The Tribune, Chandigarh, India

Subsidising electricity
Populism will cripple power board

In another act of irresponsible governance, the Punjab government has decided to absorb the power tariff hike announced for the domestic, industrial and commercial consumers by the regulatory commission in August last year. This will set the state back by Rs 550 crore. The cash-strapped government is already placed at the edge of a precipice because of its financial mismanagement and the nasty politics of competitive populism in which both coalition partners excel. The Akalis insist on free power for farmers and the BJP resists any attempt to further burden the urban consumers, letting the power board bleed itself to death in the process.

The government has a right to help the needy. But in this case it is bent upon bankrupting the state power board because it is not paying the monthly subsidy in time as legally required. The government has defaulted on subsidy payments for the past three months forcing the regulatory commission to threaten a penalty. The coalition government recently set up a two-member committee to review the ruinous power subsidy that costs the exchequer Rs 3,142 crore annually. That turned out to be an exercise in futility. Hoping to calm the squabbling ruling politicians and hoodwink the public, the Punjab State Electricity Board approached the regulator to defer the tariff hike, which was to its own advantage. In the process the board showcased its monumental legal ignorance and the regulator rightly rubbished the plea.

If the ruling Akali Dal thinks it is helping farmers or the BJP feels it is protecting the urban consumers’ or the industry’s interests, both are mistaken. The sparring coalition partners might have bought political peace but they have pushed the power board closer to a financial disaster. A cash-starved board, helped by a suicidal management, will only sink deeper in trouble and people will suffer more frequent and prolonged power disruptions.

Tackling e-waste
Processing centres need to be set up

Consumer goods are reused much beyond what their manufacturers intend them to be in India, but there is always a point beyond which they just don’t work, and will have to be discarded. At this point, they are sold to scrap dealers, who salvage all that they can recover. To a layman, this may seem like a good example of recycling, but the fact is that what ensues is hazardous, both to the individuals who handle such goods as well as the environment in general.

Waste electrical and electronic equipment or e-waste, to use its popular abbreviation, comprises electronic and electrical devices which are surplus, obsolete, or broken. E-waste can have contaminants like lead, cadmium, beryllium and polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), which are pollutants that pose significant health hazards. E-waste may contain small amounts of precious metals such as gold, silver, palladium and copper, for which it is broken down. Greenpeace estimates that India generated almost four lakh tonnes of e-waste in 2007. Barely 3 per cent of it was recycled properly. India is still in the process of framing legislation that will make the 25-odd PC manufacturers and sellers who control about 75 per cent of the market implement a take-back policy for their end-consumers and recycle the same in an environment-friendly manner. The unorganised sector will also be required to comply with the law, but the buy-back proposal is not enough.

While buyers must pay for the eventual disposal of the products they purchase, the government too must make provisions to recycle the waste and create proper facilities. This is not a problem that can be wished away. With the market for computers, entertainment device electronics, mobile phones, TVs, etc, expanding greatly, it is estimated that eight lakh tonnes of e-waste will be generated by 2012. The nation must take expeditious steps to deal with the problem, which, if unattended to, can pollute the environment and expose its most vulnerable citizens to hazards created by this toxic waste.

Thought for the Day

Politics are almost as exciting as war and quite as dangerous. In war you can only be killed once, but in politics — many times. — Winston Churchill

ARTICLE

Bridging the divide
Statehood no panacea for Telangana
by V. Eshwar Anand

The manner in which a peaceful and progressive state like Andhra Pradesh has been plunged into turmoil and uncertainty over the demand for and against separate statehood for Telangana is most unfortunate. Union Home Minister P. Chidambaram rightly said at an all-party meeting in New Delhi on January 5 that there was need to restore peace and normalcy in the state urgently so that consultations could be continued with all stakeholders in a congenial atmosphere.

Law and order has deteriorated in the state in the past six weeks. Trains and buses are stopped at will and students have lost heavily because of the agitation. Bandhs, relay hunger strikes and demonstrations for and against Telangana continue. All this should stop forthwith.

