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Misuse of American arms Maharashtra in a flux |
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Fading warriors Naval aviation needs support The latest crash of another Sea Harrier serves to underscore the fact that Indian Naval aviation is in need of some support and attention from the defence ministry, with a dwindling Harrier fleet on the one hand, and the acquisition of the Admiral Gorshkov aircraft carrier and its complement of MiG 29K fighters badly delayed on the other.
Technical education in a mess
Liars all
Just what is Putin afraid of? After landmines, ban the cluster bomb China aggressive on Tibetan rivers
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Misuse of American arms Pakistan’s
expertise in diverting the funds it has been getting from international sources for different purposes to strengthen its military machine is well known. That it has spent more than $5 billion US aid, meant for fighting Al-Qaida and other kinds of terrorism, on acquiring advanced weapon systems targeted at India could have been expected by the Americans. The New York Times report exposing Pakistan’s lopsided approach towards terrorism also puts the US administration in the dock. The Americans owe an answer to India and the rest of the world community. Why did the US not keep strict watch on its aid to Pakistan provided to help it fight international terrorism? This is no way to take the India-US relations to a new high. It is the US responsibility to seek an explanation from Pakistan why Washington has been taken for a ride. Pakistan must come out with the details about its expenditure on the 100,000 troops it has deployed in its tribal areas, mainly in the NWFP and Balochistan, as part of its military campaign against Al-Qaida, the Taliban and other terrorist outfits. The New York Times expose explains why Pakistani troops have been found to be unequal to the well-armed Al-Qaida and Taliban activists. This shows Pakistan’s non-seriousness in taking on terrorism. Islamabad has been indulging in striking deals with the Taliban in Waziristan, which has only helped the extremists to regroup themselves and cause death and destruction across the border — in Afghanistan. The US Congress is, therefore, justified in putting restrictions on the $300 million annual American military aid for equipment supply and training of Pakistan’s military that has been going to Islamabad for a long time. The $5 billion misused funds had been released under the Coalition Support Funds after 9/11. US lawmakers must put a stop to the controversial funds supply in the interest of peace and stability in South Asia. Terrorism is Pakistan’s own creation. Islamabad had been promoting it as an instrument of state policy till it realised that terrorists were nobody’s friends, not even of President Pervez Musharraf. Now that it is getting the wages of its own sins is a different matter. But New Delhi should let the Americans know bluntly that India should not be the focus of end-use of US guns and hardware. |
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Maharashtra in a flux Out of ordinary developments are taking place in Maharashtra one after the other, which may be a precursor to major political realignments in the coming days. On the one hand, Revenue Minister Narayan Rane has taken his whisper campaign against Chief Minister Vilasrao Deshmukh out into the open and even met Mrs Sonia Gandhi to claim that the only way to save the party in the State is by making him the Chief Minister. And on the other, Union Agriculture Minister Sharad Pawar has called on Shiv Sena supremo Bal Thackeray at his Mumbai residence “Matoshree” after many years to send speculations soaring. Mr Pawar has said with a straight face that he had gone to Bandra to attend a function and then decided to drive down to Matoshree to inquire about Thackeray’s health. Even AICC general secretary in charge of Maharashtra Margaret Alva has said that “Maybe Pawar and Thackeray discussed the weather”. Yet, even the politically knave can put one and one together and begin guessing. All this is happening in the backdrop of the Gujarat elections. Mr Rane has been trying to sell the line that what has happened there to the Congress can be duplicated when Maharashtra goes to the polls in 2009 if the Congress does not change the state Chief Minister. The former shiv sainik is equally disliked by Mr Pawar and Thackeray, who would like to go to any length to keep him out, although Sena MP Sanjay Raut says derisively that Rane is a small man and big leaders like Thackeray and Pawar will not waste their time discussing him. At the same time, the NCP chief seems to be subtly serving a notice on the Congress that his support should not be taken for granted. The BJP-Sena relations are also under strain and Mr Thackeray happens to be wary of the game plans of BJP leaders Gopinath Munde and Nitin Gadkari. The Gujarat drubbing has harmed Mrs Sonia Gandhi’s image and Mr Pawar might very well be smelling an opportunity for himself. To that extent, it is not only Maharashtra politics which happens to be in a state of flux. Much more is at stake in the state. |
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Fading warriors The
