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Dereliction of duty Cut taxes on oil |
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Vetoing a marriage
Inflation as the
centre-piece
Death be not proud
Human organs market goes global How they ‘take out the trash’ in DC Pulses: no alternative to import
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Dereliction of duty ONE of the primary functions of a Member of Parliament is to ask relevant questions in the House. It is for this reason that the MPs have traditionally been looking forward to taking part in the Question Hour proceedings in both Houses of Parliament. It gives them an opportunity to ask supplementary questions if they are not satisfied with the answers provided on the floor of the House by the minister concerned. A member who has done his homework can at times find inconsistencies in the answers given by the government on a particular subject and take it to task on that very account. It is through their questions that the people at large come to know, for instance, how much rainfall has occurred in Cherrapunji this year or how big is the shortfall in wheat procurement this season. In other words, Question Hour is one of the most important instruments in the hands of the members to keep the Treasury benches on their toes. Unfortunately, present-day MPs do not seem to attach much importance to Question Hour as is borne out by the fact that on Monday last as many as 13 questions, which were listed for answering that day, had to be skipped. This happened because 21 members who had asked these questions were not present in the Lok Sabha during Question Hour. Last Thursday, nine questions had to be skipped, as 15 members were absent. This was sheer dereliction of duty by the MPs. Speaker Somnath Chatterjee has rightly expressed his anguish over the absenteeism, which has, in fact, made a farce of Question Hour. However, it would be wrong to see the incident in isolation. It marks the general lack of interest members show in the functioning of Parliament. Instances when members have to be alerted about the lack of quorum in the House are quite common. If the cost of preparing answers to questions asked in Parliament is computed, it will be a huge sum. So by asking questions and then absenting themselves from the House, the members concerned cause an enormous loss to the state exchequer. What’s worse, the people are denied information, which they can get only through their elected representatives. Small wonder that the general perception about parliamentarians, as the Speaker has referred to, has not been very complimentary. It could not have been otherwise with MPs making news for the wrong reasons like asking questions for money and ferrying people to foreign countries on the strength of their diplomatic passports. |
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Cut taxes on oil IT is widely known that the central and state taxes on petrol and diesel are unacceptably high. For instance, in Delhi taxes and duties account for 53 per cent of the petrol price. In the case of diesel, the taxes make up 31 per cent of the Rs 30.25 a litre price. Some of the state governments tax more than Delhi, but subsidise diesel largely for the benefit of farmers and transporters. When the oil prices shoot up, the government’s tax collections from the petroleum products too go up accordingly. Thus, while under public pressure the government provides relief to the consumer by delaying or not raising the oil prices corresponding to the global increase, it gets higher revenue from higher oil prices. This anomaly has often been pointed out to the government in the media, but to no avail. Now a parliamentary standing committee on petroleum has raised the issue of excessive taxation on oil and called for a cut in the taxes. Suggesting the abolition of the ad valorem component in the excise duty on oil, the committee has noted that the taxes are too steep and result in higher retail prices of petroleum products. The Punjab government, for example, levies a very stiff sales tax of 27.5 per cent on petrol, making its retail price the highest in the region. The committee’s recommendations are timely. Inflation is now at a high and the government is making desperate efforts to soften it. The prices of essential commodities can come down if oil becomes cheaper. The Centre slightly reduced the duty on oil when the global prices had crossed $70 a litre, but not to the desire level. The states too look up to the Centre for oil price reduction without sacrificing their own revenue from oil. The states’ reluctance to cut the taxes is understandable and they may not oblige the Centre unless alternative sources of revenue are found or made available. |
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Vetoing
a marriage ONE cannot help feeling that at least some of the panchayats have nothing worthwhile to do. Only such idle representatives can take upon themselves the responsibility of deciding who can marry whom. The other day, the panchayat of Mansoorpur Badala village near Adampur used its veto against the marriage of a boy to a girl of the same village. According to its perverted logic, this marriage between a boy and a girl who are villagemates was wrong and had set a bad precedent for the village youth. As if trying to be bigger than the law of the land was not bad enough, the panchayat members even went to the extent of blackening the faces of the “culprits” and parading them through the streets. The couple was also told to leave the village. If this is not a kangaroo court, then what is? The panchayat was harking back to the medieval times when villages were tiny and most of them comprised progenies of the same ancestors. Applying the same yardstick today when villages have grown in size is not only illegal but also absurd. By the same silly logic, no one can marry a girl from the same city as well because that will amount to marrying one’s own sister! What is heartening is that the couple did not take this atrocity lying down and has complained to the police, who ought to enforce the right of the two adults to marry without any hindrance put up by the panchayat. There have been many instances, especially in Haryana, where community elders forced couples to annul their marriages because they happened to be from the same gotra. Reprehensible that this practice is, this kind of fatwas were issued only by caste panchayats. When the same thing is done by elected representatives, it becomes all the more reprehensible. As it is, we are having far too many recruits in the moral police. Panchayat members must not be allowed to join their ranks. |
