The Tribune, Chandigarh, India

New UK visa norms
Indian IT professionals to suffer

An important feature of globalisation is a free movement of talent, goods and services across the borders. After 9/11 Western countries have become more cautious in opening their doors to Asians. Last year’s financial meltdown has given them another reason to stop foreigners from grabbing local jobs. Britain, the slowest to emerge from recession, has toughened the visa rules for Indian IT professionals going to Britain on intra-company transfers. They will need to have 12 months’ experience before they can be sent to the UK from next January. They will not be able to settle in Britain even after the mandatory five years’ stay.

Though Prime Minister Gordon Brown is not as vocal about the loss of jobs as is President Obama, Britain is quietly and selectively shutting its borders to non-whites. That the Brown government is keen on keeping British jobs for Britons is understandable. But why target Asians only? The UK immigration rules are being tightened to keep off not only job-seekers or prospective illegal settlers, but also students from Asian countries. Indian students desirous of pursuing higher education in Britain have been denied visas despite their having deposited large amounts as fees with British universities. They have been left in the lurch. Faced with growing financial constraints, British universities woo foreign students, who pay three to four times more than their European or local counterparts.

This is the unfortunate fallout of 9/11. After the London blast, the British government seems to have become paranoid about terror. It believes that terrorists could enter Britain by taking student visas. Every country is within its rights to protect itself from terrorists, but Britain is going overboard and is discriminatory in its approach. It is harming its own interests by turning away foreign students who help it subsidise education for its own citizens.

Hamara Bajaj is history
Production ends for iconic two-wheeler

Bajaj scooters will no longer be made in India — the company that manufactured them is shifting all its energy to motorcycles. Motor scooters have a long history, and basically they are motorcycles with a step-through frame and a flat floorboard for the rider’s feet. They thus protect the rider from wind and road dirt.

Since the 1960s, when Bajaj imported and then manufactured the aircraft-inspired Vespa 150 under the licence of Piaggio of Italy, it dominated the scooter market with its low-cost products that practically became family vehicles for the middle class in India. The Bajaj Chetak that came in 1972 and the Bajaj Super in 1976 were successful spin-offs of the original, and people waited years to get their vehicles. The Hamara Bajaj slice-of-life commercials and print advertisements too helped to make the brand iconic. The company dominated the scooter market in India in the 1980s and 1990s and set many records.

Liberalisation, change in consumer attitudes and expectations, and lack of innovation eventually cut into the scooter market and Bajaj finally stopped production of Chetak and Super in 2006 as sales declined. It concentrated on the expanding market for motorcycles, except for a tentative foray into the scooter market in 2007 when it launched the Kristal, the assembly line of which will be shut down now. Bajaj is the top exporter of motorcycles in India. It sold over 20 lakh units last year. Ironically, while Bajaj shifts gear to its motorcycle line, Honda, the company that is the top manufacturer of motorcycles in the country, is also now the number one in scooters. It sold over 6.5 lakh of them in the financial year 2008-09. Scooters have their place, but not in Bajaj’s stable.

Thought for the Day

The biggest disease today is not leprosy or tuberculosis, but rather the feeling of being unwanted, uncared for and deserted by everybody. — Mother Teresa

ARTICLE

A trilogy of national shame
Will political class learn nothing?
by Inder Malhotra

WITH striking unanimity the media and public-spirited organisations in the country described the 25th anniversary of the Bhopal gas leak tragedy as a “day of national shame”. No fair-minded person can disagree with this. For, though the country remembers the ghastly catastrophe only once a year, the unbearable pain inflicted on hundreds of thousands of mostly poor people persists. Nor would it go away any time soon. Families of many of the victims have not been compensated after even a quarter of a century, and those that have been have received a measly sum of a little over Rs. 12,000 each.

