The Tribune, Chandigarh, India

Tighten the belt, please
Governments have to improve work culture

THE UPA government has directed the ministries to cut wasteful expenditure by at least 10 per cent. Apart from facing pressures of a global meltdown, the government has been forced to slash taxes, spend more, raise salaries, waive loans and help troubled industries. Having exhausted its revenues, the government is on a borrowing spree to keep up the thrust on infrastructure building and schemes to boost rural employment and incomes. If the huge financial outgo has not resulted in a tight squeeze on expenditure, it is because governments the world over are spending more and encouraging citizens also to splurge so that economic growth does not slacken, demand for industrial products stays robust and a maximum number of jobs could be saved.

But there is a certain kind of expenditure which serves no purpose other than bleeding treasuries. Economists call it non-Plan or unproductive expenditure. It is the expenditure ruling politicians and bureaucrats incur to live and work in style. It is the taxpayer who foots their bill. The government directive has identified some such expenses as foreign travel, fuel expenses, administrative expenditure, publications, advertising and publicity. But if the government really wants to cut corners, it should limit its role to the essentials. A lot many departments and employees have become redundant after the demolition of the licence-permit raj and the introduction of computers and the internet. Follow the pay commissions’ suggestions to reduce the cost of governance by improving efficiency and output.

While the Centre, by and large, manages its finances fairly efficiently, it is the states which, barring a few, have been ruined by populist policies and poor governance. The states need to undertake drastic administrative reforms, use IT for better public communication and efficiency, privatise or wind up unnecessary public sector enterprises and rein in the expenditure on bureaucratic and ministerial luxuries and jaunts abroad. Cost-cutting need not be tied to a financial crisis; it should be part of a regular policy, governance and work culture in the governments.

Jaswant stays put
Speaker has to take the call

Mr Jaswant Singh has caused another bout of migraine for the BJP by refusing to resign as head of the prestigious Public Accounts Committee despite a public “request” by Ms Sushma Swaraj, BJP’s Deputy Leader in the Lok Sabha. The situation is unprecedented. So there is no clarity about what happens when the party which nominated him to the post expels him. In ordinary times, a leader would have quit on his own. But Mr Jaswant Singh has decided to squat. Under the rules, there is nothing on the basis of which he can be thrown out. That is why the BJP has been only requesting him, saying that the post belongs to the party and not to Mr Jaswant Singh, per se. There is indeed substance in the argument that the Speaker would not have appointed him if he did not happen to belong to the BJP, the main Opposition party, to which the post goes as per the convention. But the appointing authority is always the one which can undo the appointment.

The BJP boycotted the first meeting of the 22-member committee on Monday but that did not affect the quorum which requires just eight members to attend it. Congress spokesman Abhishek Singhvi has already said that the PAC is a parliamentary body and the internal fight of the BJP does not affect parliamentary procedures. That means that even if the BJP members continue to stay away, PAC work will go on. The PAC is constituted by Parliament to monitor government expenditure. As such, Mr Jaswant Singh can very well stay put till next year.

Ultimately, it is the Speaker who will have to decide on the imbroglio. She has the powers to remove a committee chairman on the ground of his/her non-performance. But since Mr Jaswant Singh has no inclination of being a “non-performer”, Ms Meira Kumar may find the situation somewhat tricky. For the BJP the problem is that having expelled Mr Jaswant Singh from the party, it has lost its authority to keep him reined in to its discipline.

Thought for the Day

All that remains/For us will be concrete and tyres. — Philip Larkin

ARTICLE

Kathmandu to Copenhagen
There are indeed limits to growth
by B.G. Verghese

THE common peril of climate change may hopefully bind the countries of the Greater Himalaya more than the common opportunities that they have scorned for many decades. The Greater Himalayan family of the Himalaya-Karakoram-Hindu Kush (HKH) region embraces SAARC and China, the guardian of the trans-Himalayan Tibetan “water tower” that includes the upper catchments of the Indus, Ganges and Brahmaputra.

To discuss the emerging challenges and opportunities, experts, parliamentarians, professionals, NGOs and officials from these lands gathered at Nepal’s invitation last week along with the World Bank, ADB, DIFD and Danida, to discuss what might lie on the road “From Kathmandu to Copenhagen” and beyond. They shared concerns that warranted building a consensus and a common negotiating position when battle is joined at the December Copenhagen Conference on Climate Change that will set global standards beyond the current Kyoto Protocol, until 2020.

