in the US. And yet, she has strong emotional links with India, a fact strongly proved by her decision to take with her to space a copy of the Gita presented by her father, noted neurologist Dr Deepak Pandya, a Ganesha statue and a packet of samosas. Needless to say that whatever she does during her six-month stint in International Space Station will be avidly watched by everyone from Kashmir to Kanyakumari in India and the rest of the world. Her being of Indian origin is a matter of pride in itself. What makes it all the more endearing is her being a woman. That is a signal achievement in space exploration, considering that NASA has put in space only six women since 1965. Going beyond the boundaries of gravity is a thrilling but daunting task and only the very best can aspire to attempt it. Her achievement will, hopefully, spur millions of Indian women to aim higher in life. That will be the best form of emancipation for them. India has ambitious space plans of its own for the future. A mission to moon is very much on the cards. Such dreams will come true only when there are hundreds of Sunitas and Kalpanas and Rakesh Sharmas in our midst. It is such heroes who teach us all to think big and aim higher. Sky is no longer the limit.
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Crisis in agriculture Agriculture
rightly dominated the Prime Minister’s address to the National Development Council, which met in Delhi on Saturday to approve the draft approach paper to the 11th Plan. After the BJP’s poll debacle, attributed to the neglect of rural India, agriculture has been placed prominently on the UPA agenda. The successive UPA budgets have also laid emphasis on revitalising agriculture. The focus has primarily been on making credit easily available to the farm sector, enhancing and strengthening irrigation facilities and providing relief packages to sections of distressed farmers. This approach cannot be faulted, but it has only limited effect. Though 70 per cent of the population still depends on agriculture, public investment in this sector has not been made to the desired extent. Since agriculture is a state subject, the Centre can only make a limited contribution. It can only persuade the states to invest in
agriculture. Most states, nearly bankrupted by the Fifth Pay Commission, however, look up to the Centre for a solution to the crisis and hardly make their own efforts to the expected level, for lack of funds or otherwise, to tackle the situation. The Prime Minister’s exhortation to the states to effect “difficult policy changes” to achieve 9 per cent GDP growth will, hopefully, make some difference. What holds back agriculture is well known. However, the roadmap outlined by experts, including Dr M.S Swaminathan, head of the National Commission on Farmers, has not been implemented, particularly by states. Whether it is building rural infrastructure or making farm inputs available at reasonable rates, states have not come up to public expectations. Power is a key farm input, but farmers in Punjab and Haryana are yet to be assured regular supply. The sinking watertable has added to farmers’ production costs. Agricultural productivity is abysmally low. No new wheat variety has come out of research institutions in the recent years to raise wheat productivity to the global standards. Rice research is not picking up. The country remains short of lentils. The states will have to realise their responsibility and act decisively for uplifting
agriculture. Waiting for Central bailouts is not enough. |
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One hair of a woman can draw more than a hundred pair of oxen. — James Howell
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A 10-point imbalance A person can fail to get a job because he is not qualified for it, and it may be that being without a job he lacks the means needed for becoming qualified. Therefore, a balance between jobs and means has to be found. If there is an imbalance between them, its causes have also to be found by looking at the deficiencies within the candidate and also those within the system in which he operates. If the system needs to be changed it is better to try first to go by the rules and only then to try, if necessary, to change the rules. But, unfortunately, the Sachar Report fails in these respects. It is focused more on the communal identities of the jobless than on their qualifications, more on communities than on areas, less on what the rules allow already than on what they can allow only if they are changed. It is most emphatic about what is most known already, that on the whole Muslims are worse off than is any other comparable community in India. But even on that it is less illuminating than a report prepared by a working committee of the Planning Commission on the empowerment of minorities. The Planning Commission’s Report found that the enrolment of Muslims in higher and secondary education is significantly lower than the national average, both in the urban and rural areas, being 15 per cent in urban and only 5 per cent in rural areas. Male students among them who got up to the graduation level formed only 1.3 per cent of the total, and female students formed only 0.3 per cent. Male students among them who rose into “higher education” formed only 5.1 per cent of the total even in urban areas and the corresponding figure for female students was only 2.5 per cent. These figures present an astonishing contrast with the high proportion of Muslim children at school even in rural areas, the figure being as