States floating on debt
SLASHING the plan outlay is tantamount to a state government throwing in the financial towel. With the cut being a whopping 30 per cent, the Punjab government ruefully admits that it is also battered and badly bruised.

A Minister without airs
IT is almost unbelievable that Uttar Pradesh out of all the states in India is reported to have produced a politician who believes in simple living.

Appropriate honour
YOU have not done enough, you have never done enough, so long as it is possible that you have something to contribute", Muralidhar Devidas Amte said to an interviewing journalist in a Gandhian friend's house in New Delhi in 1988.

THE TRAGIC STATE
Pakistan as an example
by Darshan Singh Maini
THE birth of nation-states in history is a complex, confused phenomenon, for as historians see the problem, they are almost always tempted to float reductionist theories to reach the heart of the problem, which after all their labours, remains a sum of imponderables, contingencies and indeterminacies.

Judiciary strikes against a strike
by Rahul Singh
THE Indian judiciary has once again come to the rescue of the public, where the politicians have failed. Last Friday, the Bombay High Court made its displeasure abundantly clear regarding a taxi strike that took place in Mumbai last month.

Wanted better governance, not jumbo ministries
by Tavleen Singh
ON the eve of Mr Vajpayee’s Cabinet reshuffle, I happened to meet two of his ministers closely connected with relief work in Orissa. They both expressed horror at what they described as the total collapse of governance in that state in the wake of the cyclone.

Committees, committees and committees
by Amita Malik
I WAS trying to count the other day how many media committees I have lived through and survived. First there was the Chanda Committee, somewhere in the late fifties.

Death at Dalhousie
by Pranav Khullar
WHENEVER I go to Dalhousie I sink into my past and watch the shepherds with their flocks through the mountain pastures carrying the hill vegetables to a circular market with various points and turns. It is on the 7th point and the 12th turn that his foot slipped. He fell into an abyss and died without a shriek.

75 Years Ago

Sir Thomas Catto’s Suggestion
WHILE we emphatically differ from Sir Thomas Catto’s statement that Lord Olivier by his speeches did much to fan the fires of Indian unrest and his suggestion that the new Government should give consistent and absolute support to the Viceroy...

States floating on debt

SLASHING the plan outlay is tantamount to a state government throwing in the financial towel. With the cut being a whopping 30 per cent, the Punjab government ruefully admits that it is also battered and badly bruised. The decision, shocking though it will be to old-fashioned administrators, will not surprise anyone. The situation has been building up over a period of time and the government all along knew the corrective but lacked the political will to apply it. Subsidies can and should be cut, even if the Centre’s repetitive talk of charging economic price for all services is somewhat mindless. Punjab, a kisan-friendly state, should examine the possibility of quality supply of electricity to agriculture and fix the tariff accordingly. The kisan can be compensated by way a higher procurement price, calculated on input costs. The state can turn the tables on the Centre by insisting on a rational computation of grain price, or the application of its own principle of economic price. Sales tax is scandal tax, traders just refuse to pay and the government machinery is rendered immobile thanks to the obstructionist BJP stand. As one source has revealed, this year the ST collection will be in the region of Rs 1500 crore; it should actually be nearly three times that. Compared to this shortfall of about Rs 3000 crore, the state’s annual borrowing is only Rs 2000 crore. As it is, the entire revenue collection goes to pay the salary and pension of its staff and perhaps partly to service the debt. Pruning the plan allocation in the year-end would mean choking off the funding. It is safe to assume that during the past eight months the government had spent two-thirds of the allocation or something close to it. If this is indeed the case, it will be plan holiday until April next.

