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Veterans retire In poll mode |
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Singled out
Defence acquisitions
Dog’s day
Poverty amidst plenty Gulf between rich and poor Uphill struggle to eliminate child labour Vaccine for AIDS “unlikely”
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Veterans retire IT is significant that for a party which believes in collective leadership the role of individuals should have been such a preoccupation. This serves to underscore that, no matter how paramount the importance accorded to ideology, the course of politics, like history, cannot be to the exclusion of individuals; and, even in a collective organisation individuals count for their contribution. So, it is hardly surprising that the CPM leadership relieved the veterans — Jyoti Basu and Harkishen Singh Surjeet — from the party’s Polit Bureau only after much deliberation, and long after the elders had repeatedly insisted on giving up their places. Mr Basu and Mr Surjeet are not the kind who can “retire” from politics, their spirit being always more willing than their bodies. Their desire to step down from the Polit Bureau would have been with a view to making way for younger leaders who can be more active in conducting the party’s affairs. With Prakash Karat being re-elected general secretary for another term and new entrants in the Polit Bureau, it may be time for this generation of leadership to reflect on the service rendered — to the party and the country — by Comrades Basu and Surjeet and learn from their record. For all the rigidity of the Stalinist ideology that binds the CPM, Mr Basu and Mr Surjeet were flexible in their dealings with other parties, especially during times of crisis. Mr Surjeet excelled in crisis management and finding a way out of any complex situation. Whether it was the NF-LF coalition of Mr V P Singh, the United Front ministry of 1996-98 or the UPA in 2004, Mr Surjeet prevailed as both strategist and tactician. Similarly, when Punjab was confronted by terrorism, Mr Surjeet was active in resolving the crisis. He could also count on the support of leaders like Mr Basu, who maintained commendable working relations with both allies and opponents. Their approach was in contrast, for example, to the hard line being adopted by the CPM against the UPA today, particularly on the Indo-US nuclear deal. Perhaps, the present leadership can emulate the veterans to better negotiate for political success in coalition times.
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In poll mode NOW that the Election Commission has announced a three-phase poll in Karnataka, a key question doing the rounds in the state is whether the Assembly elections will provide a stable government. Karnataka suffered much because of the fractured mandate in the 2004 elections and consequent political instability. In the past four years, the state saw three governments -- the Congress-Janata Dal (Secular) government led by Mr Dharam Singh; the JD (S)-BJP government headed by Mr H.D. Kumaraswamy; and the week-long BJP government of Mr B.S. Yeddyurappa. It is widely believed that the Dharam Singh government would have completed its full term had the JD (S) supremo and former Prime Minister H.D. Deve Gowda and his two sons — Mr H.D. Kumaraswamy and Mr H.D. Revanna -- not created hurdles in its smooth functioning. From day one, there was a growing sense of mistrust between the two coalition partners. Fearing that the continuation of the 19-month Congress-led government would threaten their own spheres of influence, the Gowdas pulled it down and joined hands with the BJP. The Kumaraswamy government was no better. The 20-20 experiment had nothing to commend itself. There was no coalition dharma worth the name between the JD (S) and the BJP. Even as members of both sides levelled charges of corruption against one another, development took a back seat. And when the time came to pass on the baton to the BJP for the next 20 months, the JD (S) chickened out. The Yeddyurappa government failed to take off when it refused to accept the tough conditions laid down by the JD (S). The Congress, the BJP and the JD (S) have started wooing the voters. While the BJP expects to derive the voters’ sympathy for being cheated by the JD (S), the Congress is trying to break Mr Deve Gowda’s monopoly over the Vokkaliga vote. Will Mr S.M. Krishna’s return to the state help retrieve the lost ground for the Congress? As for the JD (S), it is a do-or-die situation. Even as the political parties are bracing up for the elections, the people are craving for a stable government.