high as 70 per cent. But the figure is significantly lower for higher age groups, being only 11.5 per cent at the higher secondary level. The figure for net enrolment of Muslim children is as high as 65 per cent in the age group of 6 to 10 years but it falls to about 20 per cent for the next age group, 11 to 14 years. The same report offers interesting contrasts with corresponding figures for the Scheduled Castes. These also used to be tragically low, but they used to be low for all age groups, including the 6-10 years group, because there was severe resistance by higher caste Hindus to the schooling of the Scheduled Castes of all age groups. On the other hand, the commendably high enrolment figures for Muslim children of the lower age groups show that Muslims as such did not face that kind of resistance. If their enrolment falls so rapidly with the rise of the age of the group, then the reasons must lie elsewhere than in any resistance to the education of Muslims, which is the villain of the piece in the Sachar Report. It is difficult to conceive why non-Muslims who are suspected of preventing 85 per cent of grown up Muslim boys and girls in urban areas and 95 per cent of them in rural areas from going to school would allow the schooling of 70 per cent of young Muslim children. Could the reason for the steep decline of enrolment among grown up Muslims be that, being poorer than Hindus in the corresponding age groups, Muslim boys are harder pressed to seek jobs rather than more education? Or that compared with Hindus, Muslims frown harder upon higher education or public jobs for growing up girls ? Either way, and despite the Sachar Report , the reasons for the steep decline in the enrolment of Muslim boys and girls seem to lie more in the economy and sociology of Muslims than in Hindu communalism. Apart from these contemporary factors, the present predicament of Muslims regarding jobs and education is better explained by what happened from the middle to the late 1940s, the years in which perhaps the bulk of the better educated and better off Muslims of northern India migrated to Pakistan, and they were the front runners in upholding the educational and . economic standards of the Muslims in the North. From that migration have arisen some important features of the present scene, which could also affect the chances of the Sachar proposals meeting their goals, particularly in the northern Indian states. First, the economic, educational and job statistics of the Muslims are much better in the southern states, which are home to Muslims who have better education and jobs. Secondly, and as a result of the first, very different policies will have to be devised for the two groups of states. Third, these policies will have to be much more skewed in favour of Muslims in the northern states if they are to be as well received by the Muslims there as they are likely to be in the southern states. That means, fourth, the non-Muslims in the northern states are likely to resent them more, which, fifth, may well affect their success, considering the different temper of communal history in the North. Sixth, the Sachar Report recommends that Muslims who perform the same kind of jobs as do the SCs and the OBCs should get job reservations in those occupations. The logic of this recommendation is that there is the same kind of caste-based job discrimination among Muslims as well. But many Islamic clerics have already rejected the idea because, they say, Islam forbids such discrimination. Seventh, any special reservation by religion would require an amendment to the Constitution, and it is very unlikely that such an amendment would get the required majorities. This difficulty would be much less if the Sachar Report were to recommend job and seat reservations for special areas, not for special communities, even if the chosen community were in majority in that area. But this does not figure in the Sachar Report. Eighth, the gulf between the SCs and the OBCs on the one hand and Muslims on the other would grow, particularly in the Hindi belt, if jobs presently reserved for non-creamy SCs and OBCs were diverted to a Muslim quota. Much better would it be to make primary education available to all, if not compulsory as well, in all backward areas. That would particularly benefit Muslims because that is where the majority of them reside, and most so in northern India, and yet would not make communal distinctions in law between Muslims and non-Muslims. Ninth, the report points to poorer development of infrastructure like electricity and tele-services in areas of Muslim concentration but it does not say whether this is because of a bias against Muslims or because, being poorer, they cannot generate the same demand-based development as others can. Tenth and finally, it says that the housing conditions for Muslims are “more or less on par” with other communities. But since houses are the most expensive among amenities, are we witnessing here a preference among Muslims for houses instead of education, even though education is the most important single trigger for all other statistics of the
well-being of a community? But the statistic which most lets the cat slip out of the bag of the Sachar Report is its observation that business process outsourcing has provided a “window of opportunity, where, interestingly, a large number of Muslims seem to find employment….proficiency of English (being ) the only criterion for gaining employment …”. That means a job goes where a qualified candidate is “rather than affiliations of any
kind”.