latest crash of another Sea Harrier serves to underscore the fact that Indian Naval aviation is in need of some support and attention from the defence ministry, with a dwindling Harrier fleet on the one hand, and the acquisition of the Admiral Gorshkov aircraft carrier and its complement of MiG 29K fighters badly delayed on the other. Over the last 25 years, India had acquired 30-odd Sea Harrier VSTOL (Vertical/Short Take Off and Landing) fighters from Britain for carrier-based operations. Fourteen to seventeen aircraft have been lost in accidents and a couple more reported to be beyond repair. The handful that are left are undergoing an upgrade — the so-called Limited Upgrade Sea Harrier (LUSH) programme. While there are conflicting reports as to the degree of life extension they are to receive because of the upgrade, the entire fleet is generally expected to be retired along with INS Viraat, the aircraft carrier they operate on. The decommissioning of INS Viraat is expected to happen around 2012, by which time, the Gorshkov, rechristened INS Vikramaditya, should ideally be operational. But given the Russian-created price escalation imbroglio into which Gorshkov acquisition is currently mired under, there is a high degree of uncertainty about the entire project. The attrition rate of Sea Harrier does appear rather high, though some would explain it in terms of its service life and flying duties imposed on a single carrier squadron. Given the limited nature of the upgrade, however, things are clearly in phase-out mode. What is unfortunate is that planning and acquisition, not to mention indigenous research, development and production, has been woefully laggard. This can be said in spite of whatever acquisitions have come through on the rotorcraft and maritime reconnaissance front. While a Naval ‘Tejas’ is on the cards, it does not inspire confidence given the pace of work and the problems besetting the current air force prototypes. Naval aviation should be the focus of some concerted planning and budgeting from the ministry. |
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We must indeed all hang together, or, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately. — Benjamin Franklin
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Technical education in a mess
According
to Press reports, there is going to be a substantial increase in the allocation for higher education in the XIth Plan. This is welcome. It is also reported that something like Rs 2000 crore is to be provided for those students at the secondary level who at present cannot afford to continue their studies for lack of means. This is also a move in the right direction. A couple of points, however, need to be made in this connection. The actual job will be done by the state governments. They have to be given appropriate guidelines to suit the social situation which varies from state to state. If the rules framed take that factor into account, it would to some extent ensure that the amount is spent wisely as well as creatively. In other words, pragmatic guidelines will have to be worked out. This will have to be done in any case. The one thing to underline is that the actual job has to be largely done by teachers within the broad guidelines laid down. When the job is distributed to thousands of teachers, there would be some odd lapses but the danger of systematic misuse will come down markedly. Secondly, the situation should be reviewed every year, to start with. After this has been done for two-three years, it can be reviewed every two years and no more. The involvement of teachers will ultimately prove beneficial in every sense of the word. More than anything else, it is from the state of professional and technical education that we can draw a lesson or two. As most people would recall, the pressure for admission to professional colleges continued to rise year after year in the 70’s and 80’s of the last century. There were all kinds of problems but it is not possible to go into them here. After a series of experiments spread over two decades, the situation got somewhat stabilised as a result of several legal judgments given in the 90’s. The situation as it has emerged now may be described as follows: Something like 50 per cent of those who get admission to a technical college pay the high fee demanded from them. By and large, these students can afford to pay and that is how, depending upon the institution and its standing, most of them get admitted. If some of these technical colleges (mainly under private managements) under-perform, it is not for lack of funding. Lack of the right kind of teachers who can do a good job is the real problem. There is an acute shortage of trained manpower at that level. What about those who belong to the SC and ST categories? Do they get left out? Not always. Accord-ing to the post-matriculation scheme of scholarships launched by the Ministry of Welfare some four decades ago, those students who qualify but are unable to get admission have their fee paid by the said ministry. In addition, some subsistence allowance is also provided to the students. This comes to no more than 22.5 per cent of the total strength. It may be added here that while it started in a modest way, this scheme has caught on handsomely. It helps students in those two categories of the population who, despite all the handicaps that they suffer from, somehow manage to overcome that barrier. Of the various initiatives to help the deprived students, this scheme has turned out to be more successful than anything comparable. Current-ly, the outlay for