Dominique Lapierrre — whose book “Five past Midnight in Bhopal” gave a vivid and heart-rending account of what the people living around the Union Carbide factory suffered in 1984 in one of the worst man-made disasters — has summed up the ghastly situation as it exists: The leak “continues to affect victims even today; children born are malformed; women suffer from cancer; there are people who cannot breathe; people go blind.”

Horribly, the impact of the leaked gas is “akin to nuclear radiation in that it enters the genes of the victims … No one knows how many generations transmission of the affected genes will continue”. Moreover, nearly 100 tonnes of effluents have been left on the site and have never been cleared. Consequently, half the water supply to the inhabitants around the site is virtually poisoned. Dow Chemicals that have taken over from Union Carbide have washed their hands of the 1984 outrage, and neither the Congress-led Central government nor the BJP ministry in the state seems to care.

Whether by coincidence or otherwise this year’s remembrance of the Bhopal tragedy was accompanied by anger also over the second tragedy of that year occurring barely a month before the gas leak — the reprehensible anti-Sikh riots in the nation’s capital following Indira Gandhi’s assassination by her Sikh security guards. The newly elected Akali member of the Lok Sabha, Mrs Harsimrat Kaur Badal, who is the wife of Punjab’s Deputy Chief Minister, Mr Sukhbir Singh Badal, made a moving speech in the House expressing both anguish and anger over the dismal fact that 25 years after the butchery many of those responsible had not been punished and were unlikely to be brought to book. She wanted the treasury benches to state whether any action would be taken even at this late stage, but no answer was forthcoming.

With both the grim tragedies under discussion, it was perhaps inevitable that comparisons were drawn between the final compensation paid to the victims of the Delhi riots — about Rs. 7 lakh per family — and the pittance given to the sufferers in Bhopal. Some have insinuated that this was due to the fact that the victims in Delhi were Sikhs and those killed and maimed in Bhopal Muslims. Even if there is a grain of truth in this belief, it is a huge exaggeration. The reality, as always, is more complex.

Originally, the number of people killed in Delhi and Bhopal was roughly the same, about 3,000 in each case. But while the casualties in the riots remained stationary, the unending tragedy of Bhopal took a much heavier toll of 20,000 lives. Moreover, over the succeeding two-and-a-half decades, the number of those suffering from breathlessness and other diseases added up to nearly five lakhs. The Government of India had sued Union Carbide — while letting its guilty honchos escape scot-free — for $3.3 billion. But for reasons unknown, it settled with the killers for just $ 470 million that had to be disbursed to nearly half a million sufferers.

A week before the 25th anniversary of the Bhopal outrage was the first anniversary of another infamy — the terrorist attack on Mumbai from the Pakistani soil on November 26, 2009. Instead of observing it with due solemnity and dignity, this country acted in a way that was shameful. Instead of mourning those who were felled by Pakistani terrorists, honouring the security personnel that fought the invaders valiantly, and demanding of Pakistan to punish the perpetrators of the horrifying attack and its masterminds, Indian Parliament turned itself into an arena of unbecoming acrimony. There was a particularly angry exchange between Mr Pranab Mukherjee, leader of the Lok Sabha and the second most important man in the Manmohan Singh government, and the outgoing Leader of the Opposition, Mr L. K. Advani. Once again the bone of contention was inadequate and tardy payment of compensation to bereaved families. Of the more than 4,000 sufferers, only a fourth had been given compensation so far, alleged Mr Advani, Mr Mukherjee lost his temper.

As if this was not enough, nearly 30 MPs disgraced themselves and exposed the House to ridicule by putting down questions on the day’s order of business and absenting themselves from the House. The question hour had to be dispensed with. Later, it transpired that the number of members who habitually stay away from the meetings of the standing committees of which they are members had risen embarrassingly. What happened during the Home Minister’s reply to the debate on the Liberhan Commission’s report only underscrores that parliamentary standards have reached rock bottom.