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Tempt fate — and run hard for cover! Mr Saroop Krishen, a retired ICS officer who died on Sunday, used to write scintillating middles for The Tribune from his sickbed. This piece was the last we received from him two days before he passed away last night. — Editor MANY a time luck works against one entirely on its own and without “provocation” of any kind from the victim. There are, however, occasions when people take into their heads to tempt fate and fate readily obliges them in full measure by heaping trouble on them. A Chinese woman rammed her car into another vehicle, and asked to explain gave the startling reply that she was only trying to teach her pet dog to drive. The dog was very fond of crouching on the steering wheel, and she thought she would let him have a try while she operated the accelerator and the brake. She had obviously over-estimated
the “skill” the dog had acquired in driving by seeing his mistress manage the car! She had a very heavy bill to pay for two wrecked cars — her own and the one she had hit to pieces. A man in England, however, decided, in a manner of speaking, to beat that Chinese lady hands down in regard to “original” car driving. The police noticed that a car had erratically negotiated two traffic islands and a corner, and so stopped the vehicle to question the driver. They got the shock of their life to see that he was completely blind! All along he had driven following the instructions given by a companion sitting next to him as to where to steer and when to brake. Both the men have been prosecuted and hauled to the magistrate’s court. In contrast, a Dutch man was run in for a less serious car-induced transgression of the law. He washed his newly bought luxury car quite clean but when it came to drying it he found the chore too cumbersome and time-consuming. So as an alternative he climbed into the car and drove it fast to get the wind to help him out with the drying. Only he over-did things a little. He drove at 108 k.m. per hour in a zone with the speed limit of 58 k.m. The result: the car confiscated by the police and a hefty fine besides. Another man in Holland paid the price for indulging in his weakness for music in the wrong place at the wrong time. He broke into a house and proceeded to ransack the living room. Then he noticed a piano lying there and his penchant for playing it overcame him. He had hardly started when the sound woke up the house-owner who was apparently a light sleeper. He called the police straightaway and that was the end of the music-fond thief’s venture. It was not clear whether the owner was too worried about his property or whether he thought the music he heard fell rather below his standard. Tailpiece: Churchill who was known for his dislike for cliches had someone talk to him about familiarity breeding contempt. “I daresay that is correct,” he responded coldly, “what I do know, however, is that a certain amount of familiarity is certainly necessary for
breeding”. |
Nobility in economics: Why Phelps
is a deserving winner
The
Economics Nobel Prize to Edmund Phelps brings back old memories. Teaching economics at Wharton and the Economics Department at Pennsylavania, and at Swarthmore College in the second half of the Sixties, serious and popular teachers in student ratings, with kindred souls we always complained that the Samuelson text was inadequate and circumscribing. Our seniors bridged the gap between practice, policy and theory. Lawrence Klein was then using the Wharton Model and was earlier hounded by Mcarthy. Sid Weintraub was a pioneer in integrating micro with macro theory. They were sympathetic. Apart from getting more freedom to teach ourselves in a very large class with over twenty sections, we managed to get outstanding outsiders to speak to the entire class of almost a thousand. Phelps was a great hit. I made such a nuisance that my seniors asked me to follow him with economics made relevant to poor countries. This was the Kennedy golden age and there was a systematic attack on the position that economics was only about efficiency, and institutions and income distribution did not matter. The Samuelson text took a middle position. You don’t sell a million copies, by taking a stand. Richard Okun outlined the responsibility of the State of a wages and incomes policy. But old hat Keneysianism, Weintraub called it Classical Keynesianism, was passé. The really radical stuff was going on at Swarthmore College, where visitors like Galbraith made mince-meat of the old style conservatives. To get back to Phelps, he spun a fascinating story of how the wage earner and the profit maker kept on trying to get to terms with each other as the economy pushed to fuller utilisation of resources and the unstable outcomes which followed. Monopolies, both of businesses and of trade unions, were the bees in his bonnet and an
enlightened policy maker would push them to flexibility and prosperity. My teachers were to make me do the numbers and maths for it, but that economics is also about power and efficiency is important. The Indian discussion has not mentioned it, but Phelps also made serious contributions to mathematical growth theory. That the
philistine masks power was a lesson I was to remember in the models my country asked me to make. I was twenty seven and came back home and am sixty seven years young now, but the fire still burns. The pursuit of efficiency and justice is so powerful that India does not let it go and keeps on teaching lessons to those who would play with it. The period was of ferment on understanding the analytics of macro