this scheme is in the neighbourhood of Rs 1500 crore per year. What about the remaining seats? Generally speaking, not enough students who can afford to pay and are qualified enough to join are able to join. Some of those admitted are below par, if it may be said. It is difficult to categorise the social profile of these non-descript students. A certain proportion of them belong to the OBC category and, of late, certain schemes to help them have been launched. The situation on the whole, however, remains both undefined and unsatisfactory. If the proposal to support poor students at the school level goes through as visualised and gets stabilised in a few years, the proportion of those who will now seek admission to these professional colleges will go up. If more funding is going to be provided for higher education and some financial help is also going to become available at the school level, we would be moving towards a situation where those who today are unable to get admission will start getting admitted. In other words, enhanced funding provided by the Centre will lead to far-reaching social changes as well. At this stage of development, it is difficult to be more precise than that. A stage will, however, be reached in three-four years when financial support at both the school and the post-school levels will get stabilised and a new creative system will get established. The situation will have to be kept under review all the time. In any case, one thing will become clear in course of time. Both proposals made above will succeed to the extent that teachers get involved in a creative way and most decisions are taken at the bureaucratic level. It is time to shift the focus of decision making. There are two problems from the academic point of view. The first one as already described is that the teachers are not involved, or, to be precise, hardly involved in the academic well-being of students. This distance between the teachers and the students comes in the way of the right kind of performance by the teachers. If they are not included in decision making, they do not feel involved. And this brings us to the second implication of this lack of involvement. The teachers do a mechanical job of going to the classroom, deliver their lectures as expected and do not bother to get involved with the students. This has to change. The non-descript description of those admitted as given above is one explanation for the downright unsatisfactory performance of the majority of these technical colleges. If the essentially American estimate of only 25 per cent of the engineering graduates being employable is not far from correct, someone is to blame. More than anyone else, it is the AICTE which is not doing its job. Almost two-thirds of those employed for teaching are not even postgraduates. This requirement has been laid down by the AICTE itself. If it cannot insist upon what it has itself prescribed, no one can else be blamed for it. The minimum that the AICTE can do is to arrange for the intensive re-training of teachers in position. By admitting students indiscriminately in the manner it has been happening, the students are getting a raw deal. More than any other state, it is Tamil Nadu which is responsible for a good deal of this mess. Maharashtra, too, has been playing an equally disruptive role. Once a system of assistance to poor students is worked out, the larger problem, too, will get taken care of to some extent. Only to some extent, if it may be repeated! The real problem is the failure of the AICTE to perform one of its assigned functions; manpower planning. This responsibility is clearly laid down in the AICTE Act. But it is not being taken care of. It is time to do so. A more rational system of financial assistance to deserving students will help decisively. In other words, if some of the proposals now under discussion get actually implemented, the situation will start changing. And that is what one looks forward to.n The writer is a well-known educationist.
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Liars all
Lying
is a universal truth. It is initially an avoidable part of human psyche. However, it becomes part and parcel of the lying individual due to indiscriminate usage. However, there are people who are just born liars. All of us have lied some time or the other in our lives. A person who denies having ever told a lie is telling the greatest lie of his life. Telling a lie is a necessary evil. It helps avoid petty tiffs and is very much required to lubricate the wheels of a relationship. Some lie for fun, others for lying’s sake, and still others are habitual liars. There is a crucial difference between the two genders in the lies they tell. Women lie with a tendency to make others feel better, i.e. they lie more out of politeness. However, men’s lies are centered on the so-called male ego. They lie to build themselves up or to hide something that usually smells of failure. Most of the time you can easily detect if or not a person is telling a lie. One of my friends is very fond of telling lies that are so blatantly white that you could film his story on that screen. But many times he also speaks the truth, which is of course transparent as water. Thus you can detect how much part of his speech is true and how much is spun yarn. Another of my acquaintance, who normally is a sincere person, starts blinking every time she tells a lie. I, all along, pretend