Earlier this month Rajasthan too resorted to this drastic step of slicing off 25 per cent of the plan target. Punjab is the second, and since most states are burdened with budget deficits, this practice of biting off the plan amount threatens to become a national epidemic. And at one time everybody pretended that plan fund was the holy of development holies and could not be touched! Now the states are ready to introduce economic reforms from the wrong end. If the Centre charts its globalisation road by cutting taxes of all description in the name of catching up with the Asian neighbours, the States are shrinking the plan size to stay financially afloat. Punjab Finance Minister Kanwaljit Singh has a point when he demands a total revision of the present formula for sharing the pool of resources. Now both development laggards and model growth states are treated alike, harming the interests of the latter much more. The growth impulse gets blunted and that is bad for the collective dream of a better tomorrow for all. His other points like lowering the interest rate on central loans, spreading the repayment period to 30 years and writing off 50 per cent of the loans will have no takers in Delhi. The reason is simple. The Centre is itself neckdeep in debt and is eyeing the painstakingly built public sector units to raise one-time revenue. It is selling family silver to dine in a plush restaurant; the states are unlucky in not having much family silver!

A Minister without airs

IT is almost unbelievable that Uttar Pradesh out of all the states in India is reported to have produced a politician who believes in simple living. Whether Mr Rajdhari Singh, the new entrant in the jumbo-sized Cabinet, has decided to follow the Gandhian dictum of simple living and high thinking for merely getting noticed by the media remains to be seen. But his decision not to avail of the perks and facilities offered to members of the Council of Ministers in the cash-starved state is proving to be a source of embarrassment for his colleagues. Mr Rajdhari Singh is a Samta Party nominee in the new UP Cabinet and says he believes in setting an example for others to follow. He is in his early 40s, and, therefore, still young enough to allow the light of idealism to guide his conduct. His decision to do away with the paraphernalia associated with even district-level politicians has indeed earned him admiration from those who have come in contact with him. His colleagues at the Centre — Mr Nitish Kumar and Mr George Fernandes — have supported his initiative to continue living in the two-room apartment allotted to him as a member of the UP Legislative Assembly. Of course, it is a different matter that his senior colleagues in the Samta Party in Delhi have themselves not opted to practise the kind of austerity which has made them praise Mr Rajdhari Singh. That the UP Minister is a practising socialist by choice is evident from the fact that he comes from a fairly well-to-do family. One of his sons is studying engineering in Bangalore and his wife and daughter look after the ancestral property in the village. That the initiative not to avail of the security apparatus offered to all the ministers and senior bureaucrats in UP has had a positive impact on the average citizen is evident from the laudatory phone calls he has been receiving from strangers.

As Union Home Minister Mr Inderjeet Gupta was, perhaps, the first Central leader to follow the socialist principle of simple living. He created problems for the security personnel and other members of the administrative staff by deciding not to move out of the MPs' flat, he had been living in for years, even after becoming a Union Minister. However, the first serious effort to cut down the cost of running the government was made by C.B. Gupta when he became Chief Minister of UP in 1961. He introduced the system of car pool for senior ministers. There was at least one junior colleague in the small council of ministers who used to come to the Vidhan Sabha on a rickshaw while his PA followed him on a scooter. The only time the junior minister gave himself the luxury of living beyond his means was when he borrowed his younger brother's car for ceremonial occasions, like attending the Republic Day function at Raj Bhavan. As far as Mr Rajdhari Singh is concerned, he is reportedly under pressure from his senior colleagues to give up the pretence of simple living. If the standards he has decided to set become the norm, there would be no temptation for power hungry politicians to become ministers. Be that as it may, the Minister himself is aware that his initiative alone would not reduce the burden of avoidable expenditure on the exchequer. But he put the issue in perspective by stating that "by declining a bungalow, security cover of 10 odd police personnel, a pilot gypsy and a full guard of PAC, I have done my bit. To follow or not to follow {my example} is for others to decide". It is now for the people to back his initiative so that other ministers are forced to follow his example.

