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Mamata’s vision
Fire tragedies |
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The hungry tide
Dialogue with Pakistan
Slippers, anyone?
How Budget can help small and medium units
Testing time for Omar Abdullah
Aids: Is the end in sight?
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Mamata’s vision
For
the seventh consecutive year the rail fares have been spared from a hike. Despite pressure from the Finance Minister, Railway Minister Mamata Banerjee kept the passenger fares unchanged in her second budget presented on Wednesday. That she has her eyes on the West Bengal assembly elections is obvious. The Railways incurred a loss of Rs 13,958 crore from passenger operations in 2008-09. Though the freight charges too have not been touched, these may be hiked quietly later as was done last year. The tariff reduction for foodgrains, kerosene and fertlisers is aimed partly at saving the government from heat over price rise. Despite her socialist leanings, Mamata has talked of a new business model to improve earnings and invited business houses for partnerships, promising faster clearance for private investment. However, she has ruled out privatisation of the Railways. Though the launch of new trains has become an annual feature, the minister has tried to boost tourism through a special train called “Bharat Teerth”. If Didi has not gone at full throttle announcing new projects for West Bengal, it is because Finance Minister Pranabh Mukherjee had put his foot down on funding 24 new projects, 10 of which were meant for her home state. The projects were cleared by the Cabinet but the Railway Minister was plainly told to arrange finance for these on her own. The Finance Minister had agreed only partly to her demand for a Rs 22,000-crore special safety fund. Instead of raising funds to build railway infrastructure to meet the demands of a fast-growing economy or provide more amenities and safety to the travelling public, railway ministers — Mamata Banerjee as well as her predecessor Lalu Prasad — turn populist and use the rail network to further their political interests. She spends more time in West Bengal doing political work than ensuring that railway projects are completed in time. The Indian Railways is the second largest network in the world and daily transports 14 million people. It could be run better if Mamta Express runs on track.
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Fire tragedies
That
Indian cities are ill-equipped to handle fire accidents has been proven time and again. The recent fire tragedy in a Bangalore high-rise building is yet another grim reminder of how precious lives are lost in fire accidents in the absence of adequate rescue operations as well as lack of preparedness. Though in this particular incident the fire personnel reached the site well in time, they were initially unable to help the people trapped on the top floor. There have been reports about the rescue ladder falling short and even security net failing. There is little doubt that both cities and buildings in India lack the requisite wherewithal to fight fire. Earlier, the tragedy in a Mumbai suburb in which firemen were asphyxiated underlined the ill-preparedness of those who are meant to save lives. While deficiencies in the fire-fighting equipment invariably exacerbate tragedies, often there is blatant disregard for rules and regulations too. Be it hospitals, oil depots or cinema halls, no place in India has proper fire safety norms in place. The central government rules recommend that there should be two fire stations for every one lakh population. Sadly, these rules are rarely followed and a city like Bangalore, which should have over 150 fire stations, has barely one tenth of the required number. The same state of affairs exists at other places. With cities growing at a fast rate, fire safety has to be made a priority not only in high-rise structures but also in other areas, especially in congested parts of old cities which are virtually a tinderbox. While safety drills should be a norm, awareness drives must emphasise on right methods of evacuation. The panic that spread in Bangalore, leading some persons to jump to death, also points at the lack of awareness among the people. Both buildings and fire-fighting departments have to be geared up to ensure that fires are contained without loss of life at least.