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Singled out THE three-day 30-km march that single women organised from Dhami to Shimla has finally borne fruit. The bad weather that greeted them on the way was in a way symbolic of their struggle.But in a rare gesture, Himachal Pradesh Chief Minister Prem Kumar Dhumal accepted most of their demands on the spot at the Vidhan Sabha on Thursday. The government will provide them better social and economic security. Their plight is pathetic indeed. Among them are widows, destitute women abandoned by their families and those who never got married. Life has been a struggle all their life, given the social prejudices against them. That they came together under the aegis of the Ekal Nari Shakti Sangathan is in itself a step forward. The chief minister needs to be complimented for giving a sympathetic hearing to their tale of woes and addressing them on the spot to a great extent. He has announced that all single women living on their own will be given free medical treatment and subsidised ration facility. A certificate from the village pradhan will be enough for such women to get a ration card in their name. All pending pension cases of widows and destitute women are to be disposed off so that they are eligible for financial help. The women’s march should not only ameliorate their lot but also teach society to be more alive to the difficulties faced by other vulnerable sections as well. There are so many of them who are silent sufferers. The aged, the infirm and the abandoned are all in need of tender care when they are most vulnerable. It is just that we have seen them among us so often that we seem to have become immune to their special needs. In a mature society, they should not have to shout slogans or to organise long marches to get their cries of anguish heard.
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I long to accomplish great and noble tasks, but it is my chief duty to accomplish humble tasks as though they were great and noble. — Helen Keller
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Defence acquisitions
Jalashva
stands for Sea Horse, an apt name given to what was earlier USS Trenton, an American warship bought for a song by the Indian Navy. A new ship of this type would cost in excess of $ 2500 million, so $ 75 million for Jalashva was a pittance by any standards. The ship was, of course, 40 years old and earmarked for decommissioning by the parent Navy; when we purchased the HMS Hermes from the United Kingdom in 1986, she was also 43 years old and was also slated to be paid off. That vessel, renamed INS Viraat by the Indian Navy, has already served more than two decades and will go for another 7-8 years. Its predecessor, INS Vikrant, was itself a mid 1940s ship and was decommissioned only in 1997, having served nearly 55 years. It is necessary that these facts be spelt out as then alone can the recent comments of the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) on the purchase of the Jalashva be analysed in the correct perspective. The CAG says that the pricing of the ship was arbitrary and without much thought. The first thing to be understood is that the purchase was a direct government-to-government deal and did not involve negotiation with any private party. Second, the price, as pointed out, was almost throwaway. The third so called infirmity pointed out by the CAG is that the ship was old. This, to be charitable, is an uniformed view because ships of this size, as already pointed out, last more than 50 years and the assessment of the Indian naval planners that Jalashva would go for another 10 to 15 years was absolutely correct and the cost, amortised over this period, was insignificant. The CAG goes on to object that the contract specifies that the ship should not be used in war. This provision, if it is there, is not unique. When we leased the nuclear submarine Chakra from former USSR in 1988, there was a similar clause in the contract. What we then paid as annual lease cost for that submarine compares with the total price at which Jalashva was purchased at comparable prices. The CAG is also upset that the contract specifies that the supplying country viz USA would have the right to send its people to look at the inventories etc. Once again, only the naval staff can accurately answer this question but it would be useful to remember that for the Chakra, the Soviets insisted, and we agreed, that there own crew would be physically present on the vessel all the time throughout the lease period. So, we had a Russian Commanding Officer, and his crew, present on the submarine 24/7 along with our own people. Even otherwise, contracts for acquisition of ships and submarines from the erstwhile Soviet Union, and now Russia, have quite restrictive clauses regarding security of materiel and equipment. This brings us to the question of use of the vessel in war. The Jalashva, as far as those familiar with its possible exploitation can see, is essentially a platform which will enhance our capabilities for rendering assistance during natural calamities such as the Tsunami of 2004. Not many will know