Without providing an official estimate of black money stashed away
at home or abroad, leave alone disclosing the names of any offender, the
government, in its White Paper, on Monday pitched for deterrent punishment
through fast track courts to expeditiously deal with such financial offences as
part of its multi-pronged strategy to curb the menace of illicit funds.
Tabled in the Lok Sabha by Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee,
specifically at the behest of BJP leader L.K. Advani, the 97-page document said
the government would have to take a decision on the question whether India
should have a revenue-sharing agreement with Switzerland by way of taxes on
assets held by Indian residents in the European nation without learning the
identity of the defaulting Indian residents on the lines of bilateral treaties
the Alpine nation already has entered into with the U.K. and Germany. “The
government looks forward to discussion on this important issue within and
outside Parliament before taking any further steps,” it said.
The White Paper sought to make it clear that the objective of the
document was to place in the public domain various facets and dimensions of
black money and its complex relationship with the policy and administrative
regime while presenting the framework, policy options and strategies that the
Centre has been pursuing to tackle the issue. In the light of the recent
initiatives and developments, the paper “is expected to contribute to the
ongoing debate on the issue of black money and help develop a broad political
consensus regarding the future course of action to address it,” it said.
Detailing the reasons and various means and modes of black money
generation, the paper took cognisance of one estimate of the amount of Indian
deposits in Swiss banks — that the liabilities towards Indians at the end of
2010 totalled 1.945 billion Swiss francs or about Rs. 9,295 crore. A more
startling revelation is that this marks a sharp decrease from Rs. 23,373 crore
in 2006.
The paper also provides a pointer to how the sharp reduction may
have come about: “The illicit money transferred outside India may come back to
India through various methods such as hawala, mispricing, foreign direct
investment (FDI) through beneficial tax jurisdictions, raising of capital by
Indian companies through global depository receipts (GDRs), and investment in
Indian stock market through participatory notes. It is possible that a large
amount of money transferred outside India might actually have returned through
these means.” While this holds true not only for illicit funds in Swiss banks
but also black money stashed away in various tax havens such as Cayman Islands
and Virgin Islands as also low or no tax countries such as Mauritius and
Singapore, it is significant that the budget for the current fiscal has sought
to plug some of these loopholes by amending or incorporating provisions of the
Income Tax Act.
For once, the paper has suggested improved reporting and
monitoring systems to track bullion and gold jewellery transactions and simple
reporting systems in real estate deals to facilitate the development of a
nationwide database to curb black money proliferation. It also made a case for
preventing the misuse of “off market” and “dabba trading” (trading outside
recognised stock exchanges) on equities and commodities market through further
amendments to the tax laws.
The White Paper noted that one of the “four different pillars” in
its strategy to stem the black money menace would be introduction of the
proposed Goods and Services Tax (GST) as it would be a major step towards
integrating the efforts of different agencies dealing with the problem,
especially when coordination among the various agencies was much less than
desired. In particular, the mandatory quoting of the PAN for purchase of bullion
worth above Rs. 5 lakh was aimed at catching such transactions.
In this regard, the paper also advocated the use of debit and
credit cards for high value transaction as these would automatically leave a
trail. “... there could be promotion of banking channels, including use of
credit and debit cards since they leave adequate audit trails and hence
disincentivise black money generation,” it said.
Suggesting broad strategies on reducing disincentives to voluntary
compliance, reforms in vulnerable sectors of the economy and creation of
effective credible deterrence, the paper noted that black money cannot be
effectively fought unless the judicial machinery to deal with it is specialised
and the trial of offences is expeditious and punishments are exemplary.
The Law Ministry, it said, should take up the issue of setting up
fast-track special courts to deal with all financial offences on a priority
basis.
Hope springs a trap
An absence of optimism plays a large role in keeping people trapped in poverty
ECONOMIST
May 12th 2012 | from the print edition
May 12th 2012 | from the print edition
THE idea that an infusion of hope can make a big difference to the lives of wretchedly poor people sounds like something dreamed up by a well-meaning activist or a tub-thumping politician. Yet this was the central thrust of a lecture at Harvard University on May 3rd by Esther Duflo, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology known for her data-driven analysis of poverty. Ms Duflo argued that the effects of some anti-poverty programmes go beyond the direct impact of the resources they provide. These programmes also make it possible for the very poor to hope for more than mere survival.
She and her colleagues evaluated a programme in the Indian state of West Bengal, where Bandhan, an Indian microfinance institution, worked with people who lived in extreme penury. They were reckoned to be unable to handle the demands of repaying a loan. Instead, Bandhan gave each of them a small productive asset—a cow, a couple of goats or some chickens. It also provided a small stipend to reduce the temptation to eat or sell the asset immediately, as well as weekly training sessions to teach them how to tend to animals and manage their households. Bandhan hoped that there would be a small increase in income from selling the products of the farm animals provided, and that people would become more adept at managing their own finances.
The results were far more dramatic. Well after the financial help and hand-holding had stopped, the families of those who had been randomly chosen for the Bandhan programme were eating 15% more, earning 20% more each month and skipping fewer meals than people in a comparison group. They were also saving a lot. The effects were so large and persistent that they could not be attributed to the direct effects of the grants: people could not have sold enough milk, eggs or meat to explain the income gains. Nor were they simply selling the assets (although some did).
So what could explain these outcomes? One clue came from the fact that recipients worked 28% more hours, mostly on activities not directly related to the assets they were given. Ms Duflo and her co-authors also found that the beneficiaries’ mental health improved dramatically: the programme had cut the rate of depression sharply. She argues that it provided these extremely poor people with the mental space to think about more than just scraping by. As well as finding more work in existing activities, like agricultural labour, they also started exploring new lines of work. Ms Duflo reckons that an absence of hope had helped keep these people in penury; Bandhan injected a dose of optimism.