to believe her, knowing well the amount of effort she has put into her lying. Lies can be classified as normal, habitual or pathological. There is a transition from normal through habitual lying to a psycho-pathological state. Lying machines get at truths by laying stress, but they again are not foolproof. Accomplished liars know the tricks of their trade. They maintain eye contact, keep their voice calm and are self-deluded enough to believe in their own lies. Thus even the lie detectors start lying when they have to confront seasoned liars. Lies are sometimes useful, when you are confronted with embarrassing or difficult situations. In his book, The Varnished Truth, David Nyberg states, “Occasionally there is a lot to lose by telling the truth and something to be gained by not telling the truth”. Some husbands lie to their wives of their undying love and repeat the same to their frequently changing sweethearts. Some people have to lie professionally. For example, doctors lie for the good of their patients and lawyers do so to shield their clients. Go to the salesman. He is a bundle of lies. Advertisement is in fact a lying tactic that tempts you to purchase the wrong things. Sometimes lying is healthy. It takes away some of your blues. However, lying can be tricky at times when to prove a single lie as truth one has to build a chain of lies to defend it. It is better to lie to strangers, particularly the suspicious ones to avoid danger to life and property. Children do not lie till their environment teaches them to do so as they grow up. In a nutshell, we are liars
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Just what is Putin afraid of? Time’s elevation of Putin as Person of the Year is not all hagiography by any means. The designation is reserved for consequential but not necessarily beneficent figures. Time found Putin to be charmless and humorless, a czar who has “dramatically curtailed freedoms.” But the magazine buys into the central myths that Putin has fostered, that the Bush administration consistently has promoted and that increasingly are accepted as historical truth. Foremost among these is that, by transforming democracy into autocracy, Putin also transformed chaos into stability. Russia a decade ago, Time senior editor Nathan Thornburgh observes, was “a rudderless mess, defined most by a bestial crime rate and Boris Yeltsin’s kleptocracy in the Kremlin.” In fact, crime worsened after Putin succeeded Yeltsin as president in 2000, as did corruption. In a useful corrective to the conventional wisdom just published by Foreign Affairs magazine, Michael McFaul and Kathryn Stoner-Weiss of Stanford University cite official Russian statistics to show that the average annual total of murders increased from 30,200 between 1995 and 1999 to 32,200 between 2000 and 2004. Meanwhile, in 2006 Transparency International ranked Russia at a new low of 121 out of 163 countries for corruption, the Stanford experts point out, “putting it between the Philippines and Rwanda.” And, while soaring oil prices larded the Russian treasury and the government payroll more than doubled, Russians were dying younger (life expectancy for Russian men is 59 years), getting sicker, having fewer children and drinking more. What then is the basis of the myth? Russia is more prosperous today than when Putin took over, and Russians at all income levels have benefited. Like all post-Communist countries, it endured a rise in poverty and political upheaval in the first half of the 1990s. In 1997-98, Russia along with other “emerging markets” suffered a financial crash. Yeltsin appointed a new prime minister, Yevgeny Primakov, who restored fiscal solvency and began Russia’s recovery, before Putin appeared on the scene. The forlorn babushkas selling their personal effects that many foreigners remember were ancient history by the time Putin took power. Putin continued the economic reforms in his first years, to good effect. But as he clamped down on political freedoms, he also went after independent businesses and began to resocialise the economy, dampening investment. Stunningly, even with all its oil, Russia’s rate of economic growth fell from second among the 15 post-Soviet republics in 2000 to 13th in 2005. “If there is any causal relationship between authoritarianism and economic growth in Russia,” McFaul and Stoner-Weiss conclude, “it is negative.” Russia, like Poland, Estonia and many other countries, went through tough post-Communist times. It was approaching a safe shore by the time Putin took office. Yeltsin’s greatest sins involved impinging on democracy — not allowing too much of it — but he nonetheless bequeathed Putin a country with a lively press, competitive political parties and an energized civil society. Like Poland, Estonia and the rest, Russia could have opted for prosperity and democracy. Putin made a different choice. Why then is he so popular? There’s the oil boom, of course, and the fact that government-controlled television — the only kind now — lionizes him ceaselessly. But maybe the better question would be: Is he so popular? Generally, an answer could be derived in two ways. One is polling. But the Kremlin has gradually sapped the independence of Russia’s polling industry, just as it did with the media, and it’s fair to ask how honestly respondents will be evaluating — publicly, speaking to strangers — a leader whose enemies tend to end up poisoned, shot or in prison. The other method is elections, and here perhaps we should defer to Putin’s considered judgment. Garry Kasparov, the famous chess grandmaster, wanted to run for president against Putin’s handpicked successor. A candidate must be nominated at a public meeting, but no one would rent Kasparov a meeting hall. Officials menaced his wife and daughter when they sought to fly out of the country. Kasparov himself was jailed when he attempted to take part in a political demonstration. A week and a half ago, he finally gave up. Why would a leader of such steely confidence, heroic achievement and massive popularity be so afraid of political competition? Perhaps he will explain at Time’s awards banquet. By arrangement with
