The Tribune, Chandigarh, India

Rural postings
New policy will motivate doctors

The National Rural Health Mission initiated in 2005 to make healthcare accessible to India’s rural populace has had an indifferent and lacklustre start, hampered as it has been by an acute paucity of doctors willing to work in rural areas. For some time the government has been doing some hard thinking on how best to motivate doctors to go on rural postings.

With that background, the Centre’s new incentive plan has the makings of a winner. MBBS doctors serving in rural areas will not only be compensated with more money, but also given extra weightage in post-graduate entrance examinations. Indeed, this out- of-the-box yet simple and pragmatic solution can play a major role in taking medicare to villages.

Though the healthcare delivery system even in urban areas is not in the pink of health, the situation is more dismal in rural India. There is a glaring gap between rural and urban healthcare, evident in high infant mortality rate in rural areas. Besides inadequate infrastructure like availability of beds in hospitals, there is shortage of trained medical practioners at primary and community health centres.

Since a large majority of doctors prefer to work in urban areas, the rural population falls an easy prey to quacks. In a nation where the doctor-patient ratio falls way short of the WHO- recommended norm, where the Centre itself has admitted to a shortfall of eight lakh doctors, encouraging the medical community to work in rural areas cannot but be a challenge.

Rural health appears to be high on the government agenda and a lion’s share of the health budget has been set aside for the NRHM. To revitalise rural healthcare, requisite infrastructure as well as trained medical personnel are the crucial links.

While the government proposal to set up the National Council for Human Resources in Health is worthy of consideration, it could also deliberate upon the recommendation of the Task Force on Medical Education for NRHM and create a new cadre of rural health practioners.

Splurging on memorials
Mayawati must be called to account

The Supreme Court has done well to clear the decks for an inquiry into the Constitutional propriety of the Uttar Pradesh Government expending Rs 2,600 crore of public money on building memorials and statues. Responding to an affidavit filed by the UP government, an apex court bench comprising Justice B.N. Agarwal and Justice Aftab Alam made it clear that cabinet approvals and resolutions adopted by the legislature must conform to Constitutional provisions and be subject to judicial scrutiny.

The judiciary, the bench pointedly observed while citing a hypothetical case, would not remain silent if the legislature sets aside 80 per cent of the budget for constructing statues and memorials. The affidavit filed by the UP Chief Secretary, which tendered an apology but denied any violation of the commitment the state government had given earlier of stopping construction at the controversial memorials in Lucknow, rightly failed to satisfy the court, which is now expected to deal with the more substantive issue of law on the use or rather misuse of public money.

UP Chief Minister Mayawati is notorious for defying the law courts. On several occasions in the recent past, she challenged High Court orders asking her to stop demolition of a stadium, a residential colony and a jail — all meant to pave the way for the construction of grand memorials of her mentor Kanshi Ram and, more curiously, statues of herself.

And on each occasion, regrettably, she was allowed to go ahead with the demolitions. It had come as no surprise, therefore, when the UP government offered an undertaking to stop ‘all work’ but made no move to comply in the latest case.

The speed and the manner with which Mayawati has sought to execute the projects and justify them are unfortunate. Even more unfortunate is her threat, notwithstanding the equally irresponsible statement by Mulayam Singh Yadav that he would use a bulldozer to bring down the statues, that law and order would spin out of control if the statues are demolished. While she took advantage of the statement made by Mulayam, there was no mistaking which direction it was aimed at. It now remains to be seen whether the judiciary succeeds in reining her in. Enough is enough. Mayawati must be brought to heal and taught to respect the law of the land.

Thought for the Day

For every minute that I spin, there is in me the consciousness that I am adding to the nation’s wealth. — Mahatma Gandhi

ARTICLE

Stability in Afghanistan
India confronted with an AfPak dilemma
by Zorawar Daulet Singh

The present tumult in the Hindu Kush and the insurgency’s modest strategy of “winning by not losing” suggests that barring a massive deployment of several hundred thousand American boots, the Atlantic powers face the prospect of several bloody years digging themselves “out of a hole” in the AfPak region.