Ms Duflo is building on an old idea. Development economists have long surmised that some very poor people may remain trapped in poverty because even the largest investments they are able to make, whether eating a few more calories or working a bit harder on their minuscule businesses, are too small to make a big difference. So getting out of poverty seems to require a quantum leap—vastly more food, a modern machine, or an employee to mind the shop. As a result, they often forgo even the small incremental investments of which they are capable: a bit more fertiliser, some more schooling or a small amount of saving.
This hopelessness manifests itself in many ways. One is a sort of pathological conservatism, where people forgo even feasible things with potentially large benefits for fear of losing the little they already possess. For example, poor people stay in drought-hit villages when the city is just a bus ride away. An experiment in rural Bangladesh provided men with the bus fare to Dhaka at the beginning of the lean season, the period between planting and the next harvest when there is little to do except sit around. The offer of the bus fare, an amount which most of the men could have saved up to pay for themselves, led to a 22-percentage-point increase in the probability of migration. The money migrants sent back led their families’ consumption to soar. Having experienced the $100 increase in seasonal consumption per head that the $8 bus fare made possible, half of those offered the bus fare migrated again the next year, this time without the inducement.
People sometimes think they are in a poverty trap when they are not. Surveys in many countries show that poor parents often believe that a few years of schooling have almost no benefit; education is valuable only if you finish secondary school. So if they cannot ensure that their children can complete school, they tend to keep them out of the classroom altogether. And if they can pay for only one child to complete school, they often do so by avoiding any education for the children they think are less clever. Yet economists have found that each year of schooling adds a roughly similar amount to a person’s earning power: the more education, the better. Moreover, parents are very likely to misjudge their children’s skills. By putting all their investment in the child who they believe to be the brightest, they ensure that their other children never find out what they are good at. Assumed to have little potential, these children live down to their parents’ expectations.
The fuel of self-belief
Surprising things can often act as a spur to hope. A law in India set aside for women the elected post of head of the village council in a third of villages. Following up several years later, Ms Duflo found a clear effect on the education of girls. Previously parents and children had far more modest education and career goals for girls than for boys. Girls were expected to get much less schooling, stay at home and do the bidding of their in-laws. But a few years of exposure to a female village head had led to a striking degree of convergence between goals for sons and daughters. Their very existence seems to have expanded the girls’ sense of the possible beyond a life of domestic drudgery. An unexpected consequence, perhaps, but a profoundly hopeful one.
___________________________
Hard Labor By Josh Sanburn (reprinted from Time Magazine, May 21, 2012)
internships
Shipping thousand-dollar hats from New York City to London. Shuttling heavy bags around Manhattan. Skipping lunch. Working 55-hour weeks. And doing it all for free.
"It was disgusting," says Diana Wang, 28, of her unpaid labor at Harper's Bazaar magazine. It was also potentially illegal.
Today an estimated one-third to one-half of the U.S.'s 1.5 million internships are without pay, a trend that has only accelerated since the 2008 financial crisis. Employers contend that they're paying interns with experience, which can be more valuable than cash, especially in tough-to-break-into fields such as media, fashion and entertainment. But if unpaid interns are working jobs--no matter how menial--that would otherwise go to entry-level employees, federal law mandates compensation.
The Fair Labor Standards Act isn't new; it's been around since 1938. But in recent months, it has received unprecedented attention, thanks to a trio of class actions led by frustrated ex-interns. Wang, Eric Glatt and Alex Footman, and Lucy Bickerton are demanding wages from Hearst (the owner of Harper's Bazaar), Fox Searchlight and PBS, respectively, for being overworked as unpaid interns. (All three firms declined TIME's interview requests but have publicly denied any wrongdoing.)
"They were counting on the fact that nobody would sue, particularly kids who are just out of school," says Glatt, who took his Fox internship at age 40. "This culture of expecting free labor if you slap the title 'intern' on it has become so pervasive that people don't question whether it's ethically wrong or legally acceptable."
That's starting to change. In response to these lawsuits as well as to advocacy work by the Economic Policy Institute, the U.S. Department of Labor has ramped up efforts to educate unpaid interns about their rights. It has also encouraged them to speak out, as opposed to the norm of "keeping your mouth shut and being thankful for anything that comes your way," as Bickerton, who is suing PBS's The Charlie Rose Show, put it.
Meanwhile, some companies are pre-emptively improving their internship programs. Magazine publisher Cond Nast, for example, used to offer unpaid internships without work-hour limits. Now it pays a stipend of $550 per internship, pairs interns with a mentor and sends them home by 7 p.m. at the latest. Atlantic Media, publisher of the Atlantic, established similar guidelines. Even overseas, Stella McCartney--which last year was one of 102 U.K.-based fashion houses to receive an unpaid-labor warning from the British government--has vowed to pay all interns. (Time Inc.'s policy is to pay interns, though some exceptions may be made, for example, when a student receives academic credit.) "We're at the very early stages of a backlash against unpaid internships," says Ross Perlin, author of Intern Nation: How to Earn Nothing and Learn Little in the Brave New Economy. "The phenomenon has gone off the rails."
That's good news for the ex-interns, who Camille Olson, a labor-law attorney at Seyfarth Shaw LLP, says could indeed win their suits, which are still in the early stages of litigation. And fewer unpaid internships could even mean more entry-level jobs for 20-to-24-year-olds, whose unemployment rate in the U.S. hit 13.2% last month.
For now, though, newfound intern-rights activists like Glatt are focused on raising awareness. "This will be the last summer that students do [unpaid] internships without recognizing that there's something fundamentally wrong with them," he says.
Read more: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2114428,00.html#ixzz1uwrKrM79
____________________________
In Economists We Trust
We are a society built on market-based solutions—but should everything have a price?
By JONATHAN V. LAST
Economists don't really like presents. They think they are irrational. No
gift giver can know what another person wants most, and any present is just a
wasteful approximation. The only gift anyone should ever give is cash. It is
optimally efficient.