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The hungry tide
Reports
of as many as 50 starvation deaths in Orissa’s Bolangir district are cause for serious concern. The state government’s response to these deaths is as callous as in the past. It fails to inspire hope. Revenue Minister Suryanarayan Patra has casually said that people died of “other causes” and not because of starvation. The latest report reminds one of Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik’s earlier claim that the starvation deaths in the state were due to the tribals’ intake of contaminated and poisonous food like mango kernel, meat of dead animal and due to meningitis. In fact, successive state governments have given a raw deal to the problems of the Koraput-Bolangir- Kalahandi (KBK) belt. The latest deaths confirm that various anti-poverty and developmental schemes under which crores of rupees have been pumped in over the years have not helped the poor villagers to fight chronic hunger and malnourishment. Unfortunately, this belt, once considered Orissa’s “food bowl”, has turned into a “hunger bowl”. The state government is yet to learn lessons from the starvation deaths in Kalahandi in 1986. Way back in 1998, the Poverty Profile Report of Actionaid had revealed that for a morsel of food people of this belt had sold away or mortgaged their PDS cards. The situation is far worse today. While the poor lack the money to buy food even at PDS rates, distribution is done according to the 1997 BPL survey and not the 2002 survey. Apart from destitution and exploitation by middlemen and moneylenders, corruption, political interference and official apathy have made a mess of the developmental programmes. Monitoring is virtually non-existent. Top bureaucrats hardly visit this region to take stock of the programmes. The onus of preventing starvation deaths lies squarely on the state government. It will have to take adequate measures to galvanise the administrative machinery at various levels to ensure that the benefits of the anti-poverty and nutrition schemes reach genuine beneficiaries at the grassroots level. The prevention of starvation deaths in the KBK belt requires an integrated development of the region and not temporary palliatives like providing food for work or free food to the poor and marginalised sections.
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From the cradle to the grave, underwear first, last and all the time. —
Bertolt Brecht
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Dialogue with Pakistan
India will start talking to Pakistan 14 months after the Mumbai terrorist attack. The dilemma is that the dialogue process has not led to any outcome. Instead, the tempo of cross-border terrorism after an unprecedented hiatus is beginning to pick up through a refined strategy of bleeding India by a thousand cuts. Pakistan is both unwilling and unable to rein in terrorist groups targeting India. Even if Kashmir and other disputes are resolved, terror attacks and other insidious means to belittle India will continue. Recalibration of India-Pakistan relations devoid of hostility can result only from engagement whereby the power balance in Pakistan is restructured in favour of the civilian government. This is a realistic view which advocates lowering of expectations on the terrorism front and shaping options and responses of threat mitigation and inflicting punishment. The challenge is preventing a mass casualty, a high-profile Mumbai-like attack. Last month US Defence Secretary Robert Gates virtually predicted the Pune attack, warning that the Lashkar-e- Toiba (LeT) would launch a Mumbai-type attack to provoke an India-Pakistan conflict. While lauding India’s tolerance and patience, US leaders have always feared that an Indian military response would seriously undermine their war in Afghanistan. The Director, US National Intelligence, Adm Dennis Blair, CIA Director Leon E Panetta, the Chairman, Joint JCOS, Adm Mike Mullen, National Security Adviser Gen James Jones, et al, (the list is endless) have testified before Congress, unanimous in their assessment that the LeT was not a direct threat just to India and the region but also to the US and its allies. Islamabad has been and will continue to nurse militant groups, its vital assets, both in the west and the east of the country, in the pursuit of strategic depth in Afghanistan and Kashmir. US military commanders have failed to nudge Gen Ashfaque Pervez Kayani into launching military operations against these groups. For years, Delhi has been frustrated, pressing Islamabad to book LeT mentor Hafiz Saeed for masterminding attacks in India. Pakistanis are quick to remind us that if President Gen Pervez Musharraf could not act against Saeed, how could a weak civilian government do so? General Kayani will certainly not antagonise the LeT, a force multiplier against India’s conventional military superiority, by foolishly opening another front. The military establishment will not act against the LeT and other like-minded groups. General Musharraf had made two unequivocal commitments in 2002 after the twin terrorist attacks which threatened to escalate into a nuclear exchange: Pakistan would not allow the use of its territory for attacks against India. He gave an undertaking to Deputy Undersecretary of State Richard Armitage that cross-border terrorism will end permanently, visibly, irreversibly and to the satisfaction of India. Despite these commitments, repeated twice more by General Musharraf and President Zardari, Mumbai (and Pune) happened. The charade of regurgitating the pledges for ending terrorism has ended. Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani said earlier this month before the Pune attack that “Pakistan cannot give a guarantee that another attack will not occur in India”. Moreover, “When we cannot stop attacks in our own country, how can we do in India”, he added. Delhi has done great disservice to the fight against terrorism by equating Pakistan as a victim of terrorism when all acts of violence and terror are sourced from within Pakistan while 90 per cent of violence in India is cross-border terrorism. Pakistan Home Ministry sources have stated that in 85 suicide attacks this year, more than 2000 persons have been killed. Referring to the carnage, it was Dawn columnist Kamran Shafi who reminded the Pakistanis that “our own pets have started biting us”. In the refined strategy for terrorism, the bark is louder than the bite. The US has prevailed over Pakistan’s military establishment in restraining the eastern jehadis for 14 months from mounting a mass casualty attack. Calibrated use of sub-optimal terrorist devices, outsourced to LeT- affiliated indigenous militant groups like the Indian Mujahideen and its offshoots, allows minimum tell-tale signs of maximum deniability. A strange paradox exists in the dialogue-terrorism nexus. Pakistan has been seeking resumption of the composite dialogue process for months which India has stubbornly resisted. Just when Delhi had reluctantly relaxed its opposition to talks, terrorists under the control of the Pakistan military establishment triggered a sub-optimal IED to try to disrupt the dialogue process. This suggests that terrorist groups either enjoy strategic autonomy, which is unlikely, or that the military establishment is not on board with the civilian government over the peace process. Given the large inventory of negatives surrounding the dialogue, what on earth is aimed to be achieved by the exercise of talking? All the conventional reasoning has been exhausted. It is no secret that the Indian initiative described as Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s vision to strengthen the civilian government in Pakistan has come about with US prodding despite reservations among Dr Singh’s Cabinet members. His detractors have not forgotten the delinking of terror from dialogue at Sharm-el-Sheikh and the mention of Balochistan in the text of the joint statement. The tacit delinking of terror from dialogue by India has a richer history. In 2005, President Musharraf and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh reaffirmed their resolve not to let terrorism interfere with the composite dialogue, calling the process irreversible. All this after the NDA government had assiduously sought to hold Pakistan to its pledges on ending cross-border terrorism. Frequent interruptions in the dialogue were caused not just by terrorists but also interlocutors themselves over the primacy of terrorism over Kashmir and vice versa. While India insisted that cross-border terrorism had to end first, for creating the right ambience for dialogue, Pakistan contended that progress on the other subjects of the composite dialogue was contingent upon progress on Kashmir. Hence no outcome. This time around Delhi has nuanced the nature of talks, saying it is not a resumption of the composite dialogue (which is contingent upon the conviction of the Mumbai attackers) but a dialogue over terrorism-related issues. Whatever the Indian Foreign Office may say, Pakistan Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Quraishi’s jubilation was evident. “They threatened to attack us after 26/11. Now India has come to us for talks. We never kneeled and bowed to their pressure.” The Indian lobby says this is an opportunity to tell Pakistan clearly that our response to another Mumbai will be, in the words of Home Minister P. Chidambaram, “swift and decisive”, whatever that means. The US Council for Foreign Relations in its latest report paradoxically argues that the “risk of terrorism increases if relations between India and Pakistan improve”. It adds that India will react militarily if it is clear that the attack was sourced and supported by Pakistan. Evidently, not talking to Pakistan is not an option. On the other hand, if you’re talking you can step back and stop talking, goes the argument. That obviously is the buffer between the next attack and a “swift and decisive response”. For better or for worse, keeping the lines of communications open is the preferred
option.
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Slippers, anyone?