Now consider this scenario — in the not too distant future the US and NATO forces enter into a dialogue with the Pashtun peoples straddling the borderlands between Afghanistan and Pakistan. In and of itself, this is not an unwelcome development. In fact, for the past eight years, the “tyranny of the minority” as Selig Harrison calls it, has been the guiding principle to organise the political and military power structures in Afghanistan.

In a break from a historical pattern, the northern ethnicities – Tajiks, who constitute a quarter of the Afghan polity, have emerged as a disproportionately powerful ethnic group along with other allied ethnicities such as Hazaras and Uzbeks — have come to dominate Afghanistan. The southern Pashtuns, who comprise 42 per cent of the population, have been sidelined. This was perhaps the inevitable result of the anti-Taliban operations that provided the rationale for the US intervention in late 2001.

However, what should have been confined to a systematic rollback of radicalised Taliban Pashtuns with an attendant plan to destroy the umbilical link to its benefactors in the Pakistani military-intelligence establishment and a parallel quest to empower secular Pashtun tribes, became an unthinking and politically zero-sum strategy of siding with specific ethnic groups in northern Afghanistan.

The outcome — an outright alienation of the entire Pashtun community that consists of diverse tribes with varying degrees of sympathy to a radical Sunni ideology emanating from Pakistan. This untenable situation is now staring the US and NATO forces in the face.

Yet, rather than address the very source of the present Afghan imbroglio, namely, the grievances of the marginalised ethnic groups from the power structures of the US-sponsored regime in Kabul, Washington is seriously evaluating a replay of the 1990s when the CIA and ISI collaborated to sustain the Taliban as a leading institution to mobilise Pashtun support. Indeed, back then, the process of legitimising the Taliban was only interrupted by the events of 9/11, 2001.

In retrospect, the blunt reality is that Washington and Islamabad have via various acts of omission and commission ensured that the Taliban remains the principal and legitimate voice of the Pashtun peoples. Pashtun nationalists, who might disavow an Islamist ideology and who would have an aversion to seeking political guidance from Islamabad or Rawalpindi, and thus offer a genuine counterbalance to the radicalised ideology that the Taliban Pashtuns seek to employ to unify various Pashtun tribes, have not been shored up by Washington.

Of course, it would be an exercise in self-deception to expect Pakistan to voluntarily dismantle its leverage among certain Pashtun tribes that not only provides Islamabad a modicum of influence in the future politics of Afghanistan but also staves off the prospect of Pashtun nationalism gaining sway and unifying the 40 million Pashtuns divided by an illegitimate colonial-era border.

It is worth recalling that the division of the Pashtuns in 1893 was intended to ensure that the Afghan buffer would remain susceptible to external leverage from British India’s frontiers (that had absorbed a number of Pashtun tribes). Pakistan inherited this geo-strategic leverage and subsequently abused it to undermine its Pashtun minority.

After the defection of East Pakistan in the 1970s, Islamabad accelerated its policy of encouraging radical Islamisation to preserve national unity, control ethnic contradictions, and legitimise the rule of the Punjabi-military elite. This process reached its apogee during the US-Pakistani anti-Soviet operations through the 1980s, and its final manifestation was the capture of power by the Taliban in the 1990s.

Rather than drawing sensible lessons from the past, Washington appears committed to buttressing the legitimacy of the feudal-military superstructure that rules Pakistan. That the US has been willing to empathise with the Pakistani Punjabi’s irredentist aspirations and its manifestation in the form of the Taliban (and similar machinations to undermine secular Pashtun tribes) indicates that Washington values the leverage that their patrons in the Pakistani military establishment possess.

It is also indicative of an American consensus that the stability and territorial integrity of Pakistan overrides any consideration of stabilising Afghanistan via a legitimate inter-ethnic political process, especially if the latter course lifts the veil on the ethnic contradictions in Pakistan.

The US’ evolving AfPak strategy has made this abundantly clear that the security and preservation of the Pakistani state will not be subordinated to the quest for Afghan stability. In sum, Washington has paved the way for a legitimate role for Pakistan in Afghan politics and acknowledged its potential as a vital intermediary in future negotiations with Taliban factions.