In the city of Mumbai things were no better because two factions of its police force, one of them led by the Commissioner of Police at the time of the attack when the force was found wanting, embarked on a war of words. Nor could anyone in the state government explain why important parts of the R. D. Pradhan Committee’s report had been wilfully suppressed and its recommendations were not being implemented.

The third item in the trilogy of national shame is the indifference, nay callousness, of the ruling establishment towards the cruelly soaring food prices that are causing enormous hardship to the bulk of the Indian people. The irony is that the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance goes on paying lip service to aam aadmi. In my worst nightmares I had never expected that daal, the poor man’s protein, would cost Rs 100 a kilo. A very large number of lower middle-class families can no longer afford either lentils or vegetables, but the well-fed minority is not bothered.

Doubtless, there is a shortage of lentils and foodgrains in the world market. But the wide world knows that hoarding and profiteering also plays havoc with prices. Has any action been taken anywhere in the country against hoarders and profiteers as it used to happen in the much decried past? Can anything be more shameful than that?

MIDDLE

“Ma” manifested
by Sarvjit Singh

Ma has emerged from beneath the ground in a house in Sunam and people are pouring in from all directions”, announced Rajvinder, the seasoned telephone operator of the DC residence, his mellifluous voice dripping with faith. “And that the Superintendent of Police had called up to position an Executive Magistrate there to oversee law and order.”

In the few preceding days, I have had couple of those small ‘experiences’, like someone appears after a long gap whom one had remembered the same morning. So the day started with me and the police chief travelling to the site. As we reached the spot and stepped out of the car we were welcomed by a dozen policemen, half pot bellied and all eager to brief their chief about the curious development in a house that was 200 meters into the street, not wide enough for a car.

The crowd was parted and pushed to the walls by cane wielding men in uniform, some of whom did look to be the direct descendents of the Ravana, Kumbhakarna, Meghnad trio.

Jostling against a sweaty arm here and a taut belly protruding there, we made our way to the house where ‘Mother’ had manifested. Part dumb-founded, part mesmerised and definitely thankful to be the ‘chosen ones’, the members of the family received us with folded hands and covered heads.

Standing in the small central courtyard of the house, the middle aged, turbaned head of the family then narrated the experience, “We were shaken out of sleep around 2 in the night with a loud blast that blew off our blankets. Dumbstruck, we looked into the courtyard from the window. A huge ball of blue flames rose from the floor and made its way to the sky above. Before we could push ourselves back, another ball of fire arose from the cracks in the floor and vanished into the skies.”

The floor was definitely cracked as were the wooden panes of the traditional doors blown off with precision and the door of the small refrigerator sunk in as if with a divine push. A battery of saffron robed priests looked at us through the corner of the eye, the lines on their brows exuding impatience to start the ceremony to turn the place into a temple.

While everybody was quizzing everybody else, curiosity drew me to the kitchen. The gas cylinder was intact. Though slid aside, the utensils were in place on the shelves. “What could it be?” Suddenly then, my eye fell on the rubber tube of the LPG that had loosened and detached itself from the gas stove; then I shook the gas cylinder and it was empty.

Triggered by a spark in the relays of the voltage stabiliser of the fridge, three blasts had to take place as there wasn’t enough air in the small closed space to consume the gas spilled over the floor in one go.

Speeding back to the office in the official car, I was somewhat elated on having solved the mystery and somewhat pensive that my faith had a long way to go before I could hope to see a true miracle.

OPED

Prisoners too have rights
The denial of basic facilities is common
by Shalini Dewan

In prisons around the world, the denial of basic health facilities, sanitation and even adequate food, all compound human rights violations of prisoners and undertrials. Add to this lack of access to legal recourse, lack of recreational facilities and entertainment, curtailed visitation rights, and you begin to get a taste of the pitiable plight of those in prison.

