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Rule of
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Boost to employment Cooperation is better
than competition On Record
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Rule of law enhances national security India’s internal security problems, arising from varied sources, are influenced by a host of factors among which are its past history, geography, colonial legacy, a burgeoning population, sharp social and economic disparities and complex socio-cultural and ethno-religious traditions which interplay freely in our secular democracy. As events in the past decades have shown, regional and global developments have also been impacting significantly on our security concerns. From 1947 onwards, the country has faced varied internal security problems. Some more serious threats have emanated from Pakistan’s unceasing efforts to seize Jammu and Kashmir and its sustained strategy to create chaos and disorder to destabilise and “break up” India. India has been facing increasing internal security threats in the past and today public order in about 40 per cent of the districts is seriously affected by insurgencies, terrorist activities or political extremism. Since the early 1980s, Pakistan’s ISI has succeeded in launching terrorist activities in India. Punjab had suffered enormous human and economic losses for over a decade. Benefiting from the experience gained from its forays into Punjab, Pakistan launched a proxy war in Jammu and Kashmir at the end of 1989. For over two decades now, the continuing wave of terrorism has resulted in the loss of thousands of lives, ruining of the economy and, worst of all, shattering the historical and secular fabric of Kashmir. The deployment of Central police forces or the Army for carrying out anti-insurgency or anti-terrorist operations may not yield the expected outcome unless the entire state administrative machinery, led by the Chief Minister, devotes continuous organised attention to sensitively dealing with the root causes which contributed to the breakdown of public order. Time-bound initiatives will need to be implemented to identify and resolve the social and economic problems or the political demands and aspirations of the agitating groups. Simultaneously, the entire apparatus of the state administration would require to devote close and continuous attention to providing effective governance, systematic attention being paid to ending the day-to-day difficulties faced by the common man, particularly those which may have emerged on account of the ongoing disturbed situation. To timely deal with the arising internal security problems, the state governments need to exercise constant vigil, particularly in regard to the complex pending issues, and launch prompt initiatives to open meaningful dialogues with the leaders of the aggrieved groups or communities. Experience has shown that very high human and economic costs have to be paid if there is a failure to timely deal with the issues which can lead to conflicts and violence. The situation is further complicated when a violent agitation, arising from a sensitive demand, is dealt with merely as a law and order problem and the disturbance is sought to be quelled with the application of force. The continuing determined efforts of adversary external agencies to destabilise India by spreading religious fundamentalism, inciting tensions which lead to conflicts, and perpetrating violence and subversion have generated challenges which impinge on issues of external security management. As issues relating to internal and external security have got inextricably intertwined, the Centre should evolve an holistic approach to internal security management in close coordination with the states. Internal security cannot be maintained satisfactorily in the country unless the states effectively discharge their constitutional duty of maintaining peace and public order in their realms. The states cannot pass on this crucial responsibility to the Centre as has been the trend in the past. A signal failure of the states has been the continued neglect and political exploitation of their police organisations. This has most adversely affected the discipline, morale, efficiency, honesty and trustworthiness of the constabulary. It is essential that every state undertakes a time-bound programme to enlarge, train and equip its police to effectively manage the existing and emerging challenges as well as to provide very strong support for the implementation of the Centre’s initiatives to maintain public order in the entire country. In the aforesaid context, it has also to be noted that lawlessness cannot be controlled and internal security maintained unless the entire framework of the criminal justice system functions with speed, fairness and transparent honesty. Besides the enormous logistical inadequacies in the justice delivery system, the integrity of the magistracy and the subordinate judiciary is seriously tainted. In the recent past serious allegations of questionable integrity have been raised even against those who man the superior echelons in our judicial structure. Most urgent measures need to be taken to clean up the justice administration apparatus and enlarge and strengthen it to deliver speedy and effective justice. While we continue to have hundreds of altogether obsolete and irrelevant laws, most of which were enacted during the colonial period, we do not have an adequately stringent law, applicable all over the country, which can effectively meet the requirements of dealing with terrorist offences, cyber crimes and the fast growing areas of organised criminality which pose a grave threat to national security. We also do not have a Federal Crime Agency which can deal with the serious offences committed by criminal networks whose activities may spread across the states, across the entire country and various foreign lands. We need a comprehensive law for dealing with serious economic offences which, if not checked in time, have the potential of disrupting the national economy. Today, terrorist and criminal networks operate in a borderless world. The grave challenges posed by their activities cannot be tackled if the various law-enforcing agencies continue to operate within their respective limited jurisdictions. What is urgently required is an appropriate legal framework and an extremely well-considered strategy which is executed in most effective coordination between the Centre and the states, to deal with each and every aspect of internal security management. Another matter for serious concern relates to the failure, over the past six decades, to develop a pool of functionaries who have been especially trained to manage the security apparatus at the Centre. Only the Intelligence Bureau has a sub-cadre of deputationist Indian Police Officers who, after acquiring the required