The HKH region is a global climate change hotspot and has an influence area that encompasses almost half of mankind. It will be impacted both early and severely because of its positioning in the global atmospheric circulation system and its large proportion of desperately poor who are most vulnerable. Therefore, while it is true that the developed world is historically responsible for global warming (though India and, especially, China are becoming major carbon emitters), any them-first attitude will overwhelm this region.

The maximum we can do must, therefore, be the minimum we should attempt. This will give us the moral high ground to insist that financial flows and technology transfers (even if IPR protected) must be assured on the accepted principle of common but differentiated responsibilities and capabilities that must be translated into operational practice. Climate change is a human right but, as Gandhi put it, rights (best) come from duties well performed.

The Kathmandu conclave pointedly noted that the developed world had spent enormously more on obscene corporate bailouts than in promoting sustainable development, and a mere pittance on adaptation to and mitigation of climate change. Poverty is neither a socially just nor an environmentally or climate-friendly condition. Therefore, rapid, sustainable growth is a strategic imperative and will itself assist demographic change. But this growth must be one with a low carbon footprint.

Climate change will particularly impact energy, water and food security. This presents both challenges and opportunities, as well illustrated by Nepal’s predicament. Nepal has a techno-economically feasible hydro-potential of around 45,000 MW or more but has harnessed little and suffers 16-hour a day power cuts. Like in Bhutan, hydro-development offers it a pathway to sustainable growth, poverty elimination, regional balance and market opportunity, lack of which have fuelled Maoism.

Some believe that with increasing glacial melt, glacial lake and debris dam outbursts, aberrant rainfall and cloudbursts and greater erosion that come with climate change, high dams would be short-lived and face safety hazards. Hence small is beautiful. But not prudently to convert its water into wealth would handicap Nepal, leaving it poor and unable to cope with the challenge ahead. Moreover, replacing 40,000 MW hydro- power with a thermal- equivalent that annually burns million of tonnes of dirty coal in India would entail adding to avoidable carbon emissions, aggravating the Himalayan trauma.

Where does the balance lie, especially in view of the importance of storing and regulating monsoonal flows to augment lean season river discharge? A drier climate is also likely to increase forest fires and consequent “black carbon” fallout thus enhancing snow and glacial melt. An interesting suggestion heard was that, with some remedial engineering, natural glacial lakes caused by retreating ice, can be shored up as natural dams and used to regulate flows. Clearly, there is much to be done to research adaptive and mitigative measures and to generate data to fill a yawning knowledge gap that inhibits action.

The trans-boundary character of HKH rivers mandates regional cooperation and a revisiting of old mindsets that have been overtaken by climate change. Nepal’s Prime Minister, Mr Madhav Kumar Nepal, urged multilateralism to manage the rivers that constitute South Asia’s “Lifeline”

The Kathmandu gathering agreed that while the HKH region must play its part in combating climate change, the onus was on the developed world to provide the necessary financial flows and clean and emerging technologies across private and corporate Intellectual Property Rights barriers to enable the South to leapfrog or “tunnel” through the inverted-U trajectory that the North is following to lower carbon emissions to cap global warming within an additional 2 degrees Celsius by 2015, which marks the limit beyond which lies catastrophe.

Within the HKH region, India and Pakistan must move to optimise the remaining potential of the Indus basin beyond the limits of the Indus Treaty, which have been reached, through future cooperation and joint exploration, exploitation and management as envisaged under the Treaty, by developing Indus-II. In the Central Himalaya, India has set up a National Ganges Basin Authority which could usefully collaborate with a Chinese-proposed study with the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD) in Kathmandu, of the Kailas Mountain Eco-system that waters the Indus, Sutlej and Brahmaputra. Melting Tibetan glaciers and permafrost are also altering climate patterns affecting South Asia while HKH glaciology, meteorology and “sedimentology”, themselves little understood, need scientific study.

Further east, talk of massive diversion of the “Brahmaputra” by China northwards to the Gobi-Beijing plains is Utopian but there is good reason for a regional study with international participation and funding to explore the feasibility of tapping the estimated 54,000 MW potential of the river’s great U-Bend by tunnellng the 2500-3000 m drop from Tibet to Assam. Such an output could anchor an Eastern Himalayan- ASEAN-South China power grid and mitigate carbon loading through fossil fuel alternatives.

Finally, there was mention at Kathmandu, echoing Gandhi, of the need to adapt growth paths and lifestyles in both North and South to mitigate need and curb greed. There are limits to growth. The Bhutanese have wisely decided that at the end of the day, Gross National Happiness is worth more than an inflated Gross Domestic Product. Is anybody listening?