Michael J. Sandel, the Harvard political philosopher, takes a different tack
in "What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets." He argues that while
giving a present may not make much economic sense, it is perfectly sensible in
terms of our cultural values. There are social ethics that have long marked the
practice, maximizing sympathy, generosity, thoughtfulness and attentiveness. The
optimal value, despite what the economists tell us, isn't always the most
efficient one.
What worries Mr. Sandel is that, over the past 30 years, economic imperatives
have begun crowding out other values. Witness the rising popularity of the "gift
card" industry, which substitutes monetary presents for more traditional ones.
We are steadily moving toward a culture in which our ideals are being pushed
aside in favor of the view that we ought to always be maximizing efficiency. As
Mr. Sandel notes: "Some goods we distribute by merit, others by need, still
others by lottery or chance." The particular mode is determined more often than
not by custom. And societal customs are built over a very long haul.
Public bicycles in London sponsored by Barclays
bank.
"What Money Can't Buy" is Mr. Sandel's attempt to shine a light on this quiet
revolution. He looks around America and observes all sorts of situations where
traditional mores have shifted in recent years, always in the direction of
market morality. Today you can purchase your way out of waiting in line for
rides at many amusement parks. There are express lanes that allow us to buy our
way out of traffic. Many schools now "incentivize" performance, paying students
if they read books or do well in school; some schools now sell ads on children's
report cards. Cities routinely sell advertising space on public property,
ranging from parks and municipal buildings to police cars. In each of these
cases, long-held ideas about inherent worth and common ownership have been
displaced by the simple morality of the market. There are, Mr. Sandel notes,
practical concerns with this shift, affecting matters such as equality: "The
more money can buy, the more affluence (or the lack of it) matters." But the
higher concerns are philosophical and spiritual, about how we ought to value
what he calls sweetly "the good things in life."
Getty Images
Nascar driver Tony Stewart in
uniform.
And it is not just that market values crowd out other values—once introduced,
they tend to expand to the horizon. Take the history of "naming rights," the
practice of a sports team selling the name of its stadium. In 1988, only three
stadiums in the U.S. bore the names of corporate sponsors. By 2010, more than
100 companies were paying to put their name on an American sports facility. And
not just the arenas. Sports teams now sell advertising for everything from
pitching changes to broadcaster phrases. (When Bank One bought the naming rights
for the Arizona Diamondbacks stadium, team announcers were required to call home
runs "Bank One BOOMERS.")
The morality of naming rights has trickled down. Companies now pay members of
the public to wear corporate advertising on their clothes or bodies. There are
examples of cities selling the naming rights to long-established subway stops.
Local governments defend the practice by saying that the ad dollars are free
money and that ads benefit taxpayers. Mr. Sandel grants the second part of
argument but questions the first.
In a grimly entertaining chapter on the history of life insurance, Mr. Sandel
shows how a product that was once meant as a safety net for families has become
a ghoulish investment vehicle. For centuries, life insurance was prohibited in
most of Europe on the grounds that death should not be subject to speculation.
In America, it wasn't until the 1850s that it began to gain legitimacy and then
only as a product designed to protect a man's family in the case of his untimely
death.
Corbis
A Broadway musical being advertised on a New York City
bus.
But the morals of the market slowly overcame the old objections, and today
companies routinely take out life-insurance policies on their employees because
the policies are an excellent revenue stream, whether traded or held until
collection. In recent years there has arisen an entire "life settlement"
industry in which investors buy life-insurance policies from the elderly. The
quicker people kick the bucket, the higher the rate of return. It is difficult
to think of a more ignoble way to turn a buck.
Yet why should life settlement, or other market strategies, bother us? Such
practices maximize social utility and are the ultimate expansion of individual
freedom. (There's a reason libertarians and their utilitarian brothers love
markets.) But, Mr. Sandel observes, "markets don't only allocate goods, they
also express and promote certain attitudes toward the goods being exchanged."
"When we decide," he goes on, "that certain goods may be bought and sold, we
decide, at least implicitly, that it is appropriate to treat them as
commodities." Which is why citizens can't purchase their way out of jury duty or
offer their votes for sale. Or why Catholics can't buy the Eucharist. In many
instances, allowing markets to "work" would destroy the "value" of the goods
they touch.
Mr. Sandel isn't a socialist, and his critique of markets is measured. He
acknowledges their many benefits and recognizes the broad swaths of life in
which the work of markets is both necessary and useful. And he is not a ninny
knitting his fingers over the fact that you can buy a fast-pass to get out of
waiting in line for a roller-coaster. What concerns him is that the morality of
markets often involves both bribery and corruption: "bribery" in the sense of
bypassing persuasion and "corruption" in the sense of corroding the established
values they displace.
Corbis
Pizza Hut paid to have its logo put on a Russian rocket
supplying the International Space Station
What Mr. Sandel does not offer is prescriptions for rolling back the clock.
He is such a gentle critic that he merely asks us to open our eyes. "Bribery
sometimes works," he writes. "And it may, on occasion, be the right thing to
do." Nonetheless, "it is important to remember that it is bribery we are engaged
in, a morally compromised practice that substitutes a lower norm . . . for a
higher one."
Bloomberg
The two classes of travel on Virgin Atlantic
Airways.
Yet "What Money Can't Buy" makes it clear that market morality is an
exceptionally thin wedge. What begins with paying to cut in line becomes betting
on death. There are serious concerns—how will market morality eventually
influence our thinking about end-of-life decisions?—but the concerns aren't
always so apocalyptic. For instance, if you carry market morality to its end
point, why should we have merit-based college admissions rather than a simple
auction for university slots? Such a change would be enormously efficient—we
could be certain that the people who "value" college the most got their
preference. But it would change the meaning of "value" as it relates to the idea
of the university.