that while our ships were able to reach affected areas in Sri Lanka and Maldives on the very next day and the sites in North Sumatra soon thereafter and that, itself, was a great boost to the morale of the traumatised people, their ability to render meaningful assistance was marginal. For such eventualities, there is need to put hundreds of troops ashore along with mobile cranes, bulldozers etc, all this often possible only by helicopters. The need for a platform like the Jalashva must have arisen from this post mortem. The Indian Navy now has the ability, the only maritime force in the Indian Ocean littoral, to provide immediate and credible assistance. At a different level, the Jalashva gives us the ability to deploy such forces as we need to, in “out of area” contingencies, not necessarily war. For example, our peacekeeping forces can be projected and withdrawn much more easily in places not easily accessed by more conventional means such as commercial air transportation. Assistance to friendly governments is often a requirement and this is another feasible exploitation. We, ourselves may need to show coercive presence under certain conditions and there is no embargo on such usage. Finally, should it come to actual war, it is highly unlikely that any Indian government of the day will be inhibited in exploiting the ship in any manner that it considers necessary whatever be the contents of the contract. In short, a non issue has been made into an issue. In fact, what we need is another platform of the Jalashva type. Such platforms are force multipliers. On a larger plane, there seems, in this country, a broad-based effort to try and establish infirmities, some of a financial nature and others of professional lapse, in almost every aspect which seeks to enhance and modernise military capabilities. Some of these are motivated by professional jealousies between vendors while others have political content. The Scorpene submarines, the Barak missile systems, the Eurocopters all fall under this category. Twenty year after Bofors, the Indian Army has still to get a self propelled 155 mm gun. Stoppage of the HDW submarine programme has put the Navy’s force levels of this crucial underwater element several years behind. And, termination of the indigenous Trishul project has only proved how wise the decision to go in for Barak was. By all means, we should probe financial indiscretions and misappropriations and punish those found guilty but to question the development programmes themselves and to, thereby, inhibit the modernisation process is clearly short sighted and inflict wounds which, basically, is what the enemy would like to do. This brings us back to what the CAG has said. All those familiar with the process know how exactly the process works. First some lower level auditors look at the files and ask questions. These having been answered by the Headquarters, in this case the Navy, the position is further examined and fresh sets of queries raised. Very rarely will the explanations be accepted. There is little awareness or appreciation among the auditors of the professional issues involved; sometimes, the differences become acrimonious and, in turn, lead to remarks made by higher audit authorities, finally emanating as the comments of the CAG. Audit of the financial aspect is overtaken, incorrectly, by audit of the professional issue and this is what has happened in this case. This is all the more remarkable because the present CAG is a person with considerable knowledge of the working of the defence establishment. Inhibiting the defence modernisation process is the last thing he should want.n The writer is a former Director General Defence Planning Staff and
Commander-in-Chief, Eastern Naval Command
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Dog’s day
JOURNALISTS in Calcutta had a grouse that Chinese premier Chou En-Lai did not meet them when he passed through the city on his way back to Peking. But they could not believe their ears when they were invited for a tête-à-tête with the Chinese leader at a city hotel. After all, that day’s newspapers had reported about Chou En-Lai’s departure from the city the previous afternoon, many of them with his photographs, waving to those who had gone to see him off at the Dum Dum airport. Those were the days of Hindi-Chini Bhai Bhai. Chou En-Lai received the journalists with enthusiasm. He told them that they were meeting the real Chou En-Lai and not his ghost. Then he explained to them what had happened. Soon after his plane took off from Calcutta, its engine developed a snag forcing the pilot to abandon the flight and return to the city. Since the premier had some spare time till another plane was arranged, he thought of meeting them. I had a similar experience when I boarded Air India’s newly-introduced non-stop Kochi-Delhi flight. I looked forward to reaching Chandigarh by lunch time when the plane took off on the dot at 7.30 a.m. It was a smooth takeoff except for an unusual sound we all heard from the left engine. The aircraft had by then attained the desired height and was flying smoothly. We had no clue as to what had happened