experience, comprise the core of the Bureau and can spend their entire careers in this agency. R&AW, the agency for external intelligence, has been facing serious personnel problems, and recently there have been a number of incidents of grave professional failures. The officers assigned to posts in the Home Ministry, drawn from various services and cadres, are not required to possess any past experience in the field of security management. The situation in the states is much worse. Despite the serious challenges to national security, it has still not been recognised that security management can no longer be entrusted to persons who have no training and experience in this field. It is also no longer viable to entrust the work of intelligence agencies only to officers of one particular service. Very high priority must be accorded to raising a pool of adequately trained and trusted officers who can be assigned to posts in the intelligence agencies and the departments and ministries which are responsible for managing internal and external security. I had proposed (in the Task Force Report on Internal Security, September 2000) that the government may consider the establishment of a dedicated Security Administration Cadre which comprises officers selected from among volunteers from the civil and police services, defence services and other relevant areas. It was envisaged that such a pool of officers, in various age groups, would be properly trained and assigned to posts in the security management machinery. After critically assessing their performance, the selected officers could be allowed, as is done in the Intelligene Bureau, to enjoy open-ended tenures so that, over time, they acquire the much-needed professional expertise which is sorely lacking in the existing set-up. It was projected that once such a dedicated cadre gets adequately established, the government would be able to select the most suitable officers from within this pool of officers to man posts at given levels in the Union Home Ministry, the intelligence agencies, the National Security Council Secretariat, the Ministry of Defence and other security management-related areas. Side by side, the states could be provided the required support, particularly well-designed training facilities, to raise similar cadres. The government had approved the aforesaid approach in early 2001. Nearly seven years have elapsed since then. It is apparent that the government does not intend to terminate the continuing practice of even the topmost posts in the security apparatus being filled by persons who have no past experience in security management. Considering the extremely worrying scale and pattern of the internal security failures in the recent past, the Centre shall need to significantly enlarge the capacity of its intelligence agencies, and to also ensure that the states take similar action so that constant vigil can be effectively kept across the country. The Centre would also need to most vigorously pursue the states to ensure that the functioning of their police forces is completely depoliticised and their autonomous working entrusted to the best available officers, known for their integrity and professionalism. Speediest possible measures must also be taken to revive the criminal justice system and restore its credibility. It is equally important that the state Chief Ministers urgently ring themselves around to fully understanding the altogether grave consequences if they fail to maintain peace and order within their jurisdictions or dither in providing total support and coordination to the Centre’s initiatives to make the management of internal security more effective. Effective enforcement of the rule of law is crucial to the maintenance of national security and delivery of good governance. Any threat to constitutional values shall pose a threat to the very foundations of our polity and society and, consequently, to the very unity and integrity of the country.n The article has been excerpted from the writer’s Admiral Ramdas Katari Memorial Lecture delivered on December 7. Mr Vohra, a former Union Home and Defence Secretary, is now the Government of India’s Special Representative on Jammu and Kashmir
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Profile The Board of Control for Cricket in India’s decision to impose a blanket ban on the chief selector of the Indian team, Dilip Vengsarkar, to stop writing his column looks absolutely irrational. A cricket legend of his time and decorated with India’s top sports honour, the Arjuna Award, Vengsarkar claims he gets paid Rs 40,000 per column and his yearly total income from writings comes to Rs 40 lakh. One wonders if the claim, as reported, is true; even best columnists do not get that amount. It is also doubtful if the BCCI can ever compensate him for that staggering sum. Vengsarkar is now 51 and it will be sad indeed if he has to give up writing his columns. Also, it will be loss to cricket-lovers as few can provide that insight as Vengsarkar when analysing one-dayers or five-day match. Those who have read his columns can vouch that they make interesting reading and throw light on many hitherto unknown facets of the gentleman’s game. Long years of his on-field performance, for which he was given the Arjuna award, is vividly reflected in his writings. The Government of India decorated him with the Padma Shri in 1987 for his contribution to Indian cricket. Vengsarkar made his debut on national cricket scene with a breezy score of 110 for Bombay against the Rest of India in the Irani Trophy match at Nagpur in 1975, taking in the process a heavy toll of Bedi and Prasanna, then at their peak. He was straightaway inducted into the Indian team but success was rather slow in coming. It was not until the tour of Australia in 1977-78 that he established himself in the side and for the next 15 years he was one of the batting bulwarks. Tall and slimly built Dilip was basically an elegant stroke player but on his day he could be tormentor of even the strongest attacks. He was India’s number three for many years and from that pivotal position guided the fortunes of the country’s batting for
more than a decade. From the late Seventies and Eighties, he was among the best batsmen in the country and, during a purple patch in the Eighties, he was a leading player of the world. His best known feat, of course, was being the first to score three hundreds against England at Lord’s. A superb player of drives, Vengsarkar could also pull effortlessly and hook fearlessly. With Sunil Gavaskar, he holds the Indian record for the second wicket in Tests —344 unbroken against West Indies in Calcutta in 1978-79. He led the country in 10 Tests, but lost the captaincy in 1989 following a controversial tour of the US to play some festival matches. At the time of his retirement in 1992, he was second only to Gavaskar in runs and centuries scored in Tests.