My son had gone to the U.K. after high school for university education. I was clearing up his room and sorting out what to keep and what to give away to younger cousins, for charity, etc. Soon most of the stuff was distributed and what remained was a pair of V-shaped bathroom slippers. I had no one to give them to so I decided to give them to any beggar I saw. One day, on a mission to give away the rubber slippers, I drove off to the Sector 17 city centre, heading for the pavements and the open plaza. There were lots of people sitting around selling wares or begging. All, I noticed, wore slippers or shoes. I approached some of them and asked if they needed slippers; they declined. I crossed to the other end and saw a beggar sitting under a tree. I went up to him. “Do you want these slippers?” I asked. He looked at them, mulled over, then replied, “No”. I was embarrassed. I saw another beggar in a nearby corridor and offered him slippers. He looked disdainfully. “Give me some clothes or a bedsheet.” I quickly walked away. I cast a furtive look near and far. Not another in sight. I drove off Sector 17 and approached the crossroads. Many people clustered around the car, begging, cleaning the windscreen, selling cheap goods. “Anyone of you want a pair of slippers?” They looked, shook their heads and walked away. I drove to another market place. Same response. Another market place. No beggars. By now I was tired, bored and almost ashamed of what I had to offer. Then, I saw a one-legged bare-foot beggar reclining on a small wall. I ran up to him and almost pleaded, “Will you take a slipper for your foot?” He glanced at them, tried one on, it was slightly larger than his foot, and said, “No, I don’t want it”. By now I was quite crushed. I returned home with my bag of charity. I had spent a lot of time, energy, petrol and good spirits and was back where I began. I didn’t want to just throw them in the dustbin as they were otherwise good. Next day, I left them near the outer steps of a gurdwara, hoping just somebody would take them. Times have changed. The standard of beggars has been raised. They are also selective about what they want. I had given some of my suits to my maid, which she did not wear for quite some time. When I asked her why she had not worn the clothes I gave her, she replied, “I have sold them for pressure cooker in exchange”. I quickly withdrew to the privacy of my bedroom to think things
over.
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How Budget can help small and medium units
Employing 59.7 million people, accounting for 45 per cent of the manufacturing output and 40 per cent of the country’s exports, the micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) play a critical role in the nation’s economy. With their geographical spread, the MSMEs facilitate inclusive growth. The global slump has impacted MSMEs significantly. Woes of the MSMEs, however, stretch much beyond the issues associated with the financial crisis. A majority of them have to deal with issues pertaining to restrictive credit availability and technological obsolescence, seriously undermining their competitiveness in the domestic and global markets. In order to sustain the current rate of the economy, the National Manufacturing Competitiveness Council has identified ICT (information and communication technology) implementation and ICT absorption in MSMEs as a key step towards making the sector competitive. Currently India has an estimated pool of 17.85 million SMEs and 3.1 million have at least one computer. This figure represents 17 per cent of the total Indian SMEs, which use modern technology in their business. With the rapid globalisation of India, there are going to be more opportunities available to the Indian MSME sector wherein large Indian or global companies can outsource their product and service requirements to this sector. However, these companies will require transparent and global standards in products and services where MSMEs can gain a lot from the deployment of ICT. With a strong appreciation of the rupee, the MSME sector engaged in exports has been badly hit. The MSME export sector can survive and compete through higher efficiency and productivity, which can be enabled through the deployment of ICT. In its recommendations for the Union Budget 2010-11, the CII has suggested measures for setting the stage for the next generation of SMEs. The CII recommends creating a conducive environment for MSMEs within the respective geographies and across regions with the active involvement and support of the industry. An ideal eco-system is one that facilitates SMEs easy and innovative financing options, access to appropriate and affordable technologies, steady supply of trained manpower, branding, marketing and distribution support systems, standard quality assessment tools and efficiency metrics, stable regulatory norms and socio-political stability. The CII recommends the following tax-related measures to improve IT consumption in the MSMEs: Accord 100 per cent depreciation, once in a block of three financial years, for an annual investment in IT equipment and software up to a limit of Rs 25 lakh to the MSMEs As R & D requirements of MSMEs are quite different from that of large units and MSMEs typically do not have adequate resources for R & D, create a central R&D fund specifically for the SMEs. The government could create this fund by contributing a particular amount and subsequently funds can be generated through contributions from the private sector. To encourage the private sector to invest in this fund, provide at least 150 per cent weighted deduction for contributions made by corporates to the R&D Fund for SMEs The other CII suggestions include: l