till, about 30 minutes later, the pilot announced that a “technical fault” was forcing him to return to Kochi. Soon the plane began to make a hooting sound heightening our worries. It was only after circling over the aiport at Nedumbassery several times that the plane was allowed to land. Once it had become stationary, the pilot announced that he had to switch off the left engine and fly back on a single engine. He said it was perfectly safe to fly in that mode and the crew were trained to handle such emergency situations. He said Air India would arrange another aircraft to fly us to Delhi. By the time we were transferred to a new aircraft, nearly two hours had passed. It was harrowing to sit in the aircraft, particularly with the air-conditioning system switched off. Yet, not even one passenger protested. Amazingly, even the tiny tots in the plane showed remarkable patience. We thought the jinx was over when the plane finally reached Delhi. No, we had to hover over the city for quite a few minutes till landing signals were given. Pilot Saudamini Deshmukh’s announcement that we have reached “without much delay” evoked a laugh from the passengers who had remained tense all along. To make up for the gaffe, she clarified that the flight was “only three hours late”. After wishing us the standard fare of hoping to serve us again, she came back on the public address system yet again even as the plane was taxiing: “I do not know whether I should tell you or not — a dog crossed our path just as we crossed all hurdles to reach our destination”. From my window, I could see a black dog sauntering on the runway like the one whose photograph appeared beside a Kingfisher aircraft in Kolkata’s The Telegraph a few days ago. It was not very comfortable to remember that a “dog-hit” had injured several air passengers in Bangalore a few days ago. Maybe, unlike the dog in Bangalore, the one in Delhi was well trained to handle emergency situations like the Air India
crew.
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Poverty amidst plenty We
knew things were bad on Wall Street, but on Main Street it may be worse. Startling official statistics show that as a new economic recession stalks the United States, a record number of Americans will shortly be depending on food stamps just to feed themselves and their families. Dismal projections by the Congressional Budget Office in Washington suggest that in the fiscal year starting in October, 28 million people in the US will be using government food stamps to buy essential groceries, the highest level since the food assistance programme was introduced in the 1960s. The increase – from 26.5 million in 2007 – is due partly to recent efforts to increase public awareness of the programme and also a switch from paper coupons to electronic debit cards. But above all it is the pressures being exerted on ordinary Americans by an economy that is suddenly beset by troubles. Housing foreclosures, accelerating jobs losses and fast-rising prices all add to the squeeze. Emblematic of the downturn until now has been the parades of houses seized in foreclosure all across the country, and myriad families separated from their homes. But now the crisis is starting to hit the country in its gut. Getting food on the table is a challenge many Americans are finding harder to meet. As a barometer of the country’s economic health, food stamp usage may not be perfect, but can certainly tell a story. Forty states are reporting increases in applications for the stamps, actually electronic cards that are filled automatically once a month by the government and are swiped by shoppers at the till, in the 12 months from December 2006. At least six states, including Florida, Arizona and Maryland, have had a 10 per cent increase in the past year. The recent switch from paper coupons to the plastic card system has helped remove some of the stigma associated with the food stamp programme. The card can be swiped as easily as a bank debit card. To qualify for the cards, Americans do not have to be exactly on the breadline. The programme is available to people whose earnings are just above the official poverty line. Richard Enright, the manager at this Morgan Williams, says the numbers of customers on food stamps has been steady but he expects that to rise soon. “In this location, it’s still mostly old people and people who have retired from city jobs on stamps,” he says. Food stamp money was designed to supplement what people could buy rather than covering all the costs of a family’s groceries. But the problem now, Mr Enright says, is that soaring prices are squeezing the value of the benefits. The US Department of Agriculture says the cost of feeding a low-income family of four has risen 6 per cent in 12 months. “The amount of food stamps per household hasn’t gone up with the food costs,” says Dayna Ballantyne, who runs a food bank in Des Moines, Iowa. “Our clients are finding they aren’t able to purchase food like they used to.” And the next monthly job numbers are likely to show 50,000 more jobs were lost nationwide in March, and the unemployment rate is up to perhaps 5 per cent.