LA Times-Washington Post |
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After landmines, ban the cluster bomb Welcome
to Cluster’s last stand n the final fight of a weapon that has shredded a hundred thousand legs and arms and eyes since it was lovingly created by the Nazis in the 1940s. This week, the Austrian government has banned cluster bombs and begun to dismantle its stockpile of 10,000. Official delegates from 138 countries, representing two-thirds of humanity, are now on their way back from the turning-point conference in Vienna to prepare for a treaty in 2008 that will ban them outright. But a handful of superpowers – most notably Russia, the US and China – are clinging to their right to shred civilians, and the British government is dancing awkwardly between the two camps. Cluster munitions are bombs that, as they fall, separate into dozens of smaller, bright yellow “bomblets”, each about the size of a can of Coke. Every one carries flying shards of metal that can tear through a quarter-inch of steel. They fall as “steel rain” over an entire kilometre, and they cut up anything they hit. These weapons are wildly indiscriminate. You can’t aim them, any more than you can aim your handbag when you empty it out on to the floor. When the British dropped 2,000 cluster bombs on Basra in 2003, they landed on the roofs of schools and civilian homes as much as on Saddam’s men. Worse still, many of the submunitions do not explode when they hit the ground; instead they stay there for year after year, waiting for someone – anyone – to stumble across them. Children are particularly fond of picking them up, since they look like brightly-coloured toys. That’s what happened recently to four-year-old Aya Zayoun. She found one of the 4 million bomblets dropped on Lebanon by the Israelis in the last 72 hours of the 2006 war, and she thought it was a toy bell. Aya excitedly toddled into her living room to show it to her parents and big sister and brother n where it blew up, the steel ripping through all their flesh. They were “lucky” – they lost only limbs, not their lives. Some 255 Lebanese civilians have not been so fortunate. Last month, there was a hailstorm for the first time since the war, and the hills of Lebanon echoed to the sound of hundreds of submunitions exploding. They can wait patiently for decades. A few weeks ago, 17-year-old Choen Ha and two of his friends in Vietnam stumbled across four steel balls in the jungle. They took turns tossing them to each other, and then began to play marbles with them. Finally, one of them detonated. Choen was only saved by his family spending their entire life savings on his treatment; his best friend was shredded in front of him. The UN estimates that at the current clear-up rate, explosions like this will continue in Vietnam every week for another century. These bombs were dropped before I was born. They will still be killing after I am dead. War is sometimes justified, to save life — but not if it needlessly slaughters as it goes, and leaves a legacy of death for generations. So how soon can we get a ban on these lingering people-shredders? Pessimists should remember that when a ban on landmines was first mooted in the 1980s, it was mocked as a utopian fantasy. Today, only the leper state of Burma is laying them anew. There are two potential tracks to end cluster-bombs. One is the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CWW), which almost every country is signed up to. The pro-cluster bomb states are adopting a “go slow, aim low” approach to these talks, obstructing any progress. Frustrated with this failure, last year Norway broke away and set up a rival Oslo Process, as they did with landmines. It now looks like they will get most of the world, but not the very worst offenders, to sign up to a ban next year. The British have started bargaining for a definition of cluster bombs that would simply exclude all the cluster bombs they happen to have left on the shelf. The government proposed that cluster bombs with a “fail rate” of less than one per cent should be permitted. This definition has also been picked up by the Democrats in the US Congress, who are passing legislation with the same clause. That still means a typical cluster-rocket strike would leave 40 landmine-style duds on the ground — and even that hasn’t ever been achieved in practice. The British have also tried a different get-out clause. They argued that if a cluster bomb releases fewer than 10 submunitions, then it shouldn’t be called a cluster bomb. But this redefinition would be pure sophistry. It is fired from a rocket pod that can shoot 19 rockets at a time – meaning it can dump 171 pieces of submunitions on an area. And you