Appropriate honour

YOU have not done enough, you have never done enough, so long as it is possible that you have something to contribute", Muralidhar Devidas Amte said to an interviewing journalist in a Gandhian friend's house in New Delhi in 1988. He had excruciating back pain but the joy of sharing productive ideas worked quicker than the strongest pain-killer available in the market. His face became radiant for a while as he said: "I heard this from Dag Hammarskjoeld, the compassionate former UN man.... Bapu did not feel tired at the end of a long day with a busy schedule, you see!" The man, popularly known as Baba Amte, has no reason to change Dag's view of or his own opinion on life. The grand old people’s servant has enhanced the intrinsic value of the Gandhi Peace Prize for 1999 by receiving it in the names of the child of Nature called the Adivasi, the quietly suffering leprosy patient and the Anandwan Ashram staff. The jury, headed by Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee, has made a laudable and unanimous decision. We, who were witness to the Baba's unshakable faith in national unity and tranquillity during the dark days of militancy in Punjab, feel proud to be living during his lifetime.

Try to imagine a freelance Hollywood film critic speeding around in the latest models of famous cars in bright and elegant dresses tailored by Pune's Rosario, whose clients included the Governor of the Bombay Presidency. Think of a sharpshooting shikari and a member of the family of a traditionally rich landlord. One day he returns to what is now a famous place in Chandrapur district of Maharashtra. He undergoes a total psychological transformation and starts emulating Mahatma Gandhi. Muralidhar Devidas leads poor tribals against his own feudal class and carries nightsoil on his head when sweepers leave Warora, near Wardha, stinking by going on strike. One night a "heap" stops his fast walk. He finds the thing is a person — a leprosy patient. And he finds his mission. Gandhiji asks him to devote himself to the promotion of palm-jaggery. This means planting and nurturing the Palmera tree, tapping its sap and processing it into jaggery. "Bapu said the Palmera tree is a tubewell of sugar. What a poetic expression for a tree whose leaves are used to make brooms!" He prefers leprosy-eradication as his mission. Now at 85, he is bed-ridden but full of hope for the future of the common man. He wants to build a memorial to that entity. His current thinking is summed up by a life-story published by a contemporary. The write-up reproduces the words on one of the posters in Baba Amte's living room:

"Only after the last tree has been cut down;
Only after the last river has been poisoned;
Only after the last fish has been caught;
Only then will you find that money cannot be earth."

THE TRAGIC STATE
Pakistan as an example
by Darshan Singh Maini

In tragic life, God wot,
No villain need be! passions spin the plot,
We are betrayed by what is false within. — George Meredith

THE birth of nation-states in history is a complex, confused phenomenon, for as historians see the problem, they are almost always tempted to float reductionist theories to reach the heart of the problem, which after all their labours, remains a sum of imponderables, contingencies and indeterminacies. For both ancient records (where they exist without interpolations) and speculative, imaginative reconstruction of the past still cannot dispel the fog that drapes the rise of the civic state as we know it today. Any of these factors, or a clutch of contingencies, could have created the moment when the confused urges, dreams and potentials came to a point of criticality, to use a nuclear fission concept, and the energies thus released couldn’t be contained till some kind of a central vision crystallised in those strenuous exertions of the group, clan or communal psyche, often under a forceful or charismatic leader. For, at bottom, the baptism of a nation-state is not consummated till some shattering crisis in the life of that community compels the moment to become flesh and reality. So, from the bush to the palace and the throne, and from the city-state, senates to Parliaments, there’s a long, arduous passage when several strains combine to create a semblance of a centre which would hold. And during that ordeal involving the making of a corporate consciousness, there are always dangers of both over-reaching and regression, of phoney utopias and atavistic returns to chaos.

As we know, the forms, character and modes of governance have been changing over the centuries, and the states, thus, created in the process, have varied from the feudal-monarchical and imperialist to the republican-patrician and democratic, from the theocratic and sacradotal to the communist and the fascist etc. And the ideologies informing such states have appeared and re-appeared in several variations and aspects. So, there is really no theory or formula that can account for the dynamics of the new states, though the supreme urge to acquire power, and shape the life of the community in question in accordance with their deepest urges, compulsions and values would naturally remain a common denominator. How these drives from within get crystallised and translated into action, or very often derailed enroute and lost in praxis is always a different story. Each new state has to move in a certain direction as in a dream if “the lower depths”, to recall a Freudian phrase, rise to the surface, and the people are possessed as it were. Nation-states either learn, as in the West, generally, to walk out and work in the sun, or go on to create a “psychedelic” state where dreams begin to turn into nightmares.