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Gulf between rich and poor In
one form or another, food stamps have been around in the United States since 1939, before taking their current form in the 1964 Food Stamp Act, one of the earliest pieces of major legislation in the Johnson administration’s “War on Poverty”. Mostly gone however are the days when the stamps consisted of vouchers presented for payment at a grocery store or a supermarket checkout. Now they usually take the form of a credit on an electronic debit card, reducing the visible stigma of their use for people too proud to admit they could not cope on their own. And that – at least as much as greater public awareness of the programme and the downturn now gripping the US – is a reason for the steady increase in their use since 2001, a period of solid economic growth until the full explosion of the subprime mortgage crisis in late 2007. Food stamp use declined during the second half of the 1990s thanks to the controversial 1996 welfare reform bill, and the exclusion of legal immigrants from the programme. Those provisions have now been reversed, and both state and federal governments have taken measures to make people more aware they are eligible. Food stamps are also a reminder of the continuing existence of widespread poverty in the US, and the ever expanding gulf between rich and poor in the world’s wealthiest country intensified, experts say, by the Bush administration’s tax cuts. Top income brackets have seen their disposable income soar, while earnings of the lowest paid have struggled to keep pace with inflation. The minimum wage had stood unchanged for a decade – its longest freeze ever – until it was increased to $5.85 an hour from the $5.15 set in 1997. The national poverty rate stands officially at around 13 per cent, a level little changed from the 1970s. Poverty is currently defined as an income of $21,500 for a family of four. Almost certainly the number of people eligible for, and using, food stamps will rise for the next year or more, if the downturn becomes a full-blown recession. But comparisons with the Great Depression, when food stamps did not exist, are exaggerated. Then a quarter of the workforce was unemployed, compared with just 5 per cent today. By one estimate, 60 per cent of the populace lived in poverty in the depths of the Depression. Large as it is, the 30 per cent poverty experienced in some US inner cities and depressed rural areas today does not approach that level. By arrangement with
The Independent
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Uphill struggle to eliminate child labour There
was great jubilation in Hisua block of Nawada district, Bihar, recently, on being officially declared a child-labor free block. This was a result of a happy confluence of efforts by the government and NGOs like Bachpan Bachao Andolan and Bihar Seva Sansthan. There are a plethora of laws, government programs as well as civil society initiatives aimed at securing a Hisua-like success for the rest of the country, but the prospect is quite grim. In neighboring Jharkhand, there is no such happy confluence. Here, the two worlds of government acts and ground realities do not converge. A case in point is the relevance of the recently passed Child Labor Prohibition Act for Geeta, aged 20, a resident of Kake block adjacent to the state capital Ranchi. Geeta, the youngest of five brothers and sisters, lost her parents when she was only five. Geeta and her siblings have since been feeding themselves by working as domestic help for the last eight to nine years. Her awareness of the Child Labor Prohibition Act is more by negative perception. She has watched several children with similar backgrounds being thrown out of employment by houses which were fearful of the enforcement of the Act. This spells doom for the children with no alternative to keep their bodies and souls together, no matter how idealistic and noble the principles be. There has no doubt been a plethora laws for the welfare and protection of children – Child Labor (prevention and control) Act, 1986, Child (labor mortgage) Act, 1933, Factory Act, 1948 and the Child Marriage Prohibition Act . It is equally true that these have been flagrantly violated. While NGOs and enlightened sections of our society have been leading the struggle to secure for children their rights to a life of hope, peace, security and a future, it is also true that unless the issue is approached in its totality, there will be lacunae in implementation. The Government and concerned NGOs will have to seriously address the issue of rehabilitation of child laborers. A yawning gap in this process is the lack of credible and updated data sources. Neither the central nor any state government knows the real number of child laborers in the states and the country as a whole. There has been some light thrown by a UNICEF survey conducted in 2000, where out of every five children in the under-14 age group, one was found to be engaged in outside or domestic work. They were working in hazardous industries, brick kilns, stone