MIDDLE

The living dead
by Shelley Walia

Seeing John Bayley, Professor of Literature, and his wife Iris Murdock, the philosopher-novelist in the common room at Oxford , I often felt it was difficult to discern that she was suffering from the terrible disease of Alzheimer’s. There she sat with an intelligent look of listening, occasionally chuckling at what was said and often nodding as if she was at the heart of the conversation.

It was distressing to realise that she was oblivious of the titles of her novels and half a dozen books on philosophy. I wondered if she was the same person who had once been so deeply in love with the Noble Laureate, Elias Canetti, and who Angus Wilson had outspokenly accused of ‘thriving on betrayal and promiscuity’.

I would often pass their cottage window on my way to the English Faculty. Covered with dark green ivy the sun outside the window beamed in contrast with the inside that lay drowned in gloom and dust, littered with precariously balanced heaps of books and unusual flashes of the odd unexpected treasure — ‘a bright pre-Raphaelite print, a plate of elderly chocolates.’

It all reflected the sacred and the profane, the dark hole of isolation, jealousy, self-hatred and moral “muddle” that her life and work had all added up to. And yet she lived her life to the hilt, never shying from the many affairs she tumbled into.

In this scruffy disheveled environment of her home Iris meditated on larger philosophical issues. She once wrote: ‘To do philosophy is to explore one’s own temperament, and yet at the same time to attempt to discover the truth.’ The brilliance and diversity of her work testifies to the fact that despite the massive underrepresentation, few women philosophers like her left such a mark of distinction, though often blamed for unexamined dogma and lack of objectivity.

Apparently, this set a new tone in a male dominated philosophical exploration replacing the discovery of truth from a biased standpoint.

As I look back at her final years, I wonder how a thinking mind can finally go blank. She was still ‘living’ in that summer of 1995 when I last saw her and yet it was clearly the end of a universe, of a consciousness and a body of knowledge that had influenced readers across the world.

Driving through Southwold in Suffolk, her favourite location for a holiday, I was reminded of her happier days as a member of the British Communist Party and a vibrant Fellow at Oxford. Like her novels, her life had been a ‘jolly good yarn’ except for the last few years that saw her being slowly left as more of a body than a mind. This indeed is the painful curse of Alzheimer’s.

OPED

Engaging with ASEAN
FTA indicates success of Look-East Policy
by Bharti Chhibber

Recently India and the 10-member Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) signed a free trade agreement (FTA) paving the way for setting up a common market. Beginning January 1, 2010, the agreement will gradually eliminate import duties on a number of manufactured products over the next six years.

Products from ASEAN 10 i.e. Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Thailand, Singapore and Vietnam will enter Indian markets and vice versa.

Of late Indo-ASEAN trade has seen a positive growth. In 2000-2001 India’s exports to ASEAN were about $2.9 billion and imports stood at $4.1 billion. In 2008-2009 they have increased to $16.9 billion and $23.4 billion respectively.

As of now bilateral trade between India and ASEAN is more than $40 billion, approximately 9.6 per cent of India’s total trade. With the passage of this FTA the target is to touch $50 billion mark by 2010.

Both sides will gain from this agreement. India will gain in the field of refined petroleum products, gems and jewellery, iron ore, steel, aluminium and non-electrical machinery such as boilers.

Similarly, ASEAN will also benefit in organic, inorganic chemical products, plastic products, readymade garments, electronic items, some raw textiles.

The pact opens a 1.7-billion consumer market to the member countries with a combined GDP of $2.3 trillion.

The agreement will drastically reduce or remove import duties on over 4,000 items of mutual trade between India and ASEAN.

Due to the negotiating problems and failures encountered at the Seattle Ministerial and Doha negotiations of the WTO many members are looking at bilateral and regional trade agreements as viable alternatives to multilateralism.

India is a founder member of the multilateral trading system and is balancing multilateralism with regional trade agreements. The Indo-ASEAN FTA is a step in this direction.

Moreover, India is also keen to lower its dependence on the United States and the European Union. The latter is India’s largest trading partner.

This agreement is seen as a major breakthrough after six years of intense negotiations. India and the ASEAN were to sign the trade pact in December 2008 to coincide with the ASEAN Summit. However, it was deferred because of political problems in Thailand.

As a result, to protect certain categories of domestic producers, both India and ASEAN have drawn up a negative list of products that will be outside the purview of tariff reduction regime.

India has kept 489 items outside the trade pact, mostly farm products, textiles and automobile components. Palm oil, tea, coffee and pepper are put under the highly sensitive list and import duties on them will be lowered to around 40-45 per cent by 2019.

Under the India-ASEAN FTA, a 10-year period was being provided to prepare the stakeholders of the sensitive products to adjust themselves to the gradual lowering of the import duty.