The argument thus far, I trust, has suggested the drift or my thought I tend to structure in relation to Pakistan, a state that has compromised its impulse, its informing vision, and its promise in a manner so wanton and wilful as to have reached the point of no return, its primal and conceptual contexts all tainted and undermined.

It’s, to be sure, a state born in deep distrust and pathetic hatred, and, therefore, has carried a natal flaw or curse as a mark of its being and becoming. That’s to say the seeds of tragedy lay in the very womb of the idea or ideology that, in the first instance, precipitated its birth in the midst of one of the bloodiest nativities of nation-states in the history of mankind. No wonder, Pakistan today is a prime example of the tragic state, as I see it.

I’m tempted to draw analogies from Greek and Shakespearian tragedies to give this little discourse an air of authenticity. For in this extended argument; it’s possible to see Pakistan as a tragic state whose complex fate has ingested some of the tragic weaknesses and fatal infirmities of the classical tragic heroes. The difference, however, lies in the fact that the spiritual greatness of those heroes which, in the end, redeems their embattled self is sadly missing in the case of Pakistan as a tragic protagonist on the Indo-Pak subcontinent scene. It has thus emerged as a tragic state in which the waste of the spirit and the expenditure of energies have left it in a miasma of moral doubts, and in Pavlovian, conditioned reactions or responses to any event, development or achievement in India. A surrogate state that refuses to shake off its paranoia and lethal allergies. In reality, it has become a mocktragic state; waging not only a proxy war against India (a patricidal oedipal impulse), but also a destructive war against itself — a state divided in root and branch, and only held together by an insane obsession in regard to India. This kind of tragic state becomes, like Shakespeare’s Macbeth, a ruthless entity, hell-bent upon a course of darkness and devastation. All its redeeming qualities — and the Pakistani people, the Punjabis, the Pathans, the Baluchis and others have huge potentials for a modern, humanist, democratic state — at the moment, lie eclipsed, if not erased. The demons of fundamentalism and corrosive, venomous nationalism (about which Aldous Huxley, for instance, RhS written so acutely and truthfully in Ends and Means) now ride the Pak corporate imagination — an “Imagination of disaster” —, and keep driving it in rage and fury.

The Pakistan progenitor, Jinnah, was certainly cast in the modern mould of Western thought, and his faith as a Muslim was chiefly a political necessity or compulsion, partly at least the result of Hindu obduracy and Congress miscalculations, but he could have never envisaged even in his wildest moments the shape of today’s Pakistan. And it’s Pakistan’s greatest tragedy that he did not live long enough to repair the damage he had done — a sentiment that he reportedly expressed when he lay dying. Several governments — civilian and military — have made Jinnah’s Pakistan an international outcaste today in a way, though his picture still adorns each office wall and home in that violated, wasted land as though to mock the present generation into an awareness of his dream and its swift degeneration!

General Parvez Musharraf, who too seems to have embraced lethal fundamentalism, amidst a state of chaos, fratricidal, sectarian warfare within its own borders and massive corruption, has apparently little to offer to the imagination of recovery. If Kashmir is allowed to remain an incubous in Pak polity, vitiating all attempts at an acceptable settlement, then one can only pray for Pakistan — in despair and distrust. For a most dynamic people full of great reservoirs of energy, if saved from the brink, can still be a front-line, modern Muslim state. But one sees no signs, no prospects at this point of time. The tragic state has come to stay, there being no truly tragic hero or heroine around. Only the pretenders and the perverted and the pretenders survive — in exile, in prison, in an armoured glass-house.

Judiciary strikes against a strike
by Rahul Singh

THE Indian judiciary has once again come to the rescue of the public, where the politicians have failed. Last Friday, the Bombay High Court made its displeasure abundantly clear regarding a taxi strike that took place in Mumbai last month. The strike was organised by the Mumbai Taximen’s Union, led by A.L. Quadros, a man who is more concerned with serving the narrow interests of taxi-drivers — and that, too, errant taxi-drivers — rather than the welfare of the general public.