Thus, it is only logical to presume that in a future scenario of US negotiations with Pashtuns, Washington will rely upon Pakistani-Taliban linkages to identify and modulate selective tribal groups that will pave the way for a reorganisation of the political play in Afghanistan.

India appears to have been left out in the cold, a consequence at least partially arising from the strategic confusion and lack of foresight among our security managers. The way forward suggests either a modification to India’s Afghan strategy (and presumably its Pakistan strategy) with the corollary of reaching out to Pashtun nationalist groups both independently and in coordination with other anxious regional powers or, if such a hedging strategy is politically unpalatable, then, prepare to bandwagon with the present geopolitical trend in the Hindu Kush and keep our peace.

The writer is Research Fellow, Centre for Policy Alternatives, New Delhi

MIDDLE

Austerity & punishment
by Uttam Sengupta

An old friend, now a senior IAS officer, was known to travel often in public buses or in sleeper coaches of trains.

Some of his colleagues would shrug and describe him as ‘stingy’ and ‘tight-fisted’. The uncharitable would say the guy was fond of gimmicks and fooling people. The vicious ones would darkly allude to his humble background and suggest that though he had moved upward, he still felt at home among smelly ‘cattle’ in buses and trains.

But BK is an honest man, a good officer and could speak knowledgeably on several subjects. I respected him and looked forward to his company.

One day I was sitting in his office when the Chief Engineer of the PHED walked in. BK was the secretary.

“Sir, I will pick you up tomorrow morning on way to the airport,” the engineer offered. Both, it appeared, were to attend an official meeting the next day in the summer capital, 400 kms away.

“I will reach even before you start,” laughed BK. He would be taking the overnight bus and reach early morning, he confirmed.

“Why do you do this,” I asked after the incredulous engineer left the chamber. You can’t save the government much money, you know, I remember telling him, exasperated that he would do something that appeared so unnecessary.

His reply is something I have never forgotten though.

“I do not do this for others,” he said, “I do it for myself”.

Seeing my raised eyebrows, he smiled and went on to explain, “I travel by cattle class to remind me how 98 per cent of my countrymen travel.”

Watching me making a face, BK then said something that hit me like a sledge-hammer. “I need to also punish myself for the privileges I otherwise enjoy,” he declared. And till this day, he effortlessly flits from planes to buses, from his chauffeur driven car to smelly and crowded train compartments.

In contrast, a politician friend, a gold medalist from the university, once confessed that he routinely wears soiled and torn kurtas whenever he visited his constituency. Otherwise fond of good things in life, he loves his drinks and dress and is fussy about both. But he would dress up only when he is in Mumbai or abroad and drink after exercising extreme caution.

Lalu Yadav, soon after he became the Chief Minister, declared he would continue to live in the modest staff quarter of his elder brother, who worked as a peon at the veterinary college. After squeezing the last drop of publicity, he moved into the official and palatial residence meant for the Chief Minister.

One also recalls Bhagwatia Devi, who lived in a one-room tenement and whose only worldly possession was a tin-trunk before she won a Lok Sabha seat from Gaya. Lalu Yadav used her as a poster girl, declaring that in a democracy the poorest could reach Parliament.

Newspapers carried photographs of Jayaprada taking Bhagwatia Devi around for shopping and barely three months later, the new MP was overheard berating the driver of her car for his failure to restore the airconditioner.

Clearly, some practise austerity out of conviction while others follow it because it is expedient. The irrepressible Sarojini Naidu is said to have told Mahatma Gandhi, “if only you knew how much it costs to keep you in poverty,” in a reference to Bapu accepting hospitality of big business houses even as he travelled, bare bodied, through the country in a third class compartment. The beads of rudraksha round her neck would often get replaced by a necklace whenever Mrs Indira Gandhi travelled abroad. So, what’s the big deal ?n

OPED

Quest for power
Focus has to be on renewable energy sources
by Kamlendra Kanwar

There is justifiable relief over the fact that the growth rate of the Indian economy has not plummeted as sharply as that of most other countries in this phase of global economic slowdown. With the worst on the global crisis now deemed to be over, India is setting its eyes on a grand revival, expecting the growth rate to bounce back to 9 per cent from the current estimate of around 6 per cent.