Human Rights Day (December 10) is an opportunity to squarely face up to this sorry global state of prison affairs. While imprisonment implies the enforced loss of an individual’s right to liberty through containment in a closed environment, keeping individuals in custody should not, however, have a deleterious effect on them.

As far back as 1955, the First UN Congress on the Prevention of Crime and the Treatment of Offenders established the Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners, setting out detailed guidelines on the entitlements of prisoners ranging from the right to proper accommodation, medical services and nutritious food to the right to exercise and sport and proper clothing and sleeping facilities.

The Minimum Rules also called for every institution to have a well-stocked library and for prisoners to be allowed to communicate with their family and friends.

And in 1990, reflecting the change in both sociological thought and human rights sensitivity, the UN General Assembly adopted some basic principles for the treatment of prisoners which called for all prisoners to be treated with the respect due to their inherent dignity and value as human beings, without discrimination on the grounds of race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status.

The principles also called for efforts to abolish solitary confinement as a punishment, or to restrict its use, and for all prisoners to have the right to take part in cultural activities and education aimed at the full development of the human personality.

All member countries of the United Nations unanimously approved the principles but they are yet to become a reality in many parts of the world, including South Asia, and are observed more in the breach! The continuous upgrading of prison facilities must be accorded priority as a human rights issue.

The past decade has no doubt witnessed an increasing consciousness about the desirability of prison reforms. It is now recognised that a reformative philosophy and a rehabilitative strategy must form part of prison justice. This must happen within the context of ensuring the human rights of prisoners, whether they are held in Arthur Road Jail in Mumbai or Guantanamo Bay!

In India, some estimates put the number of prisoners at 800,000 undertrials and 200,000 convicts. And the conditions in jails often fall short of international standards. The slogan of all human rights for all perhaps evades this group entirely.

The effacement of their human rights reflects perhaps the low utility that prisoners have because basically they are not a vote bank. At least, not yet! But, the larger irony is that prisoners in India – criminals even – can stand for elections but they cannot vote!

Chief Election Commissioner Navin Chawla at a recent seminar stated that there was a need to provide the right to vote to undertrials as part of the proposed electoral reforms. “The present system needs reform as undertrials are eligible to contest elections. However, they are not allowed to vote which I consider to be a denial of their natural right”, he added.

Despite an impressive legal and institutional framework to prevent it, torture is still widely tolerated or even practised by governments, and impunity persists for the perpetrators. Significantly, India, although a signatory to the 1984 UN Convention against Torture, has yet to ratify it.

According to a report by the Asian Centre for Human Rights, 1,184 deaths in police custody were reported to India’s National Human Rights Commission between 1 April 2001 and 31 March 2009. An overwhelming number of these deaths took place as a result of torture, and most of them within 48 hours of the victims being taken into custody by the police.

Despite several orders by the Supreme Court of India, guidelines enunciated by the national and state human rights commissions and official sanctions, police personnel and paramilitary forces remain undeterred and torture continues to be inflicted on those in custody.

Of course, there are some good practices too. In Tihar Jail, several NGO initiatives have made the prison a place where prisoners can express themselves through creative pursuits and are also taught a variety of skills to make them feel productive members of society.

Earlier this year, I was at a seminar in Kolkata on the rights of prisoners which was held within the walls of the Presidency Correctional Home, with the participation of about 50 prisoners as well as prominent lawyers and jurists. This was probably the first such initiative but this was not all.

Later that evening we were treated to a spectacular dance drama at the prestigious Rabindra Sadan theatre. What was unusual was that all the “actors” were prisoners currently lodged in Kolkata jails who had been granted special permission to venture out of the prison walls and present the show.

A group of about 60 prisoners – both men and women – performed Valmiki Pratibha, which traces the journey of Ratnakar from a dreaded dacoit to the holy sage Valmiki who went on to author the Ramayana.

Through art, dance, music and theatre, this innovative “culture therapy” programme, offered to the inmates across the state of West Bengal, aims to bring about a psychological rehabilitation of prisoners and enhance their feeling of self-worth.