A Division Bench of the High Court, headed by Chief Justice Y.K. Sabherwal gave the following words of stern warning to the Union: “Do not force us to pass an order to declare such strikes illegal.” The High Court has also asked the Union, the state government and the Transport Commissioner to file affidavits in the matter, which will be heard on December 7.

The High Court’s intervention arose directly because of a public interest litigation (PIL) filed by Dr Sandeep Rane, a doctor in Chembur, one of the most polluted parts of Mumbai which is located in the northern part of the city. He had filed the petition on behalf of the Smoke Affected Resident’s Forum (SARF), an organisation set up in Chembur.

Dr Rane says he realised the damage air pollution was causing when he treated a patient who had turned blue, following an asthma attack. The patient used to travel regularly from Chembur to south Mumbai, in an air-conditioned car. One day, however the air-conditioning failed and he was forced to open the car’s windows, thereby inhaling exhaust fumes from the vehicles on the road. He had an asthma attack and collapsed.

Following the PIL, the state’s Transport Commissioner, Vinay Lal, started an aggressive anti-pollution drive in the city. It soon became clear to him that the main air polluters were diesel-run taxis. Notices were issued to the drivers of 2,000 polluting taxis, most of which also happened to be over 15 years old.

Instead of cleaning up their act, the Mumbai Taximen’s Union resorted to blackmail, by going on strike. A new government had just come into power in the state and the union leader, Quadros, calculated that it would be too unsure of itself to be tough. He was absolutely right. The new Chief Minister meekly capitulated and suspended the anti-pollution drive.

The union cheered and put its smoking taxis back on the roads, while citizens gritted their teeth in anger. Luckily, the High Court has now come to their rescue.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) has estimated that up to 100,000 people in India could be dying every year from air pollution. Surveys have shown an alarming rise in respiratory disorders of people living in Mumbai and Delhi, the two most polluted cities in the country and among the most polluted in the world.

Young children are the most vulnerable, especially to air pollutants that have dangerous metals like lead in them. Such pollutants, because they are relatively heavy do not rise more than two or three feet above the ground, putting toddlers and very young children at great risk.

This was told to me the other day by a Japanese businessman who has spent quite a bit of time in India and who knows something about air pollution. He also mentioned that a lot of foreigners he knew were reluctant to come to India because of the high level of air pollution in the main cities and towns, especially if they were planning to come with their children.

In other words, we are probably losing not only valuable tourism money but badly needed managerial and technical skills as well. It is now established that around two-thirds of the air pollution is due to vehicular pollution. In a recent order, the Supreme Court has banned the plying of commercial vehicles that are over eight years old in the National Capital Region, which comprises Delhi and its surrounding areas (why it did not apply its order to other areas like Mumbai and Calcutta is baffling). Diesel vehicles, including buses, have been ordered to switch over to compressed natural gas (CNG), which is a cleaner fuel than diesel or petrol.

The Supreme Court has also issued directives on the quality of fuel that is at present being manufactured in the country. Diesel with a very low sulphur content, used in well-maintained engines, need not be at all polluting. However, the diesel being made in the country has a high sulphur content and when this is used in old and poorly maintained engines, the result is the black smoke that one sees coming out of so many trucks and taxis.

There is also the problem of the sale of adulterated fuel at some petrol pumps and other illegal outlets. Second-hand, rejected Japanese diesel engines are another source of pollution. These are apparently cheaper than the regular diesel engines but incompatible with the taxis they have been fitted on. The result is, again, heavy pollution.

Quadros, in his typical fashion, has tried to cloud the main issue by saying that private vehicle owners should also be made to undergo pollution under control (PUC) checks, not only taxis. Yes, of course, they should. But the reality is that private vehicle owners, by and large, use their vehicles less and also keep the engines in better working order. They don’t put the wrong engines in their cars, to save money, nor knowingly use adulterated fuel.

