I wonder what the US would have done, had a Bhopal like tragedy happened out there. If on account of the terrorist attack on the World Trade Centre– which unfortunately took 2995 innocent lives, including that of not-so-innocent 19 terrorists, and injured almost 6000 people– they demolished a complete nation in search of one individual, I wonder what would have they done if someone’s negligence had killed a staggering 22,000 innocent people, including children and women, and had caused permanent damages for another 120,000 people and affected some 5,50,000 people in some way or the other! If something like this would not have triggered a demolition drive, like they did in the former case, just on account of the merit of the crime (as World Trade Centre was an orchestrated crime and Bhopal tragedy was a criminal negligence), I am sure they would not have let any nation safeguard the perpetrator of the crime, like they have been doing with respect to Warren Anderson, the former CEO of Union Carbide India Limited, for so many years. In fact, no other nation would have left the US to be at peace, had something similar happened with them. But then the US cannot alone be blamed for such duality, as they can take such an audacious step only when the nation in question is India. It is outrageous that the Indian government allowed Anderson to flee, post the tragedy! It was the intervening night of 2nd and 3rd of December of 1984, when a Methyl Isocyanate (MIC) and other toxic gases leaked from the Union Carbide India Limited factory located in Bhopal– turning a sleepy town into a morgue, almost overnight. The tragedy has been recorded as the worst industrial disaster in recorded history. It is just not that scores of people died on the spot, but the ones who survived succumbed to permanent fatal injuries, forever. Thousands became orphans and homeless and in a matter of hours an entire generation became the victim of someone’s blatant negligence. It was not that the effects of the lethal MIC were unknown to the perpetrators, nor was it that the union at the UCIL never notified the hazards of the leak much in advance, but nothing was done to mitigate the same. It has been a conspiracy wherein everyone, starting from the US Administration to the government of India to the local state government– has been hand in gloves with each other. Otherwise, how can one explain that immediately after the tragedy, the key culprit, Warren Anderson, was arrested and was immediately released within a matter of two days by the Madhya Pradesh police? How can one explain that he was conveniently declared a fugitive when he audaciously did not bother to revert to the CBI summons? How would one explain that even after he was declared an absconder by the court, the government still remained silent for almost ten long years! And finally, when the government woke up in 2003 to do a formality by sending an extradition order, the US government conveniently denied the request! Read More....For More IIPM Info, Visit below mentioned IIPM articles.
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In Chattisgarh, more crpf jawans get killed by mosquito bites than by Maoists! Yes, that’s the ironic piece of research my friend Prasoon dug out for his article in the last issue of The Sunday Indian! It does tell a big story. Of course, on one hand it tells the pitiable story of our CRPF jawans, as Prasoon pointed out in his article last week. Thanks to the Maoist attack recently, which left 75 dead, the government suddenly is feeling concerned about the jawans’ lives! However, before this incident, in the last two years over a hundred of them had died of malaria, which was more than the numbers killed on duty. But previously, of course, the government was not concerned about the lives of jawans because malarial deaths obviously don’t happen in a dramatic newsworthy manner. Is it not ironic that our paramilitary forces die more of curable diseases than of bullets? Well, that’s the crux of India's problems. That more CRPF jawans are today scared to die of malaria than of Maoist bullets tells just one side of the story. The other side of the story is the story of India's reality today. The story of how we neglect about 60 percent of our population and condemn them to die of hunger, curable diseases and mosquito bites. That’s roughly about 650 million Indians who live below the internationally accepted standard of poverty line of 1.25 dollars per day. While India and Indian media celebrate the rise of its billionaires in the Forbes lists, the poor die penniless out of hunger – unknown and unheard. And unlike the perception that the government wants to create of Maoists as terrorists, the truth is that Maoists are from these very poor families who are marginalised and left to die of hunger. Worldwide, when leaders have kept such huge sections of masses marginalized, there have been revolutions. You ignore human beings and condemn them to die, they will one day believe that picking up arms is a better option than to die without a fight. History is full of heroes who have killed. Those who kill for a cause are celebrated and those who kill without a cause are called murderers. And the cause is also determined by history. Not by today’s media and their judgment. Read More....For More IIPM Info, Visit below mentioned IIPM articles.