theory. Hicksian and Patinkin extension of Keynes and the Fisher Friedman contributions were leading to a deeper understanding of the asset spectrum and futures. In terms of tools, at the analytical level in the frontiers of understanding, there are in fact not that many differences. I once asked my then boss the late Sukhomoy Chakravarti why his monetary economics was so conservative, while his economics was radical. His eyebrows furrowed when he was under pressure. He told me that those who didn’t do their sums right were never really going to help the poor. Economics at one level is about power, but at another it is about understanding. I may disagree with Shankar Acharya for example on his values, but admire his insights. Phelps was right there at the point Chakravarti was focusing on in the early Eighties and richly deserves the prize. The gravy train in India is obviously disappointed. Their heroes are those who made a profession of Thacherite Reaganism. As is usual by the time ideas come to the periphery, you get the second rate variants. Here they were and are pedalled by those who made a living off ganging up with those who were always available to criticize Indian thinking in the Seventies and Eighties. This brand of Neo-conservatism went out of fashion after the mid-nineties and the Asian meltdown. It prospers only in this great country, with frustrated old NRI economists and others at home who want to show that the enlightment came only with them They had with the blessings of the establishment, announced their candidates for the prize, with great fanfare. Phelps is much too iconoclastic and original to fill the bill even though a certain brand of serious market economics and study of institutions in which markets can function would go very well with him. But that would raise too many questions and so after he got it, in this country the paparazzi are after him. He is criticized for being “theoretical” and not practical, whatever that means and his ideas parodied by those who should know better. I asked Stiglitz once why his new book doesn’t talk much about India, while in the early Nineties India was there in all the development discussions. He said India is growing well and has nothing much else to contribute in ideas. He had a point, but I am sure only temporarily. In spite of the great efforts being made, not in a very nuanced manner, unadulterated market cola, won’t work. The facts and the argumentative Indian are bound to overcome. |
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Is Lebanon for the Lebanese at all? With
Fouad Siniora’s cabinet hiding in the Grand Serail behind acres of razor wire and thousands of troops - a veritable ‘Green Zone’, while Hezbollah allies brought up to two million supporters into the centre of the city during the weekend to declare the forthcoming creation of a second Lebanese administration. A ‘transitional’ government is what ex-General Michel Aoun called it while Naeem Qassem, Hezbollah’s deputy chairman, spoke ominously of the mass demonstrations as “the separatist day”. So is the Hezbollah militia, which withstood Israel’s disastrous bombardment of Lebanon last summer, really planning a coup on behalf of its Iranian and Syrian backers, as Siniora suspects? Or are Siniora and his cabinet colleagues - Sunni Muslim, Christian and Druze - working on behalf of the Americans and Israelis, as Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, proclaims? Already, Siniora’s administration is being referred to in the American press as Lebanon’s “US-backed government” - the virtual kiss of death for any Arab leader these days - while Aoun’s split with his fellow Christians could prove fatal to him. Only because of his weird alliance with the Hezbollah can the latter claim that their opposition represents Christians as well as Muslims. True to the ironies of Lebanese politics, it was the same former General Aoun who fought a ‘war of independence’ with Hezbollah’s Syrian friends in 1990, a conflict which he lost at the cost of a thousand lives. But even supporters of Siniora’s administration were taken aback by the vast numbers of Lebanese whom Hezbollah could mobilise yesterday, men and women who in many cases came from the villages and urban slums which suffered near-total destruction in this summer’s war. Their speakers played the role of representatives of the poor - “the people of the street” is how one foolish Sunni prelate called them in a sermon on Friday - who had no time for the privileged classes or feudal