In his retired life, Vengsarkar started Elf-Academy in 1995 and became Vice-President for the Mumbai Cricket Association in 2003. Though he was the front runner for the post of the Chairman, Selection Committee, he opted out because of his policy against zonal representation. He, however, accepted the job of the Chairman of selectors of the BCCI in September 2006. Dilip was made Chairman of the Talent Resource Development Wing when it was created in 2002 to find cricket talents within the country. In spite of having loopholes in the team selection process, the TRDW through an objective assessment system, recommended some indubitable talent that had then made it into the Indian team. In fact, most players in the Indian team were from the districts.
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— Russian President Vladimir Putin People think that as a Union Minister I can implement schemes with a single signature. But I can do only one per cent of the work. For the rest, I have to struggle. — Union Health Minister
Dr Anbumani Ramadoss — Hugo Chevez, the Venezuelan President, after he lost his bid to have 69 constitutional changes passed by a referendum
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Boost to employment Punjab
is lacking in adequate employment opportunities. This has forced the youth to migrate to other states, even foreign countries. While the country has received a liberal share of foreign investment, Punjab hasn’t. Even Punajbi NRIs settled abroad have avoided investing in the state. Haryana, however, has become a more favourable destination for such investment. Punjabis have a good knack for entrepreneurial skills. This has transformed Punjab from a high deficit state in 1947 to a surplus state. Punjab was the first to usher in green revolution and it took several years for other states to follow suit. Punjab’s farmers experimented with high yielding varieties of seed, improved farm equipment and other inputs developed by farm scientists and researchers in their universities and agricultural research centres. They took the lead in turning the poor farm land into a surplus one. Punjab has excelled in engineering. Small and medium industries have spread out liberally. Medium-scale engineering workshops and a few large industries are located in urban areas. After the development of latest technology, they have shifted to service centres. Several items in engineering industry have been developed by skilled workers with almost no formal education. Most workers have started their own small and medium units and are doing good business in neighbouring states. Lack of coal and iron ore in Punjab hinders the growth of large engineering units. Though service centres have come up, Punjab should think how to install large plants for making cars, buses, trucks, three and two wheelers. The government should also encourage assembly plants which could be developed later into full-fledged manufacturing units. With a thriving market for these products, there would be a rising demand for skilled and semi-skilled personnel. Further, the development of trade with Pakistan, Afghanistan and Central Asian countries will also help Punjab. Punjab has done well in the service sector — transport, hotels and restaurants. As for transport, it has an all-India presence in goods carriers. There are service workshops countrywide. In city bus and taxi business, they have a strong presence, but in view of protests from the local population, they have restricted entry. Efforts should be made to develop the transport sector on modern lines. It holds out promise for the unemployed youth. The private sector can attract youth by installing commercial vehicles plants. Punjab has a thriving market for hotel industry, low and high budget hotels, restaurants, wayside dhabas and the like. They have done exceedingly well outside the state too. Even in five-star hotels, they are in the forefront. M. S. Oberoi’s East India Hotel Group has countrywide chain of world class hotels. While there are some five-star hotels in Delhi, they don’t have branches in Chandigarh or Punjab. The building industry too can absorb our manpower. It has good scope for several allied activities like steel and cement. In the absence of steel and cement plants, Punjab has to import the vital inputs in the construction industry from outside the state which escalates the cost. Thus, we must economise the use of these inputs by developing alternative products and stepping up research in building material. Such research should be financed by the builders and the government. It would help reduce the construction cost. The government should tap the available entrepreneurial skills in Punjab by providing incentives like communication training and educational facilities. The quality of rural education too has to improve. Our approach to primary and middle school education is not attractive to build up talent in rural areas, especially in developing skills in agro-industries and such other areas. Punjab is still living under Green revolution, Phase I. That’s why, it is stuck in the mire of poor rural development. We have delayed our entry in Phase-II of this revolution. This should have been done along with globalisation around 1991. We must provide skills to our people and help them stabilise the rural population. Had Punjab adopted better farm planning, things would have taken a better shape. As we continued to stick to our earlier approach to food production of wheat and rice, we could not make much headway in diversifying farm production and encouraging agri-processing. The pattern of rural education must be agriculture-oriented. We should expose the system more to farm-related