Mr. Sandel is also pointing out another seemingly small but quite profound
change in society. As recently as a generation ago, economists viewed their job
as understanding prices, depressions, unemployment and inflation. It was dismal,
but at least it was science. Somewhere along the way they expanded their
portfolio to include the whole of human behavior. Gary Becker staked the guild's
claim somewhat explicitly in 1976 with "The Economic Approach to Human
Behavior." Since then, our economists have only grown in their ambition, to the
point that the subject "economics" encompasses, well, everything. In the
introduction to the smash-hit "Freakonomics" (2005), Steven Levitt and Stephen
Dubner declared that "incentives are the cornerstone of modern life" and that
"economics is, at root, the study of incentives." Or, as Greg Mankiw explains
his profession: "An economy is just a group of people interacting with one
another as they go about their lives."
Proponents of market morality claim that it imposes no belief system, but
that's just a smoke screen. Choosing to place utility maximization at the core
of your belief system is no different from choosing any other guiding
ideological precept. Every problem has an incentive-based solution; every
tension can be resolved by seeking the maximally efficient outcome.
This is a depressingly reductive view of the human experience. Men will die
for God or country, kinship or land. No one ever picked up a rifle and got shot
for optimal social utility. Economists cannot account for this basic fact of
humanity. Yet they have assumed a role in society that for the past 4,000 years
has been held by philosophers and theologians. They have made our lives freer
and more efficient. And we are the poorer for it.
—Mr.
Last is a senior writer at the Weekly Standard.
A version of this article appeared April 21, 2012, on
page C7 in some U.S. editions of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: In
Economists We Trust.
________________________
PROSPERITY CAPITAL
MAIL TODAY
By
Kumar Vikram and Bhuvan Bagga in New
Delhi
The Census 2011
report, much like the recent Delhi
DELHIITES are
not just earning good money, they are also living it up. Over the past 10
years, living standards in the city have escalated. Whether it is housing
quality, owning cars or electronic items such as TV or mobile phones, the city
has shown a remarkable ride up the prosperity scale. These findings are
contained in a report on the first phase of Census 2011, also known as the
‘House listing and Housing Census 2011’ for Delhi
The census data
is in line with the economic survey of the
The census data
capturing the growth of the city from 2001 to 2011 has revealed that more
households now have vehicles. Correspondingly, people using bicycles as their
mode of transport has shown a downward trend. “While the percentage of bicycle
users has gone down from 37.6 to 30.6 per cent between 2001-11, those owning
cars and bikes has gone up from 13 to 20.7 per cent and 28 to 38.9 per cent
respectively,” said NCT census operations director Varsha Joshi. THE CENSUS
shows a drastic increase in the percentage of households with telephones and
mobile phones with 90.8 per cent of the population having one or the other, up
from 34.7 per cent in 2001. Similarly, 88 per cent of the population in Delhi
Over the years,
more and more people have started using the banking services as their income
level has gone up. People with LPG and CNG connections in their homes have also
shown a huge rise. The percentage of population possessing assets has also
increased. Only 2.9 per cent of people possess no assets, which was 14.1 per
cent in 2001. Dr Dalip Kumar of the National Council of Applied Economic
Research said: “Improvement in lifestyle and per capita income is correlated.
As the city has seen a rise in per capita income, people have also started
expanding the income. A lot of opportunities have come up over the last 10
years. Banks have come forward with easy loan facility and affordability of
people has gone up in metropolitan cities like Delhi
Dr
P.K. Sarkar of the School
of Planning
The rise & rise of a Delhiite
By Bhuvan Bagga
in New Delhi
A DECADE ago,
Nikhil Gupta used to live in a 1 BHK DDA apartment in Shahdara, north- east Delhi
The two working
members were his father, a government employee, and an elder brother who was
starting out in the field of share brokering.Fast forward to 2012, the nuclear family of four has expanded to a joint family of eight and also moved up the economic ladder to mirror the rise of a strong middle class in the city over the past 10 years.
Twenty- six- year- old Nikhil, who was a class XI student 10 years ago, graduated as an engineer and was hired by GE where he worked for almost a year before realising that his ‘ true calling’ lay elsewhere. “ I wanted to be my own man,” says Nikhil who quit to “ work for himself”. Now, he is the joint director at Jenext Online Content marketing firm that he set up with a college friend. Their company is based out of a prime commercial space in east
The family now owns three cars, a scooter and a motorbike.
There is a possibility that the family may soon purchase a bigger car for the expanding family.
There are also six cell phones and two landline phones at the family’s disposal. The family has two laptops and a desktop.
The family has now moved to two connected 2BHK and 3 BHK apartments in Parshava Vihar in IP Extension.
Though optimistic about the future, Nikhil is worried about the “ backbreaking inflation and politics coming in way of good economics.”
HOUSE In 2001, Nikhil and his family lived in a 1BHK apartment in Shahdara. Now, they live in two connected 2BHK and 3 BHK apartments in IP Extension
VEHICLES Earlier the family owned two scooters, they now share three cars, a scooter and a bike and plan to buy another car
PHONES From one landline phone, they now have 6 cell phones and 2 landline phones
COMPUTERS
The family didn’t own any computer 10 years ago, but now has 2 laptops and a
desktop
________________________________
What’s your caste?
Shivanand Tiwari
Posted: May 07, 2012 at 0326
hrs IST
The answer could determine
whether you will be caught for corruption
I was surprised that for a Rs 1
lakh bribe, former BJP president Bangaru Laxman was sentenced to the maximum
punishment. The judge made a ringing speech. It was as if with this one
punishment, corruption itself would be brought to an end. According to our law,
both the bribe giver and the bribe taker are guilty. But in the outrage over
Bangaru, no mention was made of the bribe giver.
When the BJP distanced itself
quickly from Bangaru Laxman, I felt sad. For the first time, the BJP had made a
Dalit its president. Look at former Karnataka chief minister B.S. Yeddyurappa.
Or former Union minister Dilip Singh Judeo,
who was caught on camera accepting bundles of notes. The BJP took Judeo back
into its fold, it also fielded him for an election.
Which defence deal did Bangaru
influence? What was Bangaru’s capacity to be corrupt? In the JMM bribery case,
JMM MPs deposited the money in their bank accounts — they did not even know how
to hide the money, to make the distinction between black money and white.