Moreover, in the eventuality of a sudden surge in imports, which may hurt domestic industry, both sides are free to impose safeguard duties for four years. This flexibility remains up to 15 years.

As reported, the central government had also taken into consideration the suggestions made by a committee set up to study concerns of plantation growers as well as other stakeholders in the Indian industry.

The committee had recommended measures to safeguard the interests of plantation growers and other sections of Indian trade industry along with fulfilling its commitments under the FTA to progressively liberalise the tariff even in the case of sensitive items.

A recent survey conducted by the Associated Chambers of Commerce and Industry of India (Assocham) pointed out that Indo-ASEAN trade could be pushed up to over $35 billion from the current $15 billion by 2010 with the signing of the Indo-ASEAN Free Trade Agreement.

The tourism, infrastructure, energy, food security, ICT services, entertainment and multimedia and educational services were identified as priority sectors by the survey.

Assocham has further argued that in medical research, cooperation could focus on the prevention of communicable diseases and in the field of pharmaceuticals, ASEAN could work with India on strengthening its capacity and competitiveness in the manufacture of pharmaceuticals, traditional medicines and biological products.

Moreover, in the energy sector both India and ASEAN can cooperate and work in the direction of joint oil exploration.

India has offered ASEAN by far the most deeper tariff reductions than offered to any other preferential trade partner. On being fully operational, 80 per cent of the goods traded will be duty-free. Further, the agreement also has the most soft rules India has negotiated on third-country articles. Imports can be considered to have originated in ASEAN if any of its member states adds a mere 35 per cent value to them.

The lenient Indian stand in merchandise is keeping in mind our distinct competitive advantage in services. India hopes to have a comprehensive agreement on services by the time duties are abolished on goods trade. Negotiations on software and information technology services have been postponed to December, 2009.

Of the total $936 billion worth of ASEAN imports, services import account for $180 billion which is the primary focus of the Indian industry.

Also, it was felt that any further delay on India’s part in signing the FTA would give the upper hand to China, which is already trying to increase its influence in the Southeast Asian region.

Thus an Indian free trade pact with ASEAN as a regional outfit is highly welcome. It is indeed a success of India’s “Look-East Policy” enunciated earlier.

The writer teaches political science in the University of Delhi

Why think tanks are ignored
by Satish Misra and Neil Padukone

Concerns have been expressed on the role and relevance of think tanks in India. A former US Department of State official, Daniel Markey, who has been studying India for some time, recently observed that India’s rise as a great power is constrained by the country’s own foreign policy establishment and lack of policy relevant scholarship by think tanks.

The Group of Ministers (GoM), set up after the Kargil war, had similarly pointed out that “there is a need to ensure that the government’s policy and decision making processes are informed by the findings of rigorous analyses and research”.

In the information age, think tanks play a decisive role in shaping public policy, public opinion and official decisions. It becomes all the more significant in the system of competitive politics and particularly in a democratic polity.

For India, which is transiting from a feudal cultural society to an industrial cultural society, the role of think tanks is all the more relevant. New ideas and approaches to the prevailing social, economic, political and religious problems will help in accelerating the transitional process.

In India, where elected representatives often have rural backgrounds and are under-exposed to the nuances of national and international affairs, think tanks assume greater significance. A systematic and structured exposure to think tanks will make elected representatives better policy-makers, law-framers and executioners.

Think tanks in India should evolve an appropriate strategy and plan for ensuring a structured interaction with not only elected representatives but also with political aspirants like student union leaders.

Every discerning politician or a bureaucrat knows fully well that ideas have consequences. Globally, policy framers look for advice and counsel of scholars from think tanks, which understand this reality and thus are able to shape policies and politics with their innovative ideas and approach.

Think tanks play an important role in the policy process, but that does not only mean interacting with the government; they have a critical audience among scholars, media persons, the private sector and the common man.

The reach and impact of think tanks could be gauged with the return of conservative politics in the early 80s of the last century and decreasing appeal of communism. The intellectual arguments and policy proposals that contributed to the collapse of the Soviet Union and the success of the West were prepared and articulated by think tanks.

The regimes of President Ronald Reagan in the United States , Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in the United Kingdom and Helmut Kohl in the then West Germany are some of the concrete examples of the role that right-wing think tanks had played. This led to the privatisation of public sector enterprises.

Experts agree that think tanks can play a decisive role in helping India secure its rightful place in the international order. But “does India have the intellectual tools to meet” the challenges of internal strife, terrorism, proxy wars, a disturbed neighbourhood, the threat of conventional war in the shadow of nuclear weapons, proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and piracy on the high seas? asks IDSA Director General N S Sisodia. The answer is an “emphatic NO”.