Initiatives like these – in human rights terms – are invaluable – and definitely achievable.

The writer is the Director of the United Nations Information Centre for India and Bhutan

Boom, bust and beyond
by Hamish McRae

There were two huge economic stories – stories that when historians look back at this decade they will recognise determined the shape of the world economy for the first half of this century. One is cyclical, the other structural.

The cyclical story is blazingly obvious: we have come through two recessions, the second an extremely serious one, the costs of which will be evident for a generation. The structural story is less so, at least to those of us in the established developed world, but on balance is even more important.

It is the shift of economic power from West to East, from North America and Europe to Asia, from the Group of Seven developed economies to what are dubbed the "emerging" countries and most particularly to China and India. If you want one fact that captures the seismic scale of what has happened, it is that China started the decade as the world's sixth or seventh largest economy and has ended it, in all probability, as second only to the United States.

There are other stories of course, some of which are encouraging, such as the reasonable progress made by the world's poorest continent, Africa. Sadly, some are less so; for example, though inequality has in general fallen between countries, it has continued to rise within them. More of this in a moment; first the two great tales, cyclical first.

It is impossible to get any perspective on the current economic downturn. We are slap-bang in the middle of it and cannot know how speedy or secure the recovery will be. What we do know is that the first decade of the century has been framed by two "busts" with – for the developed world at least – a fragile boom in between.

The beginning of 2000 saw the peak of the 1990s "dotcom" boom, what we now recognise was unsustainable growth fuelled by enthusiasm for, and over-investment in, the new communications technologies. The world has been transformed by those technologies, but for a lot of the participants – and investors – it was a commercial and financial disaster.

The world recession of the early 2000s was not particularly serious and some countries, including the UK, escaped altogether. But for investors it was a catastrophe; though the world economy bottomed out in 2001, share prices had peaked at the beginning of 2000 and continued to fall until 2003. Even now, at the end of 2009, the major world markets have yet to regain their levels of early 2000. Retired people through most of the developed world have lower pensions as a result.

If share prices slumped, house prices boomed. With a couple of exceptions, most notably Germany and Japan, the developed world saw rises in the price of residential property on a greater scale than at any time in recorded history. Obviously the experience varies from country to country, but in very broad terms between 2000 and 2008 house prices in most countries doubled relative to people's incomes. Since incomes were rising, the actual increases were higher. Then the bubble burst, with consequences that we are still grappling with right now.

The house price boom was enormously important, for two main reasons. It supported a boom in consumption, as people felt richer and borrowed more against the value of their homes. That in turn drove the long boom through most of the decade. But it also was associated with excesses in the banking industry, as banks scrambled to lend more and more to home-buyers and created all sorts of complicated financial instruments that they thought would spread the risks they were taking on.

Everything was fine while prices continued to climb. But when US house prices started to plateau two things became clear. One was that many of the loans would never be repaid; the other was that these loans had been parcelled up and sold all over the world and that investors buying them had no idea how little these loans might really be worth. What became known as the "sub-prime crisis" undermined the global banking system and helped plunge the world into what has become, in many countries, the most serious recession since the Second World War.

There is still no clear consensus on the balance between the significance of the various things that went wrong. We are still in the blame game. We can see there were several elements to the failure, including:

– Excessively low interest rates in the US and some other developed countries;

– China's willingness to lend the US money to support the consumer boom;

– Poor management decisions in many large banks, fuelled in part by the way they paid their staff;

– Weak, or at least misdirected, financial regulation in several countries;

– Rating agencies that gave prime or AAA ratings to what were really junk debts;

– The familiar human response that when things seem to be going well we expect this to continue forever.

It will be for the economic historians to grade those factors, and doubtless some others, into a league table of shame. It will be for the politicians, central bankers and financial regulators to reconstruct a system to try to prevent anything like this happening again. Meanwhile we have to live with the consequences.