It’s a pattern: those framed in
sting operations and pilloried for corruption mostly belong to the backward
castes. And hospitals and parks are built in the name of those who are really
corrupt.
Similarly, in the case of former
Chief Justice of India K.G. Balakrishnan, the first Dalit CJI, we don’t
exonerate what he allegedly did. But when senior lawyer Prashant Bhushan said that
of 16 CJIs, as many as eight are corrupt, why did no one probe the allegation?
It’s the same hypocrisy — in the judiciary, media and public life.
Balakrishnan had to change his
religion and call himself a Christian to get a college admission. His father
was a lawyer’s clerk in a lower court. Balakrishnan was patronised by then
president K.R. Narayanan, also a Dalit. Political theorist Harold Laski had
written to Jawaharlal Nehru about Narayanan and that’s how he entered the
foreign service.
In Patna University
In a 2005 study, French
sociologist Christophe Jaffrelot interviewed 18 Dalit students from different
states in JNU. All of them said, democracy has given us our rights, we are
grateful for it. It is the upper castes, who are being displaced from positions
of power by the OBCs and Dalits, and who are now mostly in positions of control
in the NGOs and the media, especially the English language media, who are
increasingly uncomfortable with the idea of democracy.
That’s why OBCs and Dalits fear
the Lokpal. They are apprehensive that it will represent those same elite
classes that are biased against them. Team Anna’s tone is against democracy. It
mirrors the elite’s feeling that its spaces are being invaded, taken over by
the cowherds.
Earlier, the upper castes were
the keepers of the vote, the thekedars. Now we the politicians must knock on
the doors of Musahars to ask for their vote. Backward groups may berate their
political representatives, because they haven’t got economic justice, but they
fiercely guard their right to vote. While the elite thinks democracy stands in
the way of development, Dalits and backward castes depend on democracy to give
them a voice.
So by all means, stop corruption.
But any anti-corruption body must be representative of all sections — OBCs,
minorities, SCs, STs. Also, first catch those who rave and rant against
corruption and who have benefited the most.
Corruption has been a reality
since times immemorial but the state was expected to stop the rot. Yet, those
who took charge of the state, connived and colluded in its corruption. When
backwards and Dalits started coming into positions of power in the 1970s, they
looked to them as role models. It was the so-called great men who laid the
foundations of a corrupt polity. Those who came to power later thought that
power equals corruption.
The jeep scandal in 1948 was the
first major corruption case in independent India . V.K. Krishna Menon, then
Indian high commissioner to Britain ,
bypassed protocol and signed a contract for the purchase of army jeeps with a
foreign firm.
When the scandal broke out, I
remember Nehru asked the Public Accounts Committee to reconsider its report.
The PAC stuck to its report. And the report disappeared. I got it searched for
in the Parliament library in 1948, it couldn’t be found. When a written
question was asked about it in Parliament, the question also disappeared. Nehru
tolerated corruption.
In the Mundhra scandal of the
1950s, then finance minister T.T. Krishnamachari had to resign. Feroze Gandhi
made a stirring speech in Parliament — there was hardly any opposition at that
time, so Congressmen also played the role of the opposition. The M.C. Chagla
commission was set up, it submitted its report in 23 days, and raised the issue
of accountability. It was the Chagla report that first laid down the principle
that as a minister, you cannot shirk responsibility for decisions taken in your
department, you cannot say you didn’t know.
But Nehru said that honourable
members of Parliament must not be agitated by “a little corruption”. An
opposition member shot back, “a little corruption is like a little pregnancy” —
both grow with time.
When C.D. Deshmukh, the finance
minister in the 1952 government, first suggested having an ombudsman and
Rajendra Babu wrote to Nehru that it should be instituted, Nehru’s response was
that it would cause demoralisation among ministers and officers. Nehru was a
great man but his many small mistakes have harmed the country to this day.
In 1946, there was a terrible
riot in Calcutta .
Lohia asked Gandhiji, what should I do. Gandhiji said talk to your Muslim
friends. Lohia sent out messages, but he couldn’t find anyone. Then Lohia went
to Calcutta . He
found that the Hindu and Muslim mohallas were like separate nations, divided by
a “border”. Lohia said, we should smile at all those we meet, to lessen the
tension.
But when the country won
independence, in those same mohallas, Hindus and Muslims came together to
celebrate. Unfortunately, that excitement was not used to build a new India .
Even after India won independence
from the British, it was the same collector, and the same thanedar. The
bureaucracy and the state structure were still used to suppress the people. The
people’s excitement went cold, their initiative subsided.
Today, Sanjay Gandhi’s samadhi is
next to Gandhiji’s at Rajghat and V.K. Krishna Menon’s statue stands in
Parliament. As politicians we are invited to mark the anniversaries of those
who were known to have been corrupt. We garland their statues. And Bangaru
Laxman is sent to jail for four years.
The writer is a Rajya Sabha MP
and JD(U) national spokesperson
express@expressindia.com
express@expressindia.com
60% of rural India
Press Trust of India
Email10 3 4 96
About
60 per cent of India's rural population lives on less than Rs 35 a day and
nearly as many in cities live on Rs 66 a day, reveals a government survey on
income and expenditure.
"In terms of average per capita daily expenditure, it comes out to be about Rs 35 in rural and Rs 66 in urbanIndia . About 60 per cent of the
population lives with these expenditures or less in rural and urban
areas," said director general of National Sample Survey Organisation
(NSSO) J Dash in his preface to the report.
According to the 66th round of National Sample Survey (NSS) carried out between July 2009 and June 2010, all-India average monthly per capita consumer expenditure (MPCE) in rural areas was Rs 1,054 and urban areas Rs 1,984.
The survey also pointed out that 10 per cent of the population at the lowest rung in rural areas lives on Rs 15 a day, while in urban areas the figure is only a shade better at Rs 20 day.
"The poorest 10 per cent ofIndia 's rural population had an
average MPCE of Rs 453. The poorest 10 per cent of the urban population had an average
MPCE of Rs 599", it said.