The agitation for and against the Telangana has also affected governance. Top IAS officers say in confidence that they are not releasing funds for any project. If funds are released for a certain project in a particular region even as a routine, those from the other regions impute motives and charge them with regional discrimination, they say.

One should not read too much in the resignation spree by MLAs on both sides of the divide. They have done so for tactical reasons — for protecting their respective constituencies. Significantly, ministers and MLAs from the Telangana region withdrew their resignations just before Mr Chidambaram’s meeting on January 5.

In a democracy, every problem can be resolved through debate and discussion in a spirit of quid pro quo. Certainly, resigning from the ministry or the Assembly and taking to the streets is no way to address the problem.

Indeed, the sine die adjournment of the State Assembly has helped Speaker N. Kiran Kumar Reddy to wriggle out of a difficult situation caused by the MLAs’ resignations. But facts speak for themselves. The 294-member House has 123 MLAs from coastal Andhra, 119 from Telangana and 52 from Rayalaseema. As 175 members are strongly opposed to the state’s bifurcation, the Andhra Assembly passing a resolution for a separate Telangana state is, apparently, out of the question.

Under the Constitution, Parliament is empowered to form a new state by separating territory from any state or by merging two or more states or parts of states. It can also reduce or increase the area or alter the boundary of any state or even change its name. However, before doing so, a Bill on the matter has to be referred by the President to the legislature of the affected state so that the legislature can express its views within a certain period.

Even if it would be difficult for one to expect the Assembly to pass a resolution on Telangana, the Centre would do well to continue the consultation process with all the stakeholders, including the political parties, students and social workers, to find the best possible and mutually acceptable solution and resolve the tangle.

It would be worthwhile for the Centre, the state and the stakeholders to explore all available options. These include the appointment of a high-power committee consisting of experts, intellectuals, jurists and independent-thinking personalities. The committee should be broadbased to inspire public confidence and trust.

Though the Fazal Ali Commission (1953) was initially opposed to the unification of Telangana with Andhra, it felt that the advantages of a larger Andhra State, including Telangana, were manifold. “It will bring into existence a State of about 32 million with a considerable hinterland with large water and power resources, adequate mineral wealth and valuable raw materials”, it said.

Nonetheless, in the context of the fresh demand for the Telangana state, the Centre could look into the possibility of setting up another States Reorganisation Commission. It could have wider terms of reference to include not just Telangana but the clamour for other states such as Poorvanchal, Bundelkhand and Harit Pradesh (Uttar Pradesh), Gorkhaland (West Bengal), Vidarbha (Maharashtra), Bodoland (Assam) and so on. The proposal for seeking a Presidential Reference to the Supreme Court on Telangana under Article 143 of the Constitution also merits attention.

Essentially, the root cause of the current malaise is Telangana’s continued neglect by successive governments in the past five decades. Andhra Pradesh, India’s fifth largest state, has 23 districts — 10 in Telangana, a semi-arid region that was under the Nizam of Hyderabad’s dictatorial rule; nine in Andhra along the state’s 1,000-km coastline; and four in the Rayalaseema region which were known as Ceded (to the English East India Company) districts.

Telangana may not have mineral resources or quality coal deposits but little has been done to help its people enjoy the benefits of two mega projects on the Telangana-Andhra border — the Srisailam and the Nagarjunasagar dams. Ironically, these projects only help the people of Andhra and Rayalaseema and not those of the Telangana region. Similarly, the Godavari cuts through the Telangana area, but irrigation experts have done little to funnel water from the river to the fields. As a result, this region has witnessed suicides by many farmers. Landholdings are also concentrated in the hands of a few and that is the reason why the Naxalite movement has strong roots here.

It is increasingly felt that even if Telangana is granted statehood, it would not be able to stand on its own feet. Funds from the Centre alone cannot bail out the region. For, it is said to have no “native entrepreneurs” but “carpetbaggers” from the coastal areas of the state. Moreover, while the fast growing and investment-rich Visakhapatnam and the Krishna-Godavari Basin will remain with Andhra, questions have arisen about the future of the 400-year-old Hyderabad city.