pretensions of the government’s supporters: Amin Gemayel, father of the murdered industry minister, Nayla Moawad, widow of a murdered Lebanese president, Saad Hariri, son of the assassinated ex-prime minister Rafiq Hariri, and Walid Jumblatt, son of the murdered Druze leader Kamal Jumblatt. If Lebanon’s politics and history were not so tragic, there would be an element of Gilbert and Sullivan about all this. Siniora, now regularly visited by America’s busy little ambassador, Jeffrey Feltman, was told by one of Feltman’s predecessors only a few years ago that his multiple re-entry visa to the United States was invalid because he, Siniora, was believed to have donated money to a charity associated with - yes - the Hezbollah. To the Arab nations which supported Siniora’s government, Qassem had a simple message: “We are in the hearts of the Sunnis of the Arab world - not you!” And the danger for Siniora is that Qassem’s conviction is probably correct. Indeed, there was a hint of revolution in the air yesterday as the poor and the village youths and the people of the Beirut slums converged on Martyrs’ Square where Rafiq Hariri’s tomb was cordoned off from the crowds -- thus imitating in miniature the very partitioning of Lebanon of which both sides in this ever graver crisis accuse each other. Leila Tueni, the daughter of another of Lebanon’s murdered political leaders, the journalist Jibran Tueni (like all the victims, anti-Syrian), stated in a hall only a few hundred yards from the protests that the real reason why Nasrallah wanted to overthrow Siniora’s government, from which all Shiite ministers have resigned, was to prevent it giving its approval to the UN tribunal intended to try Hariri’s killers -- whom Ms. Tueni and the rest of Siniora’s supporters believe to include some of Syria’s senior intelligence apparatchiks. The sheer size of the crowds apparently permitted Qassem and Aoun to demand a different - or a rival - government. It was as if the Shiites were carrying out a Lebanese census which, for sectarian reasons, has not been held since 1936. But it was not they but Siniora’s supporters who won a majority in the last elections in Lebanon. If that election result - under the terms of Lebanon’s precarious confessional system of polling - were no longer valid, what did this say about the Hezbollah’s respect for electoral politics and Lebanon’s constitution? Is everyone who can rally the masses to the centre of Beirut now to be awarded their own administration? And it was not just the heavily defended look-alike ‘green zone’ around Siniora’s offices that linked Lebanon to Iraq. The growing Shia-Sunni divisions here mirror, in faint, pale but frightening form, the tragedy of the two sects in Mesopotamia. Shiites have twice attacked the Beirut Sunni suburb of Tarek al-Jdeide, a Shiite has already been murdered and turned into an opposition ‘martyr’, and the mufti of the Sunni Qoreitem mosque was reported as attacking the historic Shia imams, Ali and Hussein. Jumblatt has now called for students at the Lebanese University to study at home after a brawl on campus between Shia and Sunni undergraduates. “This university is for all Lebanese,” Jumblatt insisted. But is Lebanon? By arrangement with
The Independent |
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Delhi Durbar It is easy to leave the Centre to take up state politics but it is very difficult to leave the comforts available in the national capital. Even after becoming Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister five months ago BJP’s Shivraj Chouhan has not vacated his MP’s residence allocated to him in Delhi. Finally, though, Chouhan seems to have no other option but to vacate the flat at 7, Pant Marg, which has now been allotted to former union minister Shahnawaz Hussain, who recently entered Lok Sabha from Bhagalpur. Could this be one reason why Shivraj Chouhan wanted his wife to be given a ticket from Vidisha? Capital moves The Delhi Assembly elections are far off but the race in the Delhi BJP for the post of Chief Minister has already begun. Former Chief Minister Sahib Singh Verma is one of the strongest contenders; but Chandni Chowk MP Vijay Goel, a former Minister in the Atal Behari Vajpayee cabinet, has started making his moves in the desired direction. Not only has he started compiling numbers and addresses of the capital’s press corps but he has also launched the Heritage India Foundation to position himself for the battle ahead. Goel, who had overseen the Chandni Chowk festival a few years ago, knows that he has to keep himself in focus and the Foundation would prove to be useful. The Supreme Court-directed sealing drive in Delhi has also provided Goel an excellent opportunity and he has been leading the capital’s trading community from the front. The ‘J’ alliance A new front is in the offing. The unveiling of the AIADMK founder M G Ramachandran’s statue in Parliament was the occasion for the coming together of three cine actresses-turned politicians — J. Jayalalitha, Jayaprada and Jaya Bachchan. This is being seen as a positive sign for the formation of a political front which could emerge as an alternative to the NDA and the UPA. Former chief minister and AIADMK supremo J. Jayalalitha had spoken about political realignments being on the cards both at the Centre and in the states, after her meeting with SP chief and UP Chief Minister Mulayam Singh Yadav. His master’s voice Rashtriya Janata Dal MP from Sheohar, Sitaram Singh, used the time
allotted to him to speak during a discussion on the demand for excess grants for the Railways, to eulogise his leader and union Railway minister Lalu Prasad Yadav. The Lok Sabha MP quoted a national daily that described Lalu Prasad Yadav as great and opined that he would soon be ranked next to Rafi Ahmed Kidwai and Lal Bahadur Shastri. A sharp and quick witted MP reminded Sitaram Singh that Shastri had resigned following a railway accident. But Sitaram Singh pressed on to talk about a survey which gave Yadav a score of 6.3 on a scale of 10. Contributed by S Satyanarayanan, Satish Misra and Tripti Nath |
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