The NSSO survey also revealed that average MPCE in rural areas was lowest inBihar and Chhattisgarh at around Rs 780 followed by
Orissa and Jharkhand at Rs 820.
Among other states, Kerala has the highest rural MPCE at 1,835 followed byPunjab and Haryana at Rs 1,649 and Rs 1,510 respectively.
The the highest urban MCPE was inMaharashtra
at Rs 2,437 followed by Kerala at Rs 2,413 and Haryana at Rs 2,321. It was
lowest in Bihar at Rs 1,238.
"In terms of average per capita daily expenditure, it comes out to be about Rs 35 in rural and Rs 66 in urban
According to the 66th round of National Sample Survey (NSS) carried out between July 2009 and June 2010, all-India average monthly per capita consumer expenditure (MPCE) in rural areas was Rs 1,054 and urban areas Rs 1,984.
The survey also pointed out that 10 per cent of the population at the lowest rung in rural areas lives on Rs 15 a day, while in urban areas the figure is only a shade better at Rs 20 day.
"The poorest 10 per cent of
The NSSO survey also revealed that average MPCE in rural areas was lowest in
Among other states, Kerala has the highest rural MPCE at 1,835 followed by
The the highest urban MCPE was in
Three pieces of recent news have helped make these mental and metaphorical
walls a little more visible. The first was the Supreme Court’s upholding of the
Right to Education (RTE) Act’s requirement that all private schools reserve
free seats for students from the neighbourhood who can’t afford to pay tuition
fees. Yes, this will raise costs and be difficult to implement. But it is an
essential step towards breaking the first social wall elite Indians experience:
the walls keeping other classes, castes and creeds out of their unimpeachably
upper-crust schools. The “best” schools are also literally exclusive — and
thence begins the life-long confusion of unearned advantage and “merit” that so
defines our lumpenelite.
The Court’s pronouncement follows a decade of
effort. Many elite schools ignored outright an earlier judicial directive to
admit poorer students free of charge — as they’d promised to when they were
given land free or highly subsidised. That’s right, people: most of the schools
you’re so proud of attending or sending your kids to are founded on a broken
contract. Talk about a moral education, eh?
When the RTE was passed, some of these very schools went to court to
protect their walls. Last year, The Wall Street Journal interviewed
parents and teachers at one of them, Shri
Ram School
in New Delhi .
People spat fire at having to share space at parent-teacher meetings with
people who they seemed more comfortable seeing clean their floors. They
demanded the poorer students be “segregated”. Of course.
After all, who in our obscenely comfortable elite thinks of servants as
being anything like them? It is a feudal relationship, not a contractual one.
As another recent piece of news brought home horrifyingly, we can leave for
foreign vacations after locking up the little girl who cleans our floors. Of
course, most of us don’t behave like that; but try suggesting to anyone that
they pay their servants what they’re worth to you, rather than the most that
they can demand, and the arguments you hear will reveal how important power and
dominance is in the relationship. “They’ll get ideas,” I was told. I’ve seen
foreigners or NRIs suggest it on email groups or at parties, only to be
attacked by oddly holier-than-thou desisfor introducing their
destabilising foreign “ethics” into our nice, stable, comfortable society.
The Indian elite confuses its tiny, mediocre, incestuous world of networks
and inherited advantage with true merit, the merit that comes from striving
upwards in the night when circumstances are unfavourable. India ’s
privileged children go to schools where their social assumptions are
unchallenged, to colleges where their parents went before them and that most of
the country can’t afford, and to jobs where the networks fostered in the
exclusivity of those institutions support and nourish them.
And they live in homes that they inherit; the third piece of relevant news
was a Bloomberg study this week that showed that owning Mumbai
real estate would take an average resident of the city 300 years. This was an
outlier on the global charts; even in famously expensive Manhattan , it would take 50 years.
Other countries, too, have these networks. But they have correctives. In
egalitarian Europe , your child will study with
your plumber’s child. In Brazil
or in North America , your child will idolise
pop-culture icons and follow movies and music that aren’t of, by and for the
middle class. In post-liberalisation India , that isn’t true at all. Our
elite dominates our cultural production, as well, helping it dehumanise
everyone else.
Yes, it will be tough for schools to adapt teaching to students with varied
backgrounds. But that will force us to question the unstated elitist
assumptions and knowledge that underlie what we mistake for learning and for
merit. And young upper class Indians will be forced to deal, on nominally equal
terms, with people they’d never otherwise acknowledge. When I moved from Bombay
to Calcutta (as they then were) as a boy, I moved also from one of the most
snobby schools in the country – it was in Fort, that’s all I’ll say – to one
where children from one-room apartments mingled with those who were chauffeur-driven
to school.
There’s no question in my mind as to which was better for me. My friends in
Calcutta
included working-class Muslim boys, giving me a clearer idea, now, as to how
resentments against the Indian state can be entirely justified. We learnt to appreciate
the unmatched cool of even impoverished Anglo-Indians, allowing us to mentally
disconnect money from social power.
In all our discussions of quotas and reservations and affirmative action,
we need to remember that they aren’t just for the disadvantaged. They’re for
all of us. The American notion that diversity is itself an irreplaceable facet
of the educational experience is something that we need to internalise here. It
doesn’t matter if implementing it is unfair, or difficult. Our hideously smug,
stratified society cannot be allowed to endure as it is. It is a blemish on the
modern world.
The New Maharajas
2
People of Mysore
Elsewhere in the lanes and bylanes housing the gentry and laity, life moved placidly in the firm belief that nothing could go wrong while His Highness was there on his throne. The Maharaja’s pictures adorned the walls of every house along with those of the family deities. Some ardent devotees of royalty would make it part of their morning walk to stop by the palace gates and bow with folded hands in reverence as they did in front of a temple. In a reserved green part of the city, lush with trees and gardens, lay the bungalows of the elite who included the King’s Ministers, courtiers, judges and other high functionaries. Though they never saw him, except on rare ceremonial occasions, the citizens of the city felt honoured by their proximity to their monarch.