Establish an SME stock exchange to help SMEs raise equity capital l l l l l The writer is the Chairman of the CII, Northern Region
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Testing time for Omar Abdullah When Omar Abdullah’s government completed one year in office on January 5 this year, the administration had a seemingly complacent view on its performance through the past year which had been marred by trouble over the death of two women in Shopian. Painting “an encouraging picture” of 2009, particularly on the security and law and order front, it was revealed that the graph of terror violence was “rapidly coming down year after year” with militancy-related violence coming down by 35 per cent in 2008 and 25 per cent in 2009. This was soon rattled with the gunshots in Lal Chowk where two militants got holed up in a hotel on January 6, leading to a 22-hour-long fire-fight with the security forces culminating in the death of two militants. The incident at Lal Chowk, opening the New Year’s account on militancy front, also gave rise to a new series of “innocent killings” of teenagers at the hands of the police and security forces. It began with the death of Inayat Khan of Dalgate on January 9, a day after he received a bullet injury fired by the CRPF in the troubled Lal Chowk that was still recovering from the trauma of the encounter. Over three weeks later, another teenaged boy, Wamiq Farooq, fell to a teargas shell lobbed by the police, far away from the group of agitating youth in the Rajouri Kadal area of down town on January 31. The teenager’s body lay unidentified at the Police Control Room till the next afternoon as his family from the Rainawari locality had already launched a search for him. Only five days later, yet another teenager, Zahid Farooq fell to the bullets allegedly fired by the BSF personnel at Nishat on the city outskirts on February 5. All the three incidents of teenagers’ killings in Srinagar and, series of militant activities engaging the police and security forces across the Kashmir valley, have raised questions over the government’s handling of the situation. Even as the CBI, which finally investigated the rape and murder of two women in Shopian last year, has exonerated the police and security forces, the public mood is against accepting the theory. The same theory of suspicion is carried in view of the killing of three teenaged boys during the last one month, which has been highlighted both by the separatist organisations and the mainstream parties, mainly the opposition Peoples Democratic Party (PDP). The separatist APHC chairman, Mirwaiz Umar Farooq, laments the “criminal silence” of the government on the “targeted killing of innocent youth”. This would end only when the special powers to the security forces are revoked and troops fully withdrawn from the state, he opines. These demands are in the five-point formula conveyed to the Central government by the APHC as a pre-requisite for entering into a fresh dialogue to resolve the Kashmir issue. The opposition PDP believes that the killings were a result of the government’s failure in handling the situation as the unrest in Kashmir continued to be because of “political instability”, which needs to be addressed with a resolution of the Kashmir issue. Within hours of the latest incident the Chief Minister, Omar Abdullah, ordered an inquiry into the killing of 16-year-old Zahid Farooq at Nishat on the outskirts of Srinagar on February 5. That did not fully convince the common man in the valley as the killing had taken place in an area without clashes, which have been prompting the police or security forces to retaliate. In the case of Wamiq Farooq on January 31, the observers opine that the teargas shell that killed him should otherwise have been used to save human lives. Suspension of the ASI involved in the lobbing of teargas shell in a “callous and irresponsible manner” has also not helped the government image. The teargas shell lobbed to chase away trouble-makers and prevent any use of firearm, have killed eight persons in Kashmir since 2008. While the ruling National Conference blames “vested interests” behind the stone-pelting, prompting the police to act, the opposition PDP blames the “continued suppression” of youth for their indulging in stone-pelting. The question, however, remains whether the coalition government has been able to handle the situation effectively. In the wake of the recent killings, Chief Minister Omar Abdullah has not been able to placate public anger with his presence and personally monitoring the situation. The seat of the government being in Jammu, the winter capital of the state, he deputed his senior party and ministerial colleague, Ali Mohammad Sagar, and the Director General of Police, Kuldeep Khoda, to monitor the situation. This has been contrary to his earlier posture when he came before the media within two days after the bodies of two Shopian women were recovered last year. Resentment over the mysterious death of two women against the government continued for several months raising, questions over its performance and failure to reign in the troops. The government, however, survived the resultant outburst throughout the summer months last year. The Amarnath land agitation set into motion a new trend of public involvement in the militancy-hit Kashmir, which had its impact during last year’s agitation over the Shopian
case.