Yet, the cold reality as borne out by some experts is that to sustain a growth rate of even 7 per cent for the economy, India needs to increase its electricity generation capacity six times over the next 20 years from the present 143 gigawatts to at least 800 gigawatts. That is no mean task.

But that’s not all. India’s massive coal reserves (6 per cent of the world’s total) are high in sulphur and ash content which is hazardous to the environment. That reinforces the need to use clean technologies such as nuclear, bio fuels, wind and solar on a much bigger scale to ensure energy security for India without causing catastrophic damage to the ecological balance.

China overcame the power shortage by building huge coal-fired power plants taking advantage of its massive reserves of coal. What it failed to factor in was that excessive coal usage would damage the environment grievously with acid rain and smog, and greatly add to global warming. India will have to tread warily, taking lessons from the experience of the Chinese.

In terms of India’s present energy consumption, the International Energy Outlook 2008 reports that coal accounts for 53 per cent of primary energy consumption, oil for 31 per cent, natural gas for 8 per cent, renewable sources including hydropower, solar and wind power for 6.8 per cent and nuclear energy for 1.2 per cent. This mix needs to change substantially over the coming years.

India has no hydroelectric sites left to exploit on a massive scale. Whatever sites are left would require 10 years to bear fruit. Natural gas power is a distant dream, especially since the deal with the Iranians for a gas pipeline passing through Pakistan has fallen through.

The Indian government’s expectation is that growth in renewable energy will occur at a much faster pace than traditional power generation, with renewables making up 20 per cent of the 70 gigawatts of total additional energy planned from 2008-2012.

Among the green alternatives to coal, nuclear is the only technology with proven capacity with worldwide generation of 370 gigawatts of energy.

Carbon dioxide emissions from nuclear power are the lowest. After the go-ahead given by the Nuclear Suppliers Group and the subsequent Indo-US civil nuclear deal, nuclear power is certain to get a big boost in coming years. Over the last three years, technology development has reduced the risks attached to nuclear energy with safety norms having improved.

The country plans to increase its nuclear power capacity to 20 gigawatts by 2030 from the current 5 gigawatts.

But there are hurdles along the way. India’s natural uranium reserves are a modest 70,000 metric tonnes which is grossly insufficient to run the current and proposed nuclear power plants. India is scouting around for imported uranium but the biggest source – Australia – remains unresponsive due to the long-standing Labour Party position of not exporting uranium to a non-signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

While renewable sources of energy and nuclear power can be enhanced substantially in the foreseeable future, India’s reliance on coal, oil and natural gas can hardly be wished away. With the Oil and Natural Gas Commission having reached a virtual dead end in oil and gas exploration, it is a relief that Reliance has entered the arena in a big way.

A first-of-its-kind hydrocarbons production from any deep water field in the country, Reliance’s Krishna-Godavari basin in the Bay of Bengal will account for 40 per cent of the country’s current indigenous hydrocarbon production in about 18 months. The company estimates that the production from this will save India an annual foreign exchange outflow of $US20 billion.

With growing prosperity, India’s per capita consumption of power which is a low 400 Kwh per year (against the international average of 2,400 Kwh per year) is bound to increase sharply. A huge power deficit stares India in the face which could well slow down India’s growth. While a more concerted effort is needed to harness various forms of energy, it would be unwise to ignore the huge losses suffered in transmission through pilferage.

Mercifully, of late, renewable sources are getting greater attention. But there is still a long way to go from the 4.9 per cent that renewable energy contributes to total energy generated. The official target is to increase this share to 10 per cent by 2012 and further in subsequent years. With nuclear power chipping in on an increasing scale,dependence on fossil fuels could be reduced. But the pace of change needs to be stepped up far more

Among renewable sources, geothermal energy which is derived from natural heat stored in the deep interior of the earth promises to be a key source. Except for a few half-hearted attempts, the government has done practically nothing to exploit this vast reserve.