No Mysorean would be worth his salt if, while on visit to another part of the country, he or she did not spend the first half-hour of the conversation with a stranger singing paeans in praise of the King and the royal family and extolling the grandeur of the city and its surroundings.
It is perhaps due to the people’s fondness for royalty that Maharajas have returned to the state under a new garb. Its new capital city of Bangalore could now boast of at least a dozen luminaries of international fame who could outdo the former ruler of Mysore in every respect, be it wealth, authority, luxury, fame or sheer sense of personal power. They enjoy comforts the princes of old could have never dreamt of. They are the new Maharajas of India. Just below them would be a few hundred others who, for want of a more appropriate name, could be styled as ‘rajas’. Their reach is global and the wealth of each of them runs to hundreds of crores of rupees. Next in line are the multitude of millionaires, each of whom owns property and other assets exceeding the magic figure of ten lakh rupees. On a conservative estimate their number in Karnataka would be anywhere between a million and two million. The figure could be larger still. One of the new Maharajas –– the owner of a software empire that has sprung up from nowhere in the last fifteen years –– proudly claimed a few years ago that even his peons were millionaires.
We thus have within the state of Karnataka a “super-state” of these over two million people who are law unto themselves. They are the “new face of Karnataka”, and indeed of the whole country. In the years to come they hope to convert Bangalore into India ’s Shanghai America Paris , Dubai , Singapore or even New York America , to return to this mini-America in India
Politicians of all hues have jumped on their bandwagon. Here in one compact lot they have found what makes the wildly swaying see-saw of politics worthwhile. In one place they have everything, money, power and women. Their children and grandchildren revel in night-long orgies of dining drinking, dancing, gambling and all that goes with it, hailing the dawn of the “New Age” in India Bangalore and several other pockets in Karnataka and the rest of India
This process of ‘modernization’ of Karnataka, as a fore-runner of what is going to happen to the rest of India
2
What about the remaining fifty million or so of the fifty-three million people of Karnataka? The official line, propagated by politicians, more as protagonists of the new “super-state” than as leaders of the masses who have elected them to power, is that this “super-state” is the “engine of growth” which will instill new vigour into the entire economy of the state. It is supposed to galvanise the people into a new revolution of growth.
And now to facts. Let us first take a look at what Karnataka has already accomplished during the last fifteen years of the Information Technology revolution making it one of the world leaders in the field.
As one looks at the statistical charts of India, the first thing that strikes the mind is that despite the heavy investments made by the Centre and state governments, foreign companies and other agencies, in per capita incomes Karnataka slippled from the 10th to the 13th position among the states of India between the years 1991 and 2003. Apparently the benefits of the ‘revolution’, though computed in the incomes of the people, could not compensate for losses suffered during the same period in other sectors. A startling fact to be noted in this connexion is that factory employment in Karnataka declined from 752,00 workers in 1990 to 370,000 in 2003. Apparently Karnataka has had to pay a heavy price in other sectors to earn global fame in the IT Sector.
Some other economic data relating to the state is equally depressing. It occupies the fourteenth rank in the country in per hectare food grain output, one fourth of what Punjab produces and the lowest among the four Southern States. Notwithstanding all the hoopla about its technological miracle, in per capita gross industrial output Karnataka ranks sixth in the country. In per capita terms Gujarat produces three times as much industrial goods as Karnataka. Not surprisingly, its per capita consumption of domestic power, a sure indicator of living standards, is among the lowest in the country and the lowest in Southern India . In female employment in the work force, taken as a measure of poverty levels, Karnataka shares the top honours with Madhya Pradesh at around 33%.
What is the contribution of the New Maharajas, Rajas and their two million millionaire lackeys to the rise and fall of Karnataka, rise in the glittering arena of servicing the software needs of Western countries, chiefly America
3
Is there an alternative?
In my humble opinion the best way to deal with this question is to consider an alternative model. The case of Punjab comes to mind. In 1947 when India was partitioned the part of Punjab that came to India ’s share was a poor cousin of the Western half which went to Pakistan Pakistan
Out of nowhere, small workshops sprang up along the highways of the new state as a byproduct of the rehabilitation of such a large population. The skills needed to build new townships and colonies were provided by the refugees. They included masons, drivers, mechanics, blacksmiths and craftsmen of all sorts. Women took to knitting woolens on a large scale to cope with the severe northern winter.
By 1955, when I toured the state extensively, the small roadside workshops were producing almost every thing, from needless to bicycle parts, tools, farm implements and even automobile parts, besides building construction equipment.
How did this miracle come about? Somewhere along the line between 1947 and 1955 these small technicians, working from loosely fabricated shacks, discovered that given an electric lathe and drilling and welding machines, you could make or fabricate almost anything under the Sun, even a motor car minus its engine.
Within a few more years these sturdy, semi-literate and grimy mechanics were making their own dies and die – casting machines as well as lathes, drills and welding equipment.
The list of items they produced with these basic tools in mind-boggling. They were perhaps the first in the country to replicate a variety of handy foreign gadgets whose import was banned to conserve foreign exchange. These included house-hold accessories like mixies, electric cookers, ovens and so on.
Soon they were making bicycles, sewing machines, farm threshers, Persian wheels, spindles and looms for the upcoming hosiery industry, small radio sets, fans and almost everything for which there existed a good demand.
Next came precision equipment like car dynamos whose rotor has to be calibrated with an accuracy which until then could only be achieved by highly sophisticated imported machines. These rustic sons of the soil, often sporting big beards, were able to accomplish the same result with their large oily hands which looked more like tiger paws.
Often the workshop was their home. They slept on large rope spun cots with their families outside their unit during summer and huddled inside it in winter. Their women worked with them while the children walked or bicycled long distances to attend school.
Miracle 2:. Simultaneously with this technology wave, another silent hosiery revolution was taking place during the same years in Punjab, concentrated mainly in Ludhiana
Starting purely as an answer to the need for cheap winter covering as the poor man’s substitute for costly woolen textiles, within two decades it had made Ludhiana Punjab is a long story.