texts, delivered by trained instructors in suitable environment in schools. Farm scientists should visit them to advise teachers and students on the farm problems. Frequent interaction between farm experts and farmers will help scientific development of agriculture and thus help build up a strong farm economy. The whole system of rural education should be restructured and made need-based. The government should take a host of other steps to put agriculture on the top of Punjab’s agenda. Both the government and people have a major role to play here. NRIs settled abroad will render help in rural development. Lord Swraj Pal, a Punjabi, will extend all possible help in the development of Punjab’s economy. He has recently set up the Caparo school of manufacturing and material technology in Jalandhar to help youth learn the latest technology at a cost of Rs 28 crore. Some NRIs have also adopted their villages and helped modernise their economy. If the government approaches them properly, there would be no dearth of money to build our economy. Punjab possesses a vast entrepreneurial talent which, if properly tapped by the government and the private sector, would open up several employment avenues for youth. Special emphasis should be laid on rural youth. They need to be exposed to a new type of education which is related to rural
economy. The writer is Director, Centre for Indian Development Studies, Chandigarh
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Cooperation is better than competition The
concept of sustainable development is not new among environmentalists, economists, scholars, activists and diplomats. But what does the common man know of it? The limited comprehension of this concept by the general public is probably the reason that keeps sustainable development from becoming a reality. The world community needs to know that environment and development are interdependent and interconnected and their coexistence can create synergetic effects. Globalisation has led to significant changes in the structural orders of society. Economic development has become a crucial agenda of many nations today. The modern era of scientific and technological innovations has drastically changed the production and consumption patterns around the globe. Consumerism exerts a powerful hold and like the industrial system, it is spreading worldwide to become a most powerful ideology of the 21st century. Yet, it is entirely possible that consumerism is a grossly inappropriate value system for a world facing mounting environmental crisis. Each step taken forward in pursuance of the methodology followed for development is two steps taken backward. For, this development is done overlooking its adverse impact on the ecology and indifferent to the limited sustaining capacity of the natural environment. Owing to emission of harmful gases, rampant deforestation, desertification, disposal of untreated toxic wastes, global warming, ozone depletion, massive extinction of species and other such impending damages to the environment, environmental protection is the biggest contemporary issue faced at national and international fora. The global environmental crisis symbolises the existence of a tragedy of commons, i.e., conflict over resources between individual interests and common good. In other words, free access and unrestricted demand for finite resources ultimately structurally dooms the resources through over-exploitation. This calls for weighing the benefits derived from industrialisation, modernisation, urbanisation and rising standards of living over the costs incurred due to over-exploitation of resources and deterioration of the physical environment. It’s not that phenomena such as industrialisation are bad. They must be pursued in a controlled manner to ensure that benefits of the naturally bestowed resources of the earth are not denied to the future generations. Such an ideology has led to the evolution of the path-breaking concept of sustainable development. Sustainable development is seen as a sense of freedom – freedom of generations to access basic requirements for living that are available in the natural repositories of the earth. The powerful intuitive idea underlying the concept is that of intergenerational equity: our development is sustainable only to the extent that it meets the needs of the present. It contemplates that development ought to take place in an ecologically and environmentally sound social milieu and a sustainable community ought to internalise its costs of closing resource and waste loops rather than accepting the notion that a burden can go somewhere else. Hence, sustainable development becomes a means for achieving a level-playing field. In 1976, the first step was taken to incorporate provisions in the Constitution that cast a duty on the citizens and the state to protect and improve the environment. This was done through a constitutional amendment in 1976 which brought provisions such as Article 48A and Article 51A (g). These provisions fortified and the importance of protecting the environment as a constitutional mandate. Today both the right to environment and the right to sustainable development have been read as ‘unarticulated rights’ implicit in Article 21 of the Constitution, which explicitly guarantees the right to life and personal liberties. The recognition of such rights and duties in the Constitution, the paramount law of the land, symbolises a high-watermark in this field of environmental law. A salient features of sustainable development is the Polluter Pays Principle. It connotes that the polluter should bear the expenses of carrying out pollution prevention and control measures to ensure that the environment is in an