Hyderabad is a global brand and its contribution to the overall growth of Andhra Pradesh is immense. According to a study, the IT industry in Hyderabad alone contributes 33 per cent of the state’s GDP in terms of export revenues. Consequently, apprehensions of the image of Brand Hyderabad getting diluted in the event of the state’s bifurcation seem genuine. Proposals for making Hyderabad a Union Territory a la Chandigarh need a careful study.

A new state can be formed if it meets three principal parameters — geographical contiguity, economic viability and administrative convenience. The demand for separate statehood for Telangana may not stand the test of scrutiny. Clearly, statehood is no panacea for its problems. Its woes can be tackled effectively if concerted efforts are made by the Centre and the state to formulate a road map for removing regional imbalances.

There is a strong case for developing this region by deploying the combined water and power resources, mineral wealth and trained and skilled manpower of the entire state. Telangana’s future is inextricable as it is intertwined with a united and integrated state of Andhra Pradesh. Ultimately, its development will depend upon the collective growth of the entire state.

Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru reluctantly yielded to the demand for the formation of Andhra state on linguistic lines (by unifying the Telugu-speaking regions of Andhra in the Madras State of that time) following Potti Sriramulu’s indefinite fast and subsequent death in December 1952. While inaugurating the state of Andhra Pradesh in Hyderabad on November 1, 1956, he aptly said that the “Telangana people should have an important place in the newly formed state” and that the “leaders of Andhra would be on trial”.

No wonder, the onus for the Telangana’s continued backwardness is on the leaders themselves. The solution for the current problem lies in applying necessary course corrections in development and not in bifurcating Andhra Pradesh.

MIDDLE

Faith and courage
by Raj Chatterjee

Her late husband was my wife’s godfather. He and my father-in-law had taught philosophy, in the same college, in Kanpur for many years. She was the daughter of a general and had met him in Shimla where he was on leave.

Long before Independence they had left India. After her husband’s demise she continued to correspond with my wife. There was always a Christmas card in December and a couple of newsy letters during the year. A few years ago we heard from a mutual friend that she had suffered a stroke and was in a nursing home.

For months afterwards there was no news. We feared the worst. Then came an aerogramme written with a shaky hand but clear enough to convey her message. The stroke had left her with double vision and she could no longer drive her little car, a nuisance because she had to depend on her neighbours to do her shopping.

We were on leave in the U.K. We drove down to see her. We found her looking frail, which is not surprising at 80, but otherwise fit enough to manage her cottage on her own with only part-time help.

We had driven down from Hampton on a Saturday, arriving just before lunch. Not wishing to put a great strain on her, we had intended leaving after breakfast the following day. But she wouldn’t hear of it. Mrs Parfit, the “help”, had got her a nice cut of lamb and she would be disappointed if we didn’t stay for it.

In the evening, after a sumptuous tea, we went for a walk down narrow and winding lanes strewn with russet leaves. The old lady led the way, thumping the ground with her rubber-tipped stick.

On our way back we came to a little pub. “I’m sure you’d like to take a look inside”, she said, “And when you join us at home, there will be a glass of sherry waiting for you”. They left me there. Ladies of her generation did not visit pubs.

During lunch on Sunday she told us that her only son and his wife lived a few miles away in a neighbouring country. “Why don’t you live with them?” we asked, “Especially now that you have had a stroke and need someone to look after you”.

“I’d hate to be a burden to anyone” she said. “They used to come and see me once a week, but when petrol prices went up I persuaded them to make it once a fortnight. I’m never really lonely with my TV and my happy memories”.

She waved to us as we drove away. There was a smile on her face that spoke of faith and courage. Faith in the goodness of her friends and courage to take life as it came till she was called to rest.