His bluff needs to be called. The Bombay High Court has taken the first step. More are needed, if the lungs and respiratory tracts of the city’s inhabitants are not to be slowly destroyed.

Death at Dalhousie
by Pranav Khullar

WHENEVER I go to Dalhousie I sink into my past and watch the shepherds with their flocks through the mountain pastures carrying the hill vegetables to a circular market with various points and turns.

It is on the 7th point and the 12th turn that his foot slipped. He fell into an abyss and died without a shriek.

He was involved in the mountains. “Once a hillman, always a hillman” was his answer to most of my questions. He would walk miles in the thick forest to keep an appointment with an ancient oak, an old mulberry, an aged pine, a young citron tree. These are the hill antiquities and should be protected like monuments”, he often said. His greatest desire was not only to live but also to die in hills.

And the hills obliged him. These mountains are a strange lot. In his moments of nostalgia he would often brood and say: “These mountain paths know where to meet and when to separate. They alone understand the subtleties of life. You know these are mountain paths. They follow the ‘andaz’ of life.” During the winter he came down to the plains to take stock of the situation. It is during these visits that I had a chance to know him intimately, I, then a child of ten.

Often I leaned on his shoulders while he read an old book in a language I do not know, Urdu. At night he told me stories, the love legends of Heer and Ranjha and Sohni and Mahiwal. He read out to me “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”, a book which moved me to new heights. Those were the occasions when I peeped into his mind and found he was all soul, no bones.

His passion was to help the needy and the woeful shepherds, the milk-maids, the out-of-school hill children. He often organised eye-camps for the hill elderlies. At night he often stood with a torch in his hand at the highest point of Dalhousie and dazed at something distant but dear, something remote but rare, something abstract. He took me to the hills only a couple of times. And I treasure those memories.

Once I got lost in the hills. His real-self came out. He asked every rock and tree and waterfall. He asked the winds. He asked every passerby. He asked every wayfarer. Every nook and cranny of the hill he searched, re-searched and searched again. By the evening he found me out. Sarswati has given you back to me”, he said. Among the so many hill Gods and Goddesses he relied more on the Goddess of Knowledge. Other Gods may betray you but not Sarswati, he firmly believed.

The last time I visited Dalhousie I stood at the same spot from where his foot slipped. The whole scene came back to me without effort. It is rather strange that the hills do not lure me at all, only he does.

So he died there. With him my childhood also died, the childhood which he alone knew.

He was very dear to me, dearer than my father. He was my grandfather.

Wanted better governance, not jumbo ministries
by Tavleen Singh

ON the eve of Mr Vajpayee’s Cabinet reshuffle, I happened to meet two of his ministers closely connected with relief work in Orissa. They both expressed horror at what they described as the total collapse of governance in that state in the wake of the cyclone. It was, they said, as if there was no government at all. As a result, things had got so bad that it was hard to believe that poor, shattered Orissa would be able to recover fully from its devastation for at least another three years.

The Chief Minister was unable to control his own officials and lower down the line, in the devastated districts, officials were so afraid of facing the people that even District Magistrates had disappeared.

If all this were not bad enough there was the additional problem of politicisation of the tragedy. “The Central Government has sent supplies in good faith but once these get to the Chief Minister these are being distributed in trucks that carry huge pictures of Sonia Gandhi as if the relief is coming only from the Congress Party”.

The Congress President, herself, when she visited the state last week announced that she had seen 800 bodies. This came as a surprise to the taskforce handling disaster relief, which had set up a meticulous system of counting the dead. When the Chief Minister was asked about the sudden appearance of these mysterious bodies he was unable to come up with an answer.

The Congress is not the only party trying to make political capital out of Orissa’s pain: every other political party is doing the same. Central ministers and other political leaders are heading for Bhubaneswar in droves to “see the destruction for themselves”. When I asked one prospective traveller what he hoped to achieve by his visit his answer was: “We have to go. It doesn’t look good if we don’t go at all”.