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Aids: Is the end in sight? Testing
everyone at risk of HIV and treating them with anti-retroviral drugs could eradicate the global epidemic within 40 years, according to the scientist at the centre of a radical new approach to fighting Aids. An aggressive programme of prescribing anti-retroviral treatment (ART) to every person infected with HIV could stop all new infections in five years and eventually wipe out the epidemic, said Brian Williams of the South African Centre for Epidemiological Modelling and Analysis. Dr Williams is part of a growing body of experts who believe that anti-HIV drugs are probably the best hope of preventing and even eliminating the spread of Aids, rather than waiting for the development of an effective vaccine or relying solely on people changing their sexual lifestyle. The idea will be tested in the coming year, with the start of the first properly controlled clinical trial involving thousands of people living in a part of South Africa with a high incidence of HIV and Aids. Dr Williams said this will be followed by similar trials in the US, where HIV is rampant among some inner-city communities. "Our immediate best hope is to use ART not only to save lives but also to reduce transmission of HIV. I believe if we used ART drugs we could effectively stop transmission of HIV within five years," Dr Williams said. "It may be possible to stop HIV transmission and halve Aids-related TB within 10 years and eliminate both infections within 40 years," he told the American Association for the Advancement of Science in San Diego, California. Anti-retroviral drugs dramatically lower the concentration of HIV within a person's bloodstream, and, in addition to protecting patients against Aids, they significantly lower an individual's infectiousness – their ability to transmit the virus to another person. Dr Williams and his supporters believe that if enough infected people are treated, it would lower the rate of infection to such an extent that the epidemic would die out within the lifetime of those undergoing the treatment. Aids could effectively be wiped out by the middle of this century, he said. "The problem is that we are using the drugs to save lives, but we are not using them to stop transmission," Dr Williams said. Blocking transmission can only be done with an extensive testing regime followed by rapid treatment with anti-retroviral drugs to everyone found to be HIV positive, he said. "The concentration of the virus drops 10,000 times [with ART] ... This probably translates into a 25-fold reduction in infectiousness. But if you did this it would be enough essentially to stop transmission," he said. A study published in 2008 showed that it is theoretically possible to cut new HIV cases by 95 per cent, from a prevalence of 20 per 1,000 to 1 per 1,000, within 10 years of implementing a programme of universal testing and prescription of ART drugs. "Each person with HIV infects, on average, one person every one or two years. Since people with HIV, and without treatment, live for an average of 10 years after infection, each person with HIV infects about five to 10 people," Dr Williams said. "Treating people with ART within about one year of becoming infected would reduce transmission by about 10 times. Each person with HIV would infect, on average, less than one other person and the epidemic would die out." ART drugs have to be taken on a daily basis for life, and the cost for South Africa alone would be about $4bn (£2.6bn) per year. However, Dr Williams said that the cost of having to treat a growing number of Aids patients, as well as the economic cost of young adults dying off, would be higher than giving out free ART drugs to everyone who needs them. "The key issue of cost is that if you don't do anything it costs you a lot of money. In South Africa we spend a lot of money on people who are hospitalised with infections related to HIV," Dr Williams said. "More importantly, we are killing young adults in the prime of their life just when they should be contributing to society. The cost to society of that is
enormous. — By arrangement with
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