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We, at Planman Media, have been always very appreciative and excited about any policy that has ever made an attempt to bring in any substantial change in the state of Indian education – especially in primary education. Be it the annual budget or discreet policy decisions, education has always been our primary area of focus and inspection. There are two reasons for the same. Firstly, the returns on investment (in terms of societal dividends) on primary education, including intangibles, are very high; and secondly, knowing the fact that the returns are high, it is the very same primary education which has been subjected to perpetual political negligence and budgetary ignorance over the years. But then, with the introduction of the Right to Education bill (on April 01, 2010) the table seems to be finally turning. This act, at least on paper, holds the promise to deliver free and compulsory education to one and all, till the age of 14, across the nation. On the face of it, I feel too excited about the idea of right to education for all. But then, whether this act is actionable, given the current education infrastructure of India, remains extremely doubtful. However hard the RTE might try to impart free education, it would never be able to achieve its objective, without enough service providers. And this brings me to my first concern – the RTE has already made it compulsory for all schools to maintain a student to teacher ratio of 30:1. Various pan-India surveys indicate that currently schools are struggling with a ratio of 50:1 (and some schools with 80:1), not to rule out those schools which are running with just a single teacher! With 5.23 lakh teachers’ positions vacant, the attainment of such globally-practiced ratios seems quite challenging. Add to this an equal amount of untrained teachers at the primary level, who have to be trained to match the qualification prescribed by the RTE within the next five years! Now, the second challenge for RTE is its objective of making it compulsory for all private, unaided and minority schools to reserve 25 percent of total seats in elementary education for underprivileged and financially weak children. In order to make it actionable, the act clearly underlines that any breach of this clause would lead to stringent financial and legal punishments. No doubt, this is a clear attempt to eliminate the economic quandary that in most of the cases comes as a hurdle in any underprivileged child’s elementary education. But again, the problem is that the act does not talk about any concrete mechanism or model that would facilitate in pinpointing such pockets of population; in fact, there is no actionable model to ensure that this clause is not abused. Even if through some mechanism, the underprivileged section of the society is targeted and a handful of underprivileged children somehow manage to get into private schools, it still does not serve the purpose, as here again there are challenges. These so called reserved seats, that promise free education, would only give relief from tuition fees and not from other expenditures – which are quite considerable. The RTE does not consider the cost of school books, education tools, co-curricular fees, extra tuition needed and fees demanded in other development activities, which are quite high in good private schools. According to an ASSOCHAM survey, the costs of sending a child to school in India have risen by whopping 160 percent in the last 8 years and annual school expenses for a single child excluding tuition fees have risen by three folds, while the average annual income of middle class parents has hardly risen by 30 percent or so. So the entire purpose of the RTE would fail as the parents of these children will never be able to bear the extra expenditure. And the drop-out rates would continue. Read More....For More IIPM Info, Visit below mentioned IIPM articles.