OPED

How communal divide of J&K was averted
by Balraj Puri

Encouraged by the announcement about the formation of a separate Talengana state and provoked by the report of Justice Sagheer Ahmad, who headed the fifth Working Group on Centre-State relations in J&K appointed by the Prime Minister, the movement for the separation of Ladakh from Kashmir has gained a fresh momentum and the issue of separate Jammu state is again being debated.

A former member of the Jammu State Morcha recalls how the movement for a separate Jammu state was sabotaged first by the BJP and then by the RSS. He recalls that the RSS and leaders of the Parivar who met at Kurukshetra, passed a resolution in support of a separate Jammu state in 2000.

The BJP was hesitant to come out openly in its support. The RSS floated the Jammu State Morcha. It entered into a seat-sharing arrangement with the BJP to fight the assembly elections in 2002 from all 37 seats in the Jammu region.

But in practice the JSM flouted the agreement in some constituencies allotted to the BJP, splitting each other’s votes. Both won just one seat each. Later the RSS wound up the JSM, though it was revived by another group led by Prof Virinder Gupta.

The story of the movement for a separate Jammu state is corroborated by Sartaj Aziz, Foreign Minister of Pakistan in the government of General Pravez Musharraf in his recently released book.

He claimed that an agreement between his country and India had been reached on J&K state on the basis of its division so that the Hindu majority part of Jammu and the Buddhist majority part of Ladakh remained with India and the Pak-administered part of the state with Pakistan as the views of these people were known.

The area of dispute was confined to the Kashmir valley, thus cutting the problem of Kashmir to size. He quotes the Farooq Kathwari formula on the subject.

Kathwari is the richest Kashmiri in the world and wields considerable influence in the valley. He had visited the state in 1999 and spent a day or so in Jammu. When I met him I asked who else he was meeting in Jammu. He replied that none excepting me and the then Chief Minister, Farooq Abdullah, and he wanted me not to disclose to anybody that he was in town.

While I rejected the division of the state on the religious lines, the reaction of Farooq Abdullah was not immediately known. Earlier, he had met Indian and Pakistan leaders in power and apparently got their consent to his proposal.

Before that he had invited two representatives of the Government of India and Pakistan to New York where he lives to attend a meeting of the Kashmir Study Group, headed by him, which approved his formula.

Alarmed by these developments I organised a meeting of ex-Prime Ministers of India, including Inder Gujral, VP Singh and Chandra Shekhar and independent public men and leading academicians in Delhi. They unanimously resolved that a religious division of the state was dangerous.

I also had a series of meetings with L K Advani, the then Deputy Prime Minister and Home Minister of India. I warned him about implications of the communalisation of the entire state which would also undermine the secular basis of the entire country.

I asked him some searching questions. Did the two representatives of India attend the Kathwari meeting with the consent of the Government of India? Did the government object to the agreement they had with the Kathwari group?

Did Farooq Abdullah, whose government had proposed an administrative division of Jammu on the religious lines do it without the approval of the GOI? Wasn’t the Home Ministry financing the Trilateral Front – to divide the state in three parts on the religious lines? And so on.

Advani asked me what was the alternative to redress grievances of Jammu and Ladakh against what he called the Kashmiri domination ever since Independence. I suggested my formula, much maligned and condemned by his party, for regional autonomy, which could ensure harmony among the three regions of the state. He seemed to agree.

On the eve of the 2002 assembly elections in the state, the then BJP president J Krishnamurty was asked by media persons when he visited Jammu as to the official stand of his party on a separate Jammu state. He replied that the party had not taken any final decision on the subject but the local unit had a right to give expression to local sentiments.

I again visited Delhi and sought an appointment with Advani. I was told that he was too busy in arrangements about General Musharraf’s visit the next day and that I should wait till his departure when he would have more time.

I insisted that I should meet him before Musharraf’s visit as it was relevant to Indo-Pak talks. He agreed to meet me. I told him that Krishnamurty’s statement was welcomed in Pakistan and the extremist faction of the separatist leaders in Kashmir.