By present reckoning, India has a geothermal power potential of 10,600MW, but the country is yet to see a single commissioned project that harnesses this technology.

Another promising form of renewable energy in which India has a distinct advantage due to bright sunshine nearly 300 days in a year is solar energy. Globally, it is the fastest growing source of energy with an annual average growth of 35 per cent. In this too India’s record in tapping the resource has been lacklustre. Compared to China which is projected to have 86,100MWP (mega watt-peak)of solar photovoltaics and 1500MWP of solar thermal power by 2025, India is expected to be in a position to harness only a quarter of that in the same period.

Even in harnessing wind power, India, though a relatively early entrant, is only now beginning to break out of inertia. Despite the fact that wind power accounts for 6 per cent of India’s total installed power capacity, it generates only 1.6 per cent of the country’s power. As of July 2008 the installed capacity of wind power in India was 8,696MW. It is estimated that 6,000MW of additional wind power capacity will be installed in India by 2012.

Overall, India can deem itself fortunate that it has substantial potential for renewable, non-conventional energy forms which are non-polluting. It faces, however, an uphill task to tap these sources adequately and to reduce dependence on current, environmentally-unfriendly sources like coal and oil. The quest has really just begun and much needs to be done in coming years.

Who’s afraid of a terrorist haven?
by Paul R. Pillar

Rationales for maintaining the counterinsurgency in Afghanistan are varied and complex, but they all center on one key tenet: that Afghanistan must not be allowed to again become a haven for terrorist groups, especially al-Qaida.

Debate about Afghanistan has raised reasons to question that tenet, one of which is that the top al-Qaida leadership is not even in Afghanistan, having decamped to Pakistan years ago. Another is that terrorists intent on establishing a haven can choose among several unstable countries besides Afghanistan, and U.S. forces cannot secure them all.

The debate has largely overlooked a more basic question: How important to terrorist groups is any physical haven? More to the point: How much does a haven affect the danger of terrorist attacks against U.S. interests, especially the U.S. homeland?

The answer to the second question is: not nearly as much as unstated assumptions underlying the current debate seem to suppose. When a group has a haven, it will use it for such purposes as basic training of recruits. But the operations most important to future terrorist attacks do not need such a home, and few recruits are required for even very deadly terrorism.

Consider: The preparations most important to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks took place not in training camps in Afghanistan but, rather, in apartments in Germany, hotel rooms in Spain and flight schools in the United States.

In the past couple of decades, international terrorist groups have thrived by exploiting globalization and information technology, which has lessened their dependence on physical havens. By utilizing networks such as the Internet, terrorists’ organizations have become more network-like, not beholden to any one headquarters.

A significant jihadist terrorist threat to the United States persists, but that does not mean it will consist of attacks instigated and commanded from a South Asian haven, or that it will require a haven at all. Al-Qaida’s role in that threat is now less one of commander than of ideological lodestar, and for that role a haven is almost meaningless.

These trends have been familiar to counterterrorist cognoscenti for years but have gone mostly unmentioned in discussion of Afghanistan. This is probably because the intervention there in late 2001 was unquestionably a response to Sept. 11 — the “good war,” in contrast with the misguided expedition to Iraq, where the only connection to the 2001 attacks was in the Bush administration’s contorted selling of that invasion.

The U.S. entry into the Afghan civil war succeeded in ousting the Taliban from power and rousting its al-Qaida allies, and the intervention would have occurred regardless of whether the occupant of the White House was named Bush or Gore.

The issue today does not concern what was worth disrupting eight years ago. And it is not whether a haven in Afghanistan would be of any use to a terrorist group — it would.

Instead, the issue is whether preventing such a haven would reduce the terrorist threat to the United States enough from what it otherwise would be to offset the required expenditure of blood and treasure and the barriers to success in Afghanistan, including an ineffective regime and sagging support from the population.