And, what does the Orissa cyclone had to do with the Cabinet reshuffle? In one word: governance. You would think that the lesson the Prime Minister would have learnt from the terrifying absence of governance in Orissa is that good governance is very much the need of the moment. So, it is vital that in his own Cabinet he ensures some measure of competence. It follows then that reshuffles should happen not because some disgruntled politico has to be kept happy but because he has virtues that would benefit the Cabinet and the country. We can see, though, that Mr Vajpayee’s reshuffle was motivated not by a need for better governance but for fairly mysterious political reasons. The Prime Minister has already gifted us one of the largest Cabinets in history — 74 ministers — and this has so far been explained as a problem of coalition politics. A matter of keeping the allies happy. So how does he explain the fact that out of the four additional ministers, brought in last week, three belong to the BJP?

One of the fashionable ideas floating around Delhi’s political circles these days is “downsizing government”. Every other politician with aspirations to be taken seriously harps on the need to cut the size of the government and some of the BJP’s own stars espouse the cause more articulately than others. Mr Vajpayee’s meaningless reshuffle should make it clear to everyone that as long as he is boss there will be no downsizing despite the fact that the Central Government is already estimated to be spending 11 per cent of its revenue on paying its own salaries and travel expenses. The condition of state governments is even worse and since the Fifth Pay Commission came into effect, salary bills have brought many states to the verge of bankruptcy. It is for the Centre to set an example of how downsizing works which makes it such a shame that Mr Vajpayee’s expansion sets the opposite example.

Ironically, if the Prime Minister is serious about giving us a smaller, more competent government he would have to reshuffle his Cabinet but for different reasons. He would examine the functioning of ministers in charge of infrastructure, economic development, healthcare and literacy and sack them if they show no signs yet of comprehending the importance of their jobs. In this sense the only good change that the reshuffle affected was that Nitish Kumar got the boot from the Surface Transport Ministry. In terms of infrastructrure, this is one of the most visible of ministries. The average Indian may not notice if we suddenly had more airlines or more power stations but he would certainly notice a new road. Especially, if during Mr Vajpayee’s tenure he can gift India its first modern road, a proper motorway of the kind almost every other country in the world now already has, including Pakistan.

According to people who have dealings with the Surface Transport Ministry while Mr Nitish Kumar was minister he was like some kind of absentee landlord. He seemed to spend more time in Bihar than in his ministry and it usually took weeks of effort for anyone to get to see him.

Nobody will mourn his departure but will Rajdhari Singh be any better? Let’s go then to Railways, another vital infrastructure ministry which desperately needs modernisation. What we need is a minister who understands that commercial use of railway stations and other properties, as happens everywhere else in the world, will make money that can be further used to modernise the Railways. Mamata Bannerjee, good woman though she is, appears so far to have understood nothing. The same goes for Sharad Yadav in Civil Aviation and Ram Vilas Paswan in Communications. Both of the latter gentlemen suffer like Nitish Kumar from the Bihar syndrome which means they are more interested in the forthcoming assembly elections in that state than in their ministries.

This column is not long enough to go through every other ministry in the Central Government and point out the apparent ineptitude of ministers but it is worth mentioning that in the vital areas of education and healthcare we have seen no improvement at all in years. And, without improvement in these areas we can simply forget about India becoming a developed country in the first half of the next century.

The task ahead is so daunting that it is frightening that the Prime Minister finds time to play around with pointless reshuffles. If he could, instead, concentrate on charting out exactly what needs to be done in the more important ministries we might really see some governance. Until then let us reconcile ourselves to the fact that the total breakdown of governance we saw in Orissa could happen tomorrow in the state in which you live.

Committees, committees and committees

by Amita Malik

I WAS trying to count the other day how many media committees I have lived through and survived.