Though there are 124 think tanks in the country, most are of “indifferent standards”. In a global survey undertaken by the University of Pennsylvania in 2008, only the Institute of Defence Studies and Analysis (IDSA) figures at the 46th position on the list of 50 non-US think tanks.

India’s international studies and strategic affairs think tanks are sandwiched between a university system in crisis and an indifferent policy establishment. As Sisodia says, they suffer from both demand and supply constraints. There is hardly any demand for their output, either because it is not regarded as relevant or because key officials believe that they already know what is there to know, says Sisodia.

Over and above, there is a systemic problem with the majority of the Indian think tanks— reconciling theory with practice — as they consist mostly of retired bureaucrats and young academics. That is why think tanks often produce work which is easily ignored.

The Observer Research Foundation, for one, is striving to bridge this gap. The Centre for Policy Research (CPR), set up in 1973, has launched an “Accountability Initiative” with the objective of improving governance in the country in which citizens can participate even from their homes.

The work of the Tata Energy & Resource Institute (TERI) has touched crucial issues of urban planning and rural energy needs by suggesting innovative approaches to the existing problems.

But these initiatives need to be encouraged. The government should facilitate the flow of information by opening its archives to scholars and its minds to ideas from outside.

Nobody must be taller than the President, Sarkozy aides insist
by John Lichfield

President Nicolas Sarkozy is so sensitive about his height that his aides “cast” small women to appear beside him in public, according to Belgian TV.

President Sarkozy is five feet five inches tall

A video clip, in which a tiny Norman woman says that she was selected to stand behind Mr Sarkozy during an “impromptu” factory visit last week, has become an overnight sensation on the French-language internet.

Such is the “buzz” (in French le buzz) surrounding the clip that the Elysée Palace felt obliged to put out an angry denial. Any suggestion that members of the public were vetted for size was “totally far-fetched and grotesque”, the Elysée said.

President Sarkozy is five feet five inches tall.

RTBF, the main French-language TV channel in Belgium, followed Mr Sarkozy on a visit to a factory in the Orne in lower Normandy last week to prepare a report on the lengths taken by the French government to shape its public image.

This follows a ministerial visit to a supermarket last month in which “housewives” who flocked admiringly around the Education Minister, Luc Chatel, turned out to be employees of the company.

Before the President arrived at the Faurecia car parts factory in the Orne last Thursday, female workers were selected to appear behind Mr Sarkozy according to their height, RTBF claimed.

After showing the President’s speech, in which he appears to be the tallest person in the crowd, RTBF interviewed an unnamed factory worker. “I’m told you were picked because of your size,” says the reporter, Jean-Philippe Schaller. “Yes,” says the woman. “No one must be taller than the President,” Schaller says. “That’s right,” says the woman.

Local trades union officials have since told the news website Rue 89 that the height of workers allowed to stand close to the President had been part of advance negotiations between the factory and the Elysée. The Faurecia company has declined to comment.

Schaller said that his report had been intended to show “the lengths that are taken to control the President’s public appearances, given the controversy surrounding the subject”.

Ever since a presidential visit to another part of Normandy in January, in which hostile demonstrators could be heard chanting in the background, the Elysée and the wider French government have been taking pains to manage their public image. But despite their best efforts, more trouble looms. A full-length movie on France’s favourite cartoon schoolboy is to appear later this month. Its title is Le Petit Nicolas.

— By arrangement with The Independent

Corrections and clarifications

n The headline "Aviation insurance to hit airline sector badly" (Page 17, Sept 7) does not precisely convey the spirit of the report which is that airlines face a hike in insurance premia following the series of plane crashes this year. A more appropriate headline would have been "Soaring insurance costs to hit airlines hard."

n The headline "Doc suspected of swine flu" (Page 3, Sept 7) should instead have been "Doc isolated for suspected swine flu."

n The picture accompanying the item "Open your eyes to blind date" (Page 1, Sept 7, Lifestyle) has no caption. It makes one wonder whether those in the picture had anything to do with the thrust of the report.

Despite our earnest endeavour to keep The Tribune error-free, some errors do creep in at times. We are always eager to correct them.

This column appears thrice a week — every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. We request our readers to write or e-mail to us whenever they find any error.

Readers in such cases can write to Mr Kamlendra Kanwar, Senior Associate Editor, The Tribune, Chandigarh, with the word “Corrections” on the envelope. His e-mail ID is kanwar@tribunemail.com.

H.K. Dua
Editor-in-Chief