What we do know is that in autumn 2008 the world banking system came closer to collapse than at any time since the 1930s.

The full facts have yet to emerge but a couple of lessons are already clear. One is that the weakness of the world financial system was a central cause of the plunge in world trade towards the end of 2008 and during the early part of 2009.

Another is that there is an inherent financial and economic cycle from which it is very hard to escape. We seem to be prisoners of this cycle and one of the great challenges of the next few years will be how to curb the booms as well as supporting people during its slumps. And leading on from that, we have learnt that when things go seriously wrong, only governments are big enough to be able to pick up the pieces.

— By arrangement with The Independent

Hope for phobia sufferers
by Steve Connor

Fear has been eliminated from the human mind for the first time in a series of pioneering experiments that could open the way to treating a range of phobias and anxiety disorders with behavioural therapy rather than drugs.

Scientists have selectively blocked thoughts of fear by interfering with the way memories are "reconsolidated" by the brain. It could lead to new ways of treating the thousands of people whose lives are crippled by fear and anxiety relating to phobias and memories that go back many years.

The research, funded by the US National Institute of Mental Health, may offer an alternative form of treatment to the current use of drugs, which have side-effects. The study suggests that it may be possible to permanently eradicate an overwhelming fear by relatively simple behavioural therapy.

"Previous attempts to disrupt fear memories have relied on pharmacological interventions. Our results suggest such invasive techniques may not be necessary. Using a more natural intervention... allows a safe way to prevent the return of fear," said Elizabeth Phelps of New York University, who led the study published in the journal Nature.

Conventional behavioural therapy involves exposing people to a phobia – such as showing a spider to arachnophobes – under "safe" conditions. The new research goes a step further by deliberately triggering a fear memory and then trying to interfere with the way it is restored or "reconsolidated" by the brain within the critical minutes or hours after the memory was revived.

Dr Phelps said that it was very similar to conventional treatments of phobias but the key difference was that the timing was critical. "By paying attention to the way memories are stored and restored we can perhaps target the therapy by changing the timing of the interventions," she said.

The idea is not to create a new memory saying that the phobia in question is safe, but to retrieve the original memory and manipulate it when it is being restored, or reconsolidated, to show that it is no longer dangerous, the scientists explained.

"Our research suggests that during the lifetime of a memory there are windows of opportunity where it becomes susceptible to be permanently changed. But understanding the dynamics of memory we might, in the long run, open new avenues of treatment for disorders that involve abnormal emotional memories," said Daniela Schiller, the study's lead author and a post-doctoral fellow at New York.

The findings came out of previous work on laboratory rats showing that it was possible to eliminate the fear of a particular sound associated with an electric shock. This could be done by "extinction training", in which the rats were exposed repeatedly to the tone without any electric shocks.

However, the timing of this training was crucial. Fear of the sound was only erased in those rats that were trained after an interval of a few minutes but no longer than a few hours after the fear memory was revived.

The latest study, on human volunteers given electric shocks when shown coloured cards, was based on the rat tests. Only those people whose retraining took place within a certain time window after a fear memory was revived showed signs of fear elimination.

— By arrangement with The Independent

Corrections and clarifications

In the report “AIDS control, the NACO way” (Page 7, December 10) nowhere has it been indicated what NACO is the abbreviation of. It stands for National AIDS Control Organisation.

The headline “11ganja seized, 2 held” (Page 5, Chandigarh Tribune, December 9) is faulty. It should have been “11 kg ganja seized, 2 held”.

The headline “Gujjars missing at key posts, says survey” (Page 6, December 7) is incorrect. A more appropriate headline would have been “Few Gujjars in key posts: Survey”.

The continuation headline “Most new schemes unlikely to take” (Page 8, Chandigarh Tribune, December 5) is incomplete. It was important to say …take off instead of just take.

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 twice a week — every Tuesday 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