Why had his party become so generous to Pakistan while I was always accused of being pro-Pakistan by it? He said that while he was convinced that the remedy of the communal division of the state was worse than the disease, the RSS was not.

It confirms the recent disclosure of the differences between the RSS and the BJP by a former member of the Jammu State Morcha. Meanwhile, I contacted other members of the Kashmir Study Group.

Many of them agreed with me. Kathwari, too, modified his formula and in a recent telephonic talk with me agreed that my formula of regional autonomy was a first step towards the resolution of the complex Kashmir problem.

Life more precious than freedom
by Howard Jacobson

Nothing is more precious than freedom: true or false? False. Life is more precious than freedom. Which is why the majority of mankind will suffer almost any abridgement of its freedom so long as it can go on breathing. At least alive we may win freedom tomorrow.

And then there's love. People will compromise their freedom for that, too, for to be free and yet alone can make freedom feel a worthless commodity. Who wants to be free as an uprooted tree is free, asked DH Lawrence.

But after life and love, yes, freedom. Which is why it's important that those who offer to act in freedom's name don't take that name in vain. If freedom today is a diminished entity, that is not the fault only of tyrants.

Freedom fighters who are themselves no more than tyrants in waiting demean freedom; privacy advocates who would rather a plane go down than its passengers be searched to within an inch of modesty demean freedom; civil rights activists, when they reduce all relations between the citizen and state to a pantomime demean freedom. Civil rights, human rights! – half the time what we call "human rights" are nothing but a travesty of that nexus of obligation and entitlement that makes us human.

I have trouble with the concept of rights, not because I want less protection against violation but because I want more. "Human rights" is too feeble an expression of what we have to lose from the depredations of others. He who throws me into prison without a hearing takes away my liberty, not my rights.

He who sticks a dagger in my heart takes away my life, not my rights. I am unable to think of myself as a person to whom rights attach. I am flesh and blood not a repository of rights. And thou shalt not raise a finger against my flesh nor spill an ounce of my blood. Obey that ancient injunction and you can flush rights down the pan.

There's an old Lithuanian proverb: every man is his neighbour's matching shoe. No there isn't. I've invented it. But there should be such a proverb. Ties of affiliation bind us and at the same time trip us up. Bonds of blood, loyalty, fellowship, even hatred, not rights. We call this what Mrs Thatcher wouldn't – "society". Society being a collective for the sake of which we agree to have our shoes tied together and our freedom to do as we wish curtailed.

The suicide bomber seeks to curtail our lives. We need not trouble ourselves with what he seeks to do to his own. By targeting us, he steps outside the collective, forfeiting our fellowship and our protection. He is no longer a companion shoe.

In order to prevent his curtailing our lives, we consent to more of our freedoms being curtailed instead. But not our most precious freedoms. Not our freedom to think or to hold and express contrary opinions.

Not our freedom to love whom we choose, to not love whom we choose, to go our own way in our heads (for we can be bounded in a nutshell and still count ourselves kings of infinite space.) Just our freedom to pass through airport security without immense inconvenience, a sometimes unnecessary degree of rudeness, and without the outlines of our private parts being flashed up on an X-ray screen or whatever.

Where the soul has already been sold cheap should we really waste our outrage on the selling of a body? Privacy? Reader, he who fights to protect our privacy in the age of television and Hello! is defending what almost nobody any longer wants.

Ah, but the children. The children, the children – the last refuge of the scoundrel. Better the plane go down and 500 lives be lost than that a single child be exposed to the sexual curiosity of a pervert. We have lost our minds about children. I don't minimise the vileness of the pervert, or the sorrow and the suffering he, or she – let's not forget the "she" – can cause.

But we cannot police the imagination; nor can we scour the four corners of the earth to remove every image that might stimulate it. Whoever must have such images will find them. We cannot close every school, destroy every camera, or blindfold every adult in order to keep our children off the mental screens of perverts. Through the scanner you must go, my little darlings, so that you might arrive safely at your destination, and let the sick play as they must.