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I respect faith but doubt is what gets you an education.— Wilson Mizner |
Inflation as the centre-piece THE rate of inflation today is not high at 6 per cent as compared to the difficult times in the past when it touched double-digit levels. But everyone knows that inflation, even when moderate, hits the poor and the ''aam admi'' the most. It always brings about a redistribution of income from the poor to the rich, especially when the prices of essential commodities rise disproportionately. It affects pensioners and others with "fixed incomes". People whose staple diet is “dal, roti” and a little vegetable (300 to 350 million people live on it) have to cut corners and do with less of essential expenditures on health and education when prices of these basic items rise. Naturally, because it affects every voter, inflation plays havoc during elections and it brings about disastrous results for the ruling party. This has been happening in the recent polls held all over India. Even if the 6 per cent rate of inflation does not seem quite high, middle class people's pockets are invariably pinched and they feel angry with the government. No amount of statistical jugglery can convince them that inflation has actually declined as it did in March. The truth is that inflation can remain moderate even when essential goods are much dearer than before because it all depends on the weight of items included in the basket of commodities used for computing the inflation index. Some important items like manufactured goods have a heavy weight and if their prices are more or less stable, the rate of inflation will remain moderate. This has been happening in the case of the Wholesale Price Index (WPI), commonly used for measuring the rate of inflation, in which food items have less weight than manufactured items. Even when “dal” prices have been rising by more than 30 per cent, the WPI has inched up only by 6 per cent because manufactured goods' prices do not rise much. The Consumer Price Index (CPI), which gives a higher weight to food-items, reflects the rise in the prices of food-items more accurately. Today the CPI is higher than the WPI and is probably a better index for measuring the rate of inflation. The government seems to be very concerned about curbing inflation and many things are being tried -- an increase in the supply of food-items as well as the use of monetary tools to reduce the aggregate demand in the economy. The Reserve Bank of India raised the "repo" rate (the rate at which the central bank lends short-term funds to commercial banks) and commercial banks have in turn raised interest rates (lending rates specially). The RBI has also raised the banks' cash reserve ratio -- the percentage of cash that banks have to keep with them. All these measures have been aimed at squeezing credit because of the belief that there is too much liquidity in the system and the overall demand in the economy is higher than the supply of goods and services or there is "overheating". Consumer spending will be affected by the "squeeze", specially loans taken for real estate, cars and consumer durables. The RBI is playing it cool even in maintaining the value of the rupee against the dollar — in other words it is adopting a "hands" off' policy in preventing the recent hardening by 10 per cent. When the value of the rupee rises On previous occasions, whenever the rupee rose against the dollar suddenly, the RBI would buy up dollars from the financial markets and the value of the rupee would come down a bit. In the process, it would release liquidity in the monetary system but this function the RBI is no longer prepared to undertake. The government has also suspended futures trading of essential commodities and has imported edible oils, cereals and dals to stabilise prices. Yet the prices have not come down drastically. Obviously, the speculators are not convinced that the crisis is over and are still operating from the sidelines and hoarding the domestic supplies so that imports are making a small dent on the overall situation. Meanwhile, the high value of the rupee will result in exports suffering and millions of jobs in the export sector will go. Inflation will thus not only bring about hardship to the people but also unemployment. A hard rupee will mean cheap imports. President Ronald Reagan had controlled inflation by cheap imports. But in the US, almost all consumer goods are imported and so the policy worked. In India, it is not consumer goods that are the main items of import but oil, capital goods and raw materials. Tightening the credit to the private sector will also have a long-term adverse impact on the economy (as it happened in 1995) because it will not only mean more expensive housing and car loans but also more expensive essential operations that the corporate sector has to undertake— like upgrading technology, capacity expansion and investment in infrastructure. Tightening of credit in the past led to a long recession in India, which should not be repeated. Basically, the policy makers have not been able to foresee the danger of having a negligible buffer stock of essential commodities. The government has not been able to control speculators and hoarders and it has not been able to bring in supplies on time to supplement the declining stocks. The signals of a weak policy-making machinery and slow-moving imports have been easily picked up by traders and speculators. Perhaps, the long-term solution lies in giving a boost to agriculture without delay so that such crisis situations do not arise in the future. Monetary policy, if it is too strong, will only cause harm and the hard or high-value rupee against the dollar will cause exports to fall, specially when India's competitors have undervalued currencies. China has managed to keep inflation at bay ( around 2 per cent) and has never bothered to revalue the yuan beyond a minuscule amount of 2.9 per cent. Its exports are flourishing as a result and employment is growing. Unlike in India, the "aam admi" in China has nothing much to complain
about.