Thwarting the creation of a physical haven also would have to offset any boost to anti-U.S. terrorism stemming from perceptions that the United States had become an occupier rather than a defender of Afghanistan.

Among the many parallels being offered between Afghanistan and the Vietnam War, one of the most disturbing concerns inadequate examination of core assumptions. The Johnson administration was just as meticulous as the Obama administration is being in examining counterinsurgent strategies and the forces required to execute them.

But most American discourse about Vietnam in the early and mid-1960s took for granted the key — and flawed — assumptions underlying the whole effort: that a loss of Vietnam would mean that other Asian countries would fall like dominoes to communism, and that a retreat from the commitment to Vietnam would gravely harm U.S. credibility.

The Obama administration and other participants in the debate about expanding the counterinsurgency effort in Afghanistan can still avoid comparable error. But this would require not merely invoking Sept. 11 and taking for granted that a haven in Afghanistan would mean the difference between repeating and not repeating that horror.

— By arrangement with LA Times-Washington Post

Inside Pakistan
Powers behind Musharraf’s safe exit
by Syed Nooruzzaman

President Asif Zaradri made an interesting revelation, though denied later on, that former military ruler Gen Pervez Musharraf’s safe exit from Pakistan, after he submitted his resignation as Army Chief, was guaranteed by certain friendly powers. This has brought out the truth why the PPP-led government has been taking little interest in launching impeachment proceedings against him for trampling the constitution.

Mr Zardari stated that General Musharraf was allowed to leave Pakistan following a deal between him and the government with foreign intermediaries. This has led to a serious debate with PML (N) leader Nawaz Sharif expressing surprise why he was not consulted on such an important subject.

But when Mr Sharif began to flex his political muscles as the top opposition leader, threatening to highlight the issue of General Musharraf’s trial for treason in parliament, he was reined in by the Saudi leadership. The PML (N) leader was invited to Saudi Arabia only to be told to keep quiet on the Musharraf issue. The result: he has now softened his stance.

But is Saudi Arabia the only “friendly” country which played a role in the General’s safe exit from Pakistan? Referring to the clarification by Presidential spokesman Farhatullah Babar, The Nation says, “At the end of the day, the clarification has only brought out the confusion that prevails in the Presidency and the culture of deal-making that pervades our (Pakistan’s) polity.

Empty mansion

After shifting his residence from Army House, Rawalpindi, to a three-bedroom flat in London’s Edgware Road area, these days General Musharaf is busy giving lectures at various institutions in Europe and the US. He is minting money by speaking whatever comes to his mind. He has no fear of getting punished at some stage for the blunders he committed during his rule. But is he really happy?

Shyema Sajjad says in an article in Dawn (Sept 17) that the General’s flat in London “might have silk carpets and leather couches, but probably is no match to the prestigious abode at Army House (which he eventually moved out of 18 months after resigning as the Chief of Army Staff). More than reminiscing about the good old days in the crisp uniform and Army House, Musharraf must also be home-sick for the home he built but never got to live in — the Chak Shahzad mansion lies empty”.

He may remain scared of coming back home though those in power would prefer never to touch him. The powers-that-be know it well that many of them, too, will be losers in case General Musharraf is finally brought to book.

The frustrated Baloch

If a Senator and former federal minister, Mr Salim Saifullah Khan, is to be believed, “Balochistan is the most serious crisis confronting Pakistan today”. In his view, Islamabad has “no strategy” to redress the grievances of the Baloch though these are well-known. Soon after the formation of the PPP-led government in March President Zardari said that within 12 months “the provinces would be given autonomy in accordance with the constitution and the they will have rights over their resources”, the Senator says in his brief article carried in The News on September 17. But so far nothing has been done and the Baloch leaders are losing their patience.

The Nation (Sept 16), however, says that the Pakistan government seems to have “recognised the true nature of the Balochistan problem, that it is basically a political issue, which can be settled only through a political approach”.

The paper also mentions that “the government has decided to withdraw cases against Baloch leaders and grant general amnesty to political prisoners and those who are in exile or allegedly involved in anti-state activities”. But only time will tell whether these will help control the Baloch insurgency.