acceptable state. The polluter who is responsible for causing the pollution is absolutely liable for reversing the ecological damage and compensating the victims of pollution. Hence, the developed nations which are the primary contributors of environmental pollution must provide financial aid to the developing nations to enable the latter to adapt energy efficient green technologies. However, sustainable development requires more than just clean technology and political will. It calls for a change in individual, community, and corporate thinking and behaviour that government mandate and coercion cannot achieve. It requires a commitment on a personal level to act with long-term benefits in mind, and the state cannot coerce such commitments. While the government has a critical role, it must coincide with society’s natural impulses. We the people are the trustees of today’s resources and guarantors of tomorrow. Our ways of thinking about human existence as an endless struggle for dominance over nature and other humans have led to significant ecological degradation. It is time we realised cooperation is often a better survival strategy than competition.n The writer is associated with the National University of Juridical Sciences, Kolkata
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On Record
Lysa
John, the national campaign coordinator of the Wada Na Todo Abhiyan (WNTA) has been focussing on the right to livelihood, health and education. The WNTA, which took off from the World Social Forum 2004 held in Mumbai, has been monitoring the promises made by the government to meet the objectives set in the United Nations Millennium Declaration, the National Development Goals and the National Common Minimum Programme. Holding 250 organisations together, Lysa has mobilised over 58,000 people towards ensuring accountability in governance. She speaks to The Sunday Tribune about the country’s unique action group. Excerpts: Q: Which organisations are part of the Abhiyan? A: We are represented by over 900 action groups which include big global initiatives, United Nation groups and small tribal movements. Grassroot organisations, people’s movements, advocacy and resource organisations are all actively involved in formulating the focus and agenda. We serve as a platform for deprived communities to put their grievances before the government. Q: What are your core objectives? A:
Health, education and livelihood. Government policies have to be implemented on the ground. We identify the loopholes and work towards streamlining the system. Q: What initiatives have you taken up? A:
We use mechanisms possible to make our voice heard. First, mass mobilisation. We reach out to people by building one-on-one network. The UPA government has a Common Minimum Programme (CMP). We will ask the government to reply. Secondly, we will collect data about the new policies and publish them. Academics and intellectuals help us in putting the information together. Third is advocacy. We have to get the policy makers and groups together under some minimum understanding about social issues. Q: What is “nine is mine”? A:
We are demanding 9 per cent GDP on health and education. We want to make children aware about their rights. Lakhs of kids had signed the memorandum that we submitted to the Prime Minister who met a kids’ delegation last year. We will meet Union Finance Minister P. Chidambaram in the second phase of the campaign. By January 2008, we plan to submit about five lakh signatures. Q: How do you mobilise funds? A: Through contributions. Many resource agencies are also part of the campaign. The state organisations manage the printing material, etc. Voluntary organisations and the media have also been very helpful. Q: What about the human resource? A: We are working work in 23 states effectively. Each state would have 5-6 partner groups. Every activity is taken up by the core group and the state group together. The state groups are actively involved in mobilisation; we take care of the initiatives. Q: Which section is most enthusiastic in the campaign? A: We technically connect to the middle class which helps us and then to the people who are facing deprivation. The middle class brings the media and help us with our publications. Their individual connections are important for us. Though the involvement at the ground level is most necessary, these people are the heart of the campaign. You should see how excited they are when approached. Q: Can you tell us about the state-wise experiences? A:
Many small states like Puducherry have been quite good. People in smaller states are closer to the government. They can get to the Chief Minister like no other big states. Obviously, we have to deal with state-wise problems. In Punjab, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, Himachal Pradesh, the state media has been very helpful; they have some understanding on the issues we raise. Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh panchayats are full ofaction and so it is easier to get to the grassroots. Our campaign requires political literacy and that’s why we have been successful in Bihar. Q: How effective has the Abhiyan been so far? A: Our performance has been outstanding. People have shown so much confidence. We are now in 23 states, after we started from just six states. Things do move.
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My victory is a sign of political stability in Russia. The elections showed Russians will never allow their country to go down a destructive road as it happened in some post-Soviet states.
While the opposition continues to celebrate a Pyrrhic victory, this is the moment to start a real period of reflection, of self-criticism.