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Death be not proud
I
know you will promptly put me down as an ogre and a monster and I suppose I will have to live with that odious disopprobation. You see, I have a rather strange failing — I am an avid collector of oddities and printer’s devil that creep unnotived into otherwise solemnly worded obituary notices. No I am a disillusioned Bangalorean, griping about the cost of living, crumbling infrastructure and crime and rapacious ways of land developers and apartment promoters. My drooping spirits were miraculously revived when I read the following obit notice. “Mr so-and-so has attained the heavenly feet of Bangalore.” Fancy Bangalore having a heavenly feet. After that, there was no stopping me and my pride in being a native Bangalorean went up by a couple of notches. I could have sworn that I was reading a sensational news agency despatch about a pitched encounter between security forces and Pak-trained militants in the Baramula sector in the Kashmir valley for the word “Cartridge” was there. It was as plain as the nose on my face. I then realised with a sense of shock that what I was reading was, in fact, a sad obit notice and that the word “cartridge” had slyly inveigled itself in place of “cortege.” So our old friend, the wily printer’s devil had struck with his characteristic vengeance and skillfully dribbled past stout defences put up by keen and hawk-eyed proof-readers. I refuse to believe that scotsmen are grim-visaged folk with little or no sense of humour. Take, for instance, the following obit notice which appeared a few years ago in the Glasgo Herald. It read, “Angus Macpherson has left for his heavenly abode.” The next day appeared a sequel in the same column, “Great anxiety in heaven. Angus Macpherson hasn’t arrived yet.” British peer Lord Bessborough woke up one fine spring morning feeling fit as the proverbial fiddle and reaching for the newspaper, he was startled out of his stately wits to see his name in the obituary column announcing his sad demise. Flummoxed, his lordship lost no time in getting the delinquent paper on the phone. A contrite sub-editor did apologise, but added wonderingly, “But where are you calling from?” Then there was this obituary notice I spied in an upcountry newspaper. “The diseased leaves behind his wife and three children.” If newspaper managements decide to crack down on the errant staff in its composing section and a crimson-faced personnel manager sends down a grimly worded memo — “Sack that printer!”, you can be sure that the message will get garbled in transmission and it will read “Sack that
painter!” |
Human organs market goes global IF you lose your job, you can sell your home. If you lose your home, you can sell your possessions. If you lose your possessions, you can prostitute yourself. And if you lose everything else, you can sell one more thing: your organs. Twice in the past month, transplant experts from around the world have convened in Europe to discuss the emerging global market in human organs. Two maps presented at the meetings tell the story. One shows countries from which patients have traveled for organs in the past three years: Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, South Korea and Taiwan. The other shows countries from which organs have been sold: China, Colombia, Pakistan and the Philippines. The numbers on the maps add up to thousands. According to the World Health Organization, the annual tally of international kidney transactions alone is about 6,000. The evidence includes reports from brokers and physicians, accounts from Indian villages, surveys of hospitals in Japan, government records in Singapore and scars in Egyptian slums. In Pakistan, 40 percent of people in some villages are turning up with only one kidney. Charts presented at the meetings show that the number of “donations” from unrelated Pakistanis is skyrocketing. Two-thirds of the people receiving these organs are foreigners. Data from the Philippines show the same thing. The first successful organ transplant took place half a century ago. Since then diabetes, hypertension and other kidney-destroying diseases have spread. Antibiotics have improved, as have drugs that suppress the immune response to foreign organs. More people need transplants, and more can be saved by them. But donations haven’t kept up with demand. An estimated 170,000 patients in the United States and Europe are on transplant waiting lists. More than 70,000 Americans are waiting for kidneys, and the list has grown by almost 5,000 per year. People are dying. Instead of waiting, many patients have set out to recruit their own donors. They started with billboards, then moved to Web sites such as MatchingDonors.com, JoeNeedsALiver.com and HelpMyGrandpa.com. Around the world, people have learned that their organs are assets. Peruvians, Ukrainians, Chinese hospitals and American prisoners advertise their innards. Last year, a South Korean playwright used his kidney as collateral for a loan. Politicians have tried to rein in this market. The United States banned organ sales two decades ago. India did the same in 1994, and China followed last year. But when lives are at stake, rules get bent. To procure more organs, doctors have discarded brain-death standards, donor age limits and recipient health requirements. States have let transplant agencies put patients