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When I got to know about the plan of the current government to pass the Right to Food Act, I went through a series of feelings. First it was dismay, followed by optimism, further followed by despair. For the first few minutes, I kept wondering why did it take so much time to provide the most basic and fundamental right to the citizens of this country? It is not that we have become self sufficient with respect to food only recently; on the contrary, we as a nation have secured food sufficiency since decades, but still allowed food grains to decay in our godowns, and not let them reach those who have been starving to death! Anyway, considering that it is better late than never, I felt that finally the common man and his poorer cousins were getting more attention from the government, which had been too engrossed in trying to save India Inc. from recession. I felt happy because this particular bill becomes even more pertinent at this point in time as the prices of food grains and cereals in the last one year have risen to such an extent that many items have become nearly out of reach of the common man. Needless to say, nothing much has been done to change much of that, as a result of which the middlemen and hoarders are making obscene margins at the cost of both farmers and the consumers. Thus, from that perspective, the very concept of the Right to Food Act gives the fundamental right to every citizen to get safe and nutritious food, consistent with an adequate diet, necessary to lead an active and healthy life with dignity! But then, there are many glitches in the draft bill – to begin with, the fact that the quantum of food-grains has been fixed in the draft at 25kg per month, against an earlier Supreme Court directive of 35kg. Along with this, there is a huge gap between the Center and the states with respect to the number of people below the poverty line. The Center has budgeted the bill assuming 6.75 crores people below poverty line, whereas the states have already issued over 10 crore BPL cards. Not to forget, the assumptions for both the states and the Center are far from reality, as the basic paradigm of defining poverty remains questionable in itself in the Indian context! In addition to this, the introduction of the bill also highlights the failure of various government programs which were targeted at giving food security to the underprivileged! A case in point is the Antyodaya Anna Yojana (AAY), which was meant to provide subsidized food to the destitute, primitive tribes, disabled and old. Interestingly the bill is now attempting to scrap AAY and reduce the guarantee of rice to 25kg, which was 35 kgs in the case of the former, making the recipients worse off. Read More....For More IIPM Info, Visit below mentioned IIPM articles.
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It is the women of the country who have been in the news for the first few days in the month of March. What started with the passing of one of the most contentious bill (women reservation) in the Rajya Sabha, ended up with another equally controversial, yet favourable judgment passed by the high court, with respect to women officers. The court granted permanent commission to interested women officers of the forces serving under the short service commission. As was expected, the government has been silent so far on the issue and again as expected the top brass of the Army and the Air Force have reacted against the high court’s stance. The high court passed this judgment with a view that few women officers who were assured eligibility for a permanent commission during the time of recruitment were denied of the same later. In fact, the denial was only meted out to them while their male counterparts were moved from the short service commission to permanent commission. The court was of the view that this act had been discriminatory, and thus passed an order stating that the officers, who joined before 2006, including those who have retired, should be awarded full permanent commission with complete financial and other benefits in retrospect. Going by sheer merit of the judgment, it can be said that it is a landmark moment! And of whatever I have read so far, most of the editorial stance by most media houses has been against the judgment. So much so, the top brass of the Army and Air Force are contemplating to contest the judgment in the apex court. Their biggest concern has been with respect to the high court’s order to take back the retired women officers and accommodate them. As per the top brass, there aren’t any vacancies at the senior positions to accommodate these women officers who retired from Short Service Commission. There have also been reports stating that for people who have been against this judgment feel that there exists occupational hazard in forces, and thus women should not be given permanent commission. In fact all these arguments are profound in themselves, but then my question is that even after knowing all this, why such an assurance was given to accommodate women officers for permanent commission, in the first place? And if the assurance was given, then why such a differential treatment was meted out to them? And finally, why is the government silent now? And frankly, I do not subscribe to logic of occupational hazards, as women officers in India still serve in the noncombat areas and as far as any other hazards are concerned they are equally associated with other professions as well. Women officers in India mostly serve engineering, ordnance, signals, intelligence, education, law, air traffic control, among others. And if today, women are equal opportunity partners in all other fields, why should they be denied the same in services. For that matter even, BSF, CRPF, ITBP, CISF, all of them have their special Mahila battalions, taking care of frontline duties in the border region. What more, a contingent of 120 CRPF women has been in Liberia for quite sometime taking care of law and order situation in the civil war torn nation. Read More....For More IIPM Info, Visit below mentioned IIPM articles.