breaking, hotels and factories. It would however be necessary to conduct an extensive and comprehensive survey of child laborers for bringing them into the mainstream. Effective and successful schemes for the welfare of these children cannot be devised without first gathering correct and relevant data. In the absence of such figures, all efforts for child welfare would be futile. In fact, on 10th December, 1996, Justice Kuldeep Singh of the Supreme Court gave an important verdict terming child labor as a heinous crime. He instructed the Central Government to conduct an intensive survey on child laborers, but till date the instruction has not yielded any results. The Jharkhand High Court had also given a somewhat similar instruction to the state government. Any move to integrate these children into mainstream and make their transition from the labour force into an just and enabling environment will necessarily have to launch schemes for economic self reliance for the families whose children are forced to work outside for supplementing their family income. Equally important is mainstreaming these children into the education system. Here too there is much to be desired. The Right to Education has been included among the Fundamental Rights, but the official statistics on the child education system reveal a bleak reality. With the existing education system so weak, the special needs of mainstreaming child laborers seem a Herculean task. The formation of the National Commission for Protection of Child Rights as a nodal body for protecting and safeguarding the rights of children in 2007 seems promising. It would monitor the implementation of the relevant laws and programmes focusing on child development, welfare and survival. All the states have also been instructed to form such commissions. These commissions would be responsible for protecting the rights of children in the state. But these commissions are yet to be constituted. — Charkha Features
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Vaccine for AIDS “unlikely” To
control AIDS, funding must be invested in strategies that work: effective prevention efforts, routine testing and universal access to treatment – and not spent on expensive vaccine research that over 20 years has yielded little of promise other than discovering how not to make an AIDS vaccine. The latest round of vaccine trial failures (including a large-scale Merck trial halted when the vaccine turned out to have possibly increased subjects’ risk of acquiring HIV) has added to a growing consensus in the scientific community that an AIDS vaccine is a decade or more away, if one can be developed at all. Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, recently stated: “We have to leave open the possibility that we might never get a vaccine for HIV.” That view was shared by leading AIDS expert David Baltimore, who conceded last month that the scientific community is no closer now to discovering an HIV vaccine than it was 20 years ago. Twenty years of research and the fact remains: A vaccine against a retrovirus, the family of viruses HIV belongs to, has never been successfully developed. It is highly unlikely that there will be an AIDS vaccine – certainly not by any current definition of the word. Despite this record of failure, the U.S. budget for HIV vaccine research continues to increase, more than doubling between 2000 and 2006 from $327 million to $854 million. We already know what a successful AIDS control program looks like: effective prevention, routine testing and access to treatment. Government funding of AIDS vaccine research should be ended and this money put to more productive, and lifesaving, uses. An estimated 20 million people in the world are HIV-positive but do not know it: Applying $1 billion toward the rapid scale-up of HIV testing worldwide would likely prevent millions of new infections. Achieving universal access to treatment would make the most significant contribution to a drop in AIDS deaths and in HIV transmission rates worldwide. Bolstering the case for increasing access to treatment is a recent study conducted by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention indicating that AIDS drugs render an HIV-positive person significantly less infectious. The study of married couples, conducted over three years in Uganda, assessed the long-term effect of antiretroviral treatment on HIV transmission. Results demonstrate up to a 90 percent reduction in the likelihood that an HIV-positive husband will infect his partner if he is receiving prevention counseling services and antiretroviral drug treatment. Inhibiting the virus’ ability to replicate, antiretroviral drugs lower what is known as the viral load in a person’s system, often to such a degree that the virus, while not eliminated, becomes undetectable. Scale-up of treatment worldwide must be our highest priority. Dr. Khanlou is chief of medicine in the US for the AIDS Healthcare Foundation and. Weinstein is its president By arrangement with
LA Times-Washington Post
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