on life support, contrary to their living wills, to preserve their organs. If Congress revises its ban on organ sales, as some advocates hope, lawmakers in South Carolina plan to offer prisoners reduced sentences in exchange for organs or bone marrow. If governments can’t control wages or prices in a global economy, they certainly can’t control the purchase of extended life. In the past two years, Israeli organ brokers shifted their business from Colombia to China for faster service. If China closes its doors, they can shift again. In Pakistan, kidneys already sell for a fraction of what Chinese hospitals charged. Brokers can compare organ prices from country to country, just like wheat and corn. Already, bans on organ commerce are crumbling. Indians who lost their livelihood in the tsunami of 2004 sold their kidneys, ignoring the law. Bulgaria imposes stiff sentences on organ traders, but that didn’t deter a local hospital from serving Israeli transplant tourists last year. Nor did China’s ban stop a Chinese hospital from offering a liver to a BBC correspondent. Three weeks ago a Korean newspaper reported that China’s organ crackdown had simply raised the price of a Chinese kidney in South Korea. Some reformers think they can solve the organ shortage and tame the market by legalising sales. Their latest proposal, presented at one of the European meetings last week by Arthur Matas of the University of Minnesota, is a single-payer system for organs. It’s half-libertarian and half-socialist. On the one hand, Matas says markets for eggs and sperm are harmless, kidney purchases can save countries money, and offering poor people cash for organs is no more coercive than offering them money to work in mines or join the army. On the other hand, he thinks the government can fix kidney prices and determine who gets them. Good luck. As any country with national health insurance knows, people find ways to buy more than they’re allotted. Ration medical care abroad and affluent foreigners will come here. Ration organs here, and affluent Americans will go abroad, as they’re already doing. It’s true that payments would elicit more “donations.” But studies reviewed at the meetings in Europe show that flooding the market with purchased organs reduces the incentive to donate. The key to reversing the organ market is to turn that equation on its head. Stop fighting capitalism and start using it. What’s driving the market is scarcity. Americans, Britons, Israelis, Japanese and South Koreans are going abroad for organs mostly because too few of their countrymen have agreed to donate organs when they die. Because if the dying can’t get organs from the dead, they’ll buy them from the living. By arrangement with
LA Times-Washington Post |
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How they ‘take out the trash’ in DC IN Washington DC they call it “Taking out the Trash” time – the dead hours of late Friday afternoon when a government department dumps an embarrassing piece of news, hopeful it will be overlooked by the Saturday papers and otherwise lost and forgotten amid the pleasures of the weekend. And last Friday provided a classic of the genre. At 5.30 pm the surprise news came over the wires: Randall Tobias, 65, a deputy secretary of state in charge of US foreign aid programmes and a former chairman of the Eli Lilly pharmaceutical company, had resigned “for personal reasons,” effective immediately. The ritual tributes flowed in: “a rich legacy on which he can look back with justifiable pride,” declared Sean McCormack, spokesman for Condoleezza Rice. A couple of hours later the sensational truth emerged. Mr Tobias, by all accounts a much liked figure, had quit because his name was about to surface in a long simmering scandal about a high class prostitution business in Washington DC, run by a woman based in California, whose clients may have included some of the biggest names in town. The affair of the ‘Washington madam’ first became public knowledge earlier this year. Few details emerged - with one irresistibly titillating exception. The lady in question had an exhaustive list of names and phone numbers of those who had sought her business. Washington being Washington, when this other shoe would drop was merely a matter of time. Now it is about to, and the hapless Mr Tobias promises to be just the start of it. In one of the more remarkable public appearances here in a long while, a middle aged lady, demure in a navy blue suit, long dark hair and large horn-rimmed glasses appeared this Monday on the steps of the venerable DC district courthouse to read a statement to reporters. Her name is Deborah Jeane Palfrey. For 13 years according to court papers, she ran a firm that operated across the DC area, called Pamela Martin & Associates. She maintains this was an above board enterprise, “a high-end adult fantasy firm which offered legal sexual and erotic services across the spectrum of adult sexual behaviour.” If some of her girls over-stepped the mark, Ms Palfrey contends, that was their fault, not hers. For prosecutors however it was a call girl ring, featuring college-educated young ladies, for whose attentions the going rate was $300 an hour. Whatever the truth of the matter, one thing is already clear. Hell hath no fury like a madam scorned. Ms Palfrey considers herself a victim, placed in an impossible position when the IRS tax