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ONLY THEN WOULD WE KEEP GETTING GOVERNMENTS TRULY FOR THE PEOPLE, BY THE PEOPLE AND OF THE PEOPLELast December, the state assembly of Gujarat passed a bill to make voting mandatory – that bill is still to see a nod from the Governor. Revisiting the issue, L K Advani and Narendra Modi both recently echoed the viewpoint again and asked the legislation to make voting compulsory in the state, especially after a low turnout rate in the recent civic elections. On an average, the voter turnout rate in Gujarat has been around 50 per cent, while a month back Bihar saw a turnout rate of 43-45 per cent! The recent developments with respect to compulsory voting remind me of an editorial of mine that I wrote way back in 2007 – on allowing voting through SMS! Although I never advocate mandatory voting in a democracy, as that is not logical, what is essential is a larger engagement of the electorate which has been diminishing by the day. In fact, this larger engagement need not be just for a few constituencies, but it should be applicable for the whole nation! Obviously, there is practically no better way to rationalize the electoral process than by making the electorate wider with a singular objective of universal suffrage. Given the current voter turnout rates that hardly touch a mark of 50 per cent these days, the election results fail to reflect the actual mandate, as a major proportion of the electorate chooses not to exercise their franchise! And the most unfortunate part is that a majority of people who abstain from voting are the youth and the educated class. They feel completely disengaged from the election process on account of the process itself (which till recently was full of rigging and other forms of malpractices), the quality of candidates, and the political system as a whole. But then, what most do not realize is that their not voting not only leads to the selection of an incapable person (who is a criminal 25 per cent of the time) but, for that matter, also questions the duties attached to our fundamental rights. This also reminds me of those horror years when India saw the repercussions of low voters’ turnout rate – where the government lasted for few days to few weeks (twice in 1996 and then in 1998) costing the nation massively! The situation has been so bad that the last 13 general elections have seen an average turnout rate of 59.63 per cent (least being 33 per cent and maximum being 61.97 per cent). The issue of a larger engagement gets more pertinent as conducting of elections are a huge expense to the nation. As per the official reports, India invested a staggering sum of Rs 100 billion – or Rs 10,000 crore – in the last general elections. A trend analysis on the expenditure over the last 30 years indicates that every year the expenditures on Lok Sabha elections increase by nothing less than 40-45 per cent. Over and above the official expenditure, even the political parties indulge in huge expenditures in their respective campaigns and to lure the voters. In 2004, in the much hyped about ‘India Shining’ campaign, the BJP had frittered over Rs 75-100 crore, while the last election saw Congress and BJP spending more than Rs 250 crore each. Moreover, the idea of a larger engagement in voting is not discreet but is well present across the world. Countries like Australia, Argentina, Belgium, Brazil, Chile, Cyprus, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ecuador, Fiji, Lebanon, Liechtenstein, Nauru, Peru, Singapore, Turkey, Uruguay et al, witness an average of 90-95 per cent voting, thus bringing to power those governments that are truly people’s representatives – all thanks to the systems they practice! As I wrote back in 2007, along with making voting broadbased, it’s important to make it accessible – more mobile polling booths and voting through mobiles/Internet could assure high turnout. And further, along with this, there should be the final choice that many in India have been fighting for. The choice to vote for ‘None of the above’! Democracy might take a new form then. We might have a result that looks like – ‘Congress’ 24%, ‘BJP’ 24%, ‘Others’ 1% and ‘None of the Above’ 51%! The seats in every Parliament should also be distributed in the ratio of votes polled as it should be in a true democracy. While democracy then will replace the existing DEMON-OCRACY in India, politicians will know that the only way to stay in power is by hard work for the people; and they will start doing that, instead of indulging in criminal activities. And whenever there is a new scam, mobile companies can make some more money by having a snap opinion poll asking voters to comment on whether they still want the government in power. Such opinion polls can’t go wrong, nor can they be debated. 3 We might finally end up getting governments truly for the people, by the people and of the people! For more articles, Click on IIPM Article.For More IIPM Info, Visit below mentioned IIPM articles.
IIPM B-School Detail
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Arindam Chaudhuri's Portfolio - he is at his candid best by Society Magazine
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