Of course there is always choosing more precisely those we scan and those we don't, but here, in the usual farcical manner of these things, one set of rights collides with another – the right, dictated by common sense, to be presumed an unlikely carrier of lethal chemicals, and the rights of people with highly suspicious profiling not to be suspected.

And here the civil rightists are at their most hypocritical and absurd, asking us as a society to deny one of our most useful human instincts, which is to recognise from experience the lineaments of danger, what it looks like, where it comes from. And if we get it wrong, as we will surely sometimes get it wrong? Then we get it wrong. No system of survival was yet devised that did not have unfairness in it.

As for the argument that we will make terrorists out of those we unjustly suspect, only a fool would advance it. Anyone so inflammable as to become a terrorist because he is strip-searched at an airport already is a terrorist.

In the meantime – if there is a meantime – God save us from the moral illiterates who would put our "rights" before our lives.

— By arrangement with The Independent

Chatterati
Conserving nature needs to be top priority
by Devi Cherian

Tigers facing extinction ought to be our major national concern. And a visit to the Ranthambore National Park in Rajasthan restores one's realisation that conserving nature needs to be the highest priority.

Once you have spotted a tiger in the wild, everything else is a bonus. Ranthambore has lots of cheetals, sambhars, chinkaras, wild boars and a host of other animals, including leopard, but seeing a tiger is still the ultimate thrill.

The Jaisal and Anjali Singh-owned Sher Bagh with its luxurious tented accommodation and some of the most experienced forest drivers is clearly the best place to be when you visit.

Ranthambore is the only national park worldwide that allows you to combine nature with history. It has a beautiful jewel of a pre-Mughal fort that is massive and awesome in itself and as a result the park is dotted with ancient monuments through which animals now roam freely and fiercely.

The latest estimates are that Ranthambore now has close to 40 tigers. An energetic and efficient DFO like the one in charge currently clearly makes a difference to the park morale and animal mortality.

The crowds that go fairly deep into the park arrive in hordes and place an unfair burden on the Forest Department. They are neither regulated nor even policed in any real sense.

Sadly, the authorities have not been able to control the boorish behaviour of many tourists who defile the park with their behaviour that is uncaring for nature. They very often attempt to disturb animals, pay little attention to park etiquette and generally ruin the experience of those unfortunate enough to be stuck in the park's diesel fume-spewing Canters.

In a fast-paced world, where conservation and nature are the new buzz words, the appeal to both domestic and foreign tourists is only likely to increase with years ahead.

Simple tents that have superb comfort levels are only one part of Sher Bagh's appeal. An eco-friendly approach permeates everything they do — a model for those who need to study luxury tourism.

Given the forward-looking tourism policy, Sher Bagh could be the model that makes an "Incredible India" and goes beyond the more obvious tourist trails as a magnet for global travellers.

Of course, this requires concentrated efforts to make sure that the battle between man and nature is more often decided in favour of nature. Tigers suffer simply because they do not have a vote.

Patnaik’s gesture

Chhotu could not believe his luck when Orissa CM Naveen Patnaik called him home. Chhotu, who used to shine shoes on a footpath close to the Chief Minister's residence, is now the CM's blue-eyed boy.

It was about two years ago that Chhotu first met Patnaik. He had tagged along with his father, a daily-wage worker, and did not go unnoticed. The CM greeted him with some chocolates.

As fate would have it, Chhotu soon lost both his parents. With their parents dead, Chhotu and his 16-year-old brother started working as shoeshine boys.

Last month Patnaik was passing by the footpath when he noticed the boy again and stopped his car and asked him to come home. Chhotu was received at Patnaiks's residence and the CM made arrangements for Chhotu to be admitted to a government school. He also gets financial assistance from the CM to meet his educational expenses.

In return, Patnaik has one thing to ask of Chhotu: under no circumstance should he bunk classes or go back to work as a shoeshine boy. No wonder this is Patnaik's third term as the CM. There are numerous stories about his sensitive and humane nature.