authorities last October froze “her assets and entire life savings, thus rendering her unable to hire lawyers to defend her against such baseless allegations. So what is a lady do in these circumstances? She must make the best of the one asset she does have left: in this case, those names and numbers. Initially, she told reporters in a fine imitation of a damsel in distress, she considered selling the phone records. Quickly however she thought better of the idea, for fear the documents “might end up in the possession of an unscrupulous person or persons.” Perish the thought. Her decision moreover had nothing to do with the fact that a Court had issued an order barring her from doing so. It was “an ethically conscientious choice,” taken by herself and Montgomery Blair Sibley, a flamboyant lawyer whom Ms Palfrey does seem to have found, despite her advertised impecunity. In the end the pair decided to hand over – for free of course – a sampling of 46 lbs of phone invoices and bills to “a responsible news outlet” – in this case ABC News. And she added, sweetly venomous, although ABC News was under “no obligation whatsoever to me,” she did expect their reporting “to help identify other potential witnesses for my defence.” By seizing her assets, the federal authorities had left her no choice in the matter. But wasn’t this just blackmail, a reporter asked Mr Silbey. “Blackmail?,” came the reply, “No, just the due process of law.” All will be revealed on Friday, in the ABC programme ‘20/20,’ in which Mr Tobias is expected to appear. In the meantime Brian Ross, the ABC reporter on the story, claimed he had been told by Tobias that “he had had gals come over to the condo to give me a massage.” But he maintained, there had been “no sex.” Thus far the only public figure of note to surface in the affair was Harlan Ullman, a former naval officer who helped devise the military doctrine of ‘Shock and Awe’ – the use of dominant force and spectacular displays of power to overwhelm an opponent, that featured in the initial attack on Iraq in March 2003. “The allegations do not dignify a response,” was his terse comment after his name was contained in documents filed in court last month. By arrangement with
The Independent |
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Pulses: no alternative to import THE problem with regard to pulses has long existed but is being highlighted now since it has assumed a political dimension. It is known that the area grown under pulses has remained constant for over five decades. It is also known that the production of pulses and per hectare productivity have not increased. With the population continuing to grow, it is no wonder that the per capita availability has declined and is likely to continue to do so. The per capita availability has fallen from 36 grams per day in the nineties to 33 grams per day in the last few years. In the fifties, it was as high as 85 grams per day. The reasons for this are also fairly well understood. Pulse crops are grown under rain-fed conditions and mostly on marginal soils, with practically little or no management inputs. The fraction of the area under pulses which is irrigated has not increased and has remained constant at eight to ten per cent over the decades. The situation is not likely to change drastically over the foreseeable future. The reasons for this are also fairly obvious. Even for crops like wheat, which is grown mostly under favourable environmental conditions with more than 85 per cent of the area irrigated, both productivity and production have been stagnating for the past seven to eight years, making imports inevitable. With all the pronouncements to extend irrigation to an additional ten million hectares, it is unlikely that the irrigated area under pulses will increase. It is clear our past strategies to enhance productivity have not worked. Even for crops like wheat, where significant productivity gains were achieved, our past strategies are no longer working. It is true that low investments in agriculture are the culprit. India has a vast network of agricultural research and educational organisations aimed at improving productivity. A casual look at annual reports of the department of Agricultural Research and Education show that new crop varieties and technologies with a potential for increased production are given out every year. What they mean to the farmer is anybody’s guess. Reading those reports, one does not even get a feeling of the existence of a problem. The ministry of agriculture organises meetings every season to plan for achieving production targets every year, only to see these targets remain unrealised. Now that there is some indication of a problem, one can start thinking of solutions. Even with well considered strategies it takes years if not decades for research and development results to start showing up. For pulses, even with the best of strategies, productivity increases, at best, will only be modest. Without those strategies in place it will not be possible to even maintain the present productivity levels. The earlier we take the view that import of pulses will be the best strategy in the short and in the long run, the better it would be. The writer is the director of the Centre for Advancement of Sustainable Agriculture, National Agricultural Science Centre Complex, New Delhi. |
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