First there was the Chanda Committee, somewhere in the late fifties. Like all the other committees, it had a formidable line-up of members of whom I remember most M. Chalapathi Rau of the National Herald, a man of utmost integrity and courage. And also Mehra Masani, who, as member-secretary, brought to its proceedings her formidable background, beginning with the London School of Economics and then her long and outstanding tenure in All India Radio. Then there was Asok Chanda himself, a first-rate administrator and intellectual. Later came one of the most famous (Verghese) committees, although I think it was called a working group, which did not make much of a difference. It was set up by the present Home Minister, Mr L.K. Advani, immediately after the Janata Government came into power after the dreadful days of the Emergency. This group also came up with a splendid, detailed report. But although his government lasted for some time after the report came out, the only mark Mr Advani left behind and we are all grateful for it, was election broadcasts and telecasts. What would life be without those sparring matches, those poll predictions and all that baby-kissing on TV once the elections are announced. Then there came the P.C. Joshi committee. Like all the others, it had an impeccable choice of members. And like all its predecessors, it stressed the need for — you guessed it — autonomy, de-centralisation, the lot.

First, the enquiries were limited to AIR and after that to AIR and Doordarshan. The wicked Indian-culture destroying satellite channels were to come later and break AIR and DD’s smug monopoly, although AIR has always, in a way, had competition because, as Mrs Gandhi discovered during the Emergency, you cannot jam other broadcasts with any degree of success. And you cannot, like King Canute, ask the waves to go back. Mrs Gandhi also said during the Emergency, after a brave station director had mentioned credibility: “Credibility, what is credibility? AIR and DD are government departments and will remain government departments.” The last I and B. Minister Pramod Mahajan, said pretty much the same thing in so many words. Because as far as politicians and their brain-washers the bureaucrats are concerned, far from plunging into the 21st century, they are not even in the 20th they are still stuck in the 19th century with the Telegraph Act of 1897. All their outmoded ideas have long since been overtaken by Internet and other advances in technology, which will make banning DTH etc. obsolete.

And now Mr Arun Jaitley, on whom many professional broadcasters are pinning their hopes, has come up with an impeccable committee of three, Mr N.R. Narayanamurthi, Mr Kiran Karnik (of the Discovery Channel and more so of ISRO fame) and Mr Shunu Sen, who has a formidable background in management and marketing. They have been asked to produce their report in three months. They will no doubt come up with admirable findings too, and no doubt the magic word autonomy will figure somewhere. What one will, however, be on tenterhooks about, is whether its recommendations will be practical in political terms, and more importantly whether they will be implemented or meet the fate of previous reports. The most important question however, is any government, any party, for that matter, likely to give up control, remote or direct, over such powerful media for propaganda purposes? Will Prasar Bharati be able to shed political interference, its bureaucratic hang-ups and its staff really have the drive and the backing, let alone the, training, creativity and professionalism for public broadcasting, in the best sense of the term? If our print media, one of the best in the world, can be run by private enterprise and showed its patriotism during the Freedom movement, the Emergency and fought Rajiv Gandhi’s infamous information bill, why not radio and TV? Why should there be a Ministry of Information and Broadcasting at all?

These are larger issues which also have to be considered. Not least of all by the listening and viewing public and the tax-payer. Whose crores are spent on radio and TV. Time for a national debate.

P.S.: I have been informed, with reference to last week’s column about the discourtesy to Prof. P. Bhattacharjea as conveyed in a letter to the Minister, that Mr Jaitley has since replied and that the dreadrul lack of professional manners is being looked into.

75 YEARS AGO

November 27, 1924
Sir Thomas Catto’s Suggestion

WHILE we emphatically differ from Sir Thomas Catto’s statement that Lord Olivier by his speeches did much to fan the fires of Indian unrest and his suggestion that the new Government should give consistent and absolute support to the Viceroy, we are in complete agreement with him that the immediate elimination of the ten-year period by a modification of the Government of India Act will go some way to remove the misunderstanding and bitterness which an undue insistence upon it in practice has produced.

Of course, no modification of the Act is really necessary for the purpose, for the Act nowhere lays down that no step in advance is to be taken before the expiry of the ten-year period.

What is necessary is a change in the British Government’s angle of vision, manifesting itself in actual steps calculated to give India at least substantially what she wants. But a modification of the Act with a view to making Parliament’s meeting clearer will be generally regarded as an earnest of the coming change and, therefore, welcomed.