can fit four rocket pods into a helicopter at once n so in practice, using these bombs, you could still be indiscriminately dumping 684 submunitions on an area at once. If we set the bar this low, the ban will be worthless. Privately, the British government excuses its behaviour by arguing that it is necessary to set a lower standard so they can coax the US and Russia to sign up. We would never have banned any unacceptable weapons with this strategy. When a treaty was created to ban dum-dum bullets in 1899, only nine countries signed up — but gradually, other countries were pressured to join. Similarly, the US has never signed up to the landmine ban — but since it was agreed firmly by the rest of the world in 1997, they have been shamed into not using them. Next year we need a cast-iron ban. By arrangement with
The Independent |
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China aggressive on Tibetan rivers China
has recently announced that a 141 km highway linking Bome to Medok City in Nyingtri Prefecture will be constructed next year. An airport has also been opened in this Prefecture at an altitude of 2949 metres. Medok is located near the Great Bend of Yarlung Tsangppo (India’s Brahmaputra) where the river takes a sharp U-turn to enter into India. India is interested in these developments since the road and the airstrip at Nyingtri would facilitate construction of the project planned by China at the Great Bend to divert the Brahmaputra waters to its north. One of the major problems facing China presently is water scarcity, as the mighty Yellow River has become a seasonal stream and the Yangtze river is in a critical condition. China does not want its aspirations to superpower status thwarted by a water crisis and hence its plans to divert the abundant water resources of the Tibetan Region to the arid north through 3 links – the eastern, central and western. The southern part of the western link envisages the Brahmaputra diversion. The Chinese plans for using the Brahmaputra waters have been in the news since last few decades, as brought out in the Executive Intelligence Review Special Report (1982), and the Scientific American (June, 1996). For many years China had been vehemently denying any such move. However, in 2003, China’s official news agency, Xinhua, confirmed the plans for the Tsangpo The project, scheduled to start in 2009, would be sited at Permakoe near the Great Bend and would have two components (i) a power plant with an installed capacity of more than 40000 MW utilizing the fall of 3000mts. in the river and (ii) arrangements for diverting Tsangpo waters. The Chinese interventions in the Sutlej, Brahmaputra, etc. could affect river flows into India.Our irrigation and hydroprojects would suffer if the Chinese divert the waters during glacier melting period and release large flows during the monsoon. In this connection, the experience of Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia and Thailand, the co-basin states of the Mekong basin due to China constructing 2 hydro-dams in its territory, should be an eye opener for India. These states alleged that the indiscriminate Chinese operations affected their agriculture, fisheries and tourism activities; also, the devastating floods of 2002 in their areas occurred due to China releasing more waters than normal from its upstream reservoirs into the river below. However, China did not bother about the objections raised by these states and even of the Mekong River Commission (MRC) stating that it is not a member of MRC. India too had experienced heavy losses due to unprecedented floods from Tibetan rivers in the recent past. The large floods in the Sutlej in 2000, 2004 and 2005 necessitated closure of the Nathpa Jhakri Project and evacuation of people from the affected areas. Arunachal Pradesh also suffered due to a flooded Brahmaputra reportedly caused by dam failures in Tibet. China is not answerable to India on the use of the Tibetan rivers since there are no agreements between India and China on transboundary rivers, a situation similar to the Mekong basin. Hence it would be in the interest of India to enter into an agreement with China for the optimum utilization of the Tibetan rivers as a follow up of the joint declaration made by the two countries in 2006 for exchanging hydrologic data. Sharing information on flow data alone is not adequate to address our concerns. The impacts on the rivers due to upstream Chinese operations such as (i) reduction of flows by diversion and (ii) floods resulting from breaches or sudden gate openings, have to be addressed by India. Construction of cascade projects across the concerned rivers is therefore a necessity to ensure water conservation and flood absorption. Unfortunately proposed projects like Khab project(s) in Himachal Pradesh and Siang project(s) in Arunachal Pradesh investigated earlier appears to have been dropped on benefit -cost considerations. The strategic importance including disaster mitigation offered by these projects should have been given due weightage while evaluating them instead of applying the routine norms . It is time Government of India takes special interest to implement these projects to address India’s concerns instead of labouring under an ideology induced myopia. The writer is a former Member-Secretary, Indian National Committee on Irrigation and Drainage (INCID). |
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