While Ludhiana was thriving in hosiery the city of Jullunder Amritsar
The saga is never ending.
Miracle 3. Again within the same period the small and medium farmer of Punjab increased his farm yields ten times by dint of hard labour, helped by timely supplies of inputs and finances by government agencies.
Its own food grain needs being limited, by the Nineteen Seventies Punjab had become the granary of India and Ludhiana
By the Nineteen Seventies electricity and roads had reached every village in Punjab . Farming was mechanized throughout the state. What with the roar of tractors and rice mills, big and small, and humming of winnowing and thrashing machines, among others, the whole countryside of the state resembled a factory. Instead of bullock carts tractor-trailors became the principal mode of transport of goods and people in rural Punjab .
Miracle 4. In accomplishing this economic miracle Punjab was not alone. An altogether different model of growth was taking shape, with great success, in Maharashtra and Gujarat . Quite suddenly the two states of Western India found themselves wafted on the high tide a cooperative movement the like of which had never been seen in the world. The two states together looked like a giant cooperative conglomerate. The cooperative sector soared to heights of achievement in practically every sector of rural activity. Unlike Punjab the peasant here was too poor, illiterate and unskilled to act on his own steam like his counterpart in the Northern state. But he had one gift which was unique in the country. He could ‘cooperate’ and submit to the discipline of collective interest of the community.
The result was that one by one all spheres of rural production and distribution came under the sweep of cooperatives. Gujarat began with milk, the mainstay of the poorest members of the community, the shepherd and small farmer. Then it went on to cover cotton, oilseeds and sugar, besides banking and credit.
Likewise, the cooperative movement in Maharashtra concentrated on sugar to begin with and, within a short period, from being a virtual non-producer, the State emerged as the country’s largest producer of sugar, depriving UP of the title. Simultaneously it took over cotton in which again miracles were achieved.
Any student of the growth of Indian economy during the past fifty years will agree that if Maharashtra and Gujarat are among the four front-line states it is entirely because of their cooperative miracle.
But perhaps one of the biggest achievement of Maharashtra was the success of its irrigation cooperatives. It was something unheard of in the text books of any ideology that the proud small land-owner would willingly surrender his traditional claims on irrigation water in the common interest. Yet they did it, practicing great honesty and tolerance among themselves, since it is impossible for any outside agency to superwise such a widely distributed network from field to field. Under this system, called “bara-bari”, the farmer at the head of a water channel got the same share as the man at its tail. Great was the enthusiasm of Maharashtrian peasantry to act collectively during the period.
During a tour of the country in the famine year 1964-65. I was thrilled to find in a hilly village in Yeotmal district, men women and children, old and young, carrying water from a stream in pitchers and even in cooking pans and bowls to water small vegetable plots of their village, a rough climb of over one hundred feet, in the night in dim lantern light.
Leaders of the state had plunged themselves into the movement with gusto. During the same tour I met V.P. Naik, the then Chief Minister of Maharashtra, in Nagpur Maharashtra fully self-sufficient in foodgrains.” Sure enough he succeeded, because the entire peasantry was behind him.
A few years later while India was still in the throes of a severe food crisis, I asked the veteran socialist leader, Asoka Mehta, who was then Deputy Chairman of the Planning Commission, why the miracle of Maharashtra and Gujarat could not be replicated in backward U.P. and Bihar . He replied, “my friend, I have wasted half my political career trying to inculcate the cooperative spirit among the peasantry in East UP and Bihar . I must confess I have failed miserably. You can transplant a system from one place to another but not the spirit that drives it.”
4
The two models of growth explained above present a complete contrast to the latest model adopted by Karnataka. It is this author’s confirmed view that if the Bangalorean model spreads throughout India
The reasons are obvious :
1. While it professes to be working for the ‘greatest good of the greatest number’ of people, our government’s SEZ scheme is clearly directed at serving the greatest good of the smallest number. The direct result of such policies pursued world-wide by the rulers of the day is that half the total wealth of the six billion people on planet earth is owned by less than three hundred individuals. The SEZs are clearly aimed at concentrating national wealth in a few hands through the tried and tested mechanism of the stock market and real estate.
Not even ten percent of the big boom in the IT industry can be attributed to its own efforts by way of production and sales. Most of it is public money illegitimately pumped into the industry via the stock market by manipulating government’s financing policies. These malpractices include the printing of paper currency, which pushes up prices of goods of the common man’s daily use, and acquiring and gifting away to the IT tycoons poor farmers’ fields at a hundreth, and at times a thousandth, of the price the beneficiaries reap by converting the landholdings into real estate.
2. As can be clearly seen from the falling figures of the organised sector’s workforce during the last few years, such diversions of most of the nation’s productive capital only leads to negative employment, that is, increased unemployment.
3. The alternative models of Punjab, Maharashtra and Gujarat presented by me involve the entire population of these states, not just a band of engineers, most of whom are from outside the state and not sons of the soil.
4. In the earlier models growth begins from below. Its first beneficiaries are the poorest class of small farmers, shepherds, unskilled and semi-skilled technicians and a whole variety of odd jobs men. There is hardly any one in the rural and semi-urban population of the covered area, which includes almost the entire state, who does not derive direct benefit from it.
5. The hub of activity in the Punjab-Gujarat-Maharashtra models is the village. Almost every village or cluster of villages has a center where people gather, discuss plans and problems, organise innovations in the development of their human resources through schools, medical facilities and cheap entertainment. Small road-side markets spring up, some of which later grow into big bazaars. The list is endless.
6. All this happens through local initiative and investment without involving the government or financial institutions.
7. In this model income always exceeds investment. One does not sink massive amounts of public money in the elusive hope of long term returns.
8. Lo and behold! Miracle of Miracles! All this spectacular growth in Punjab, Gujarat has Maharashtra has been achieved without involving a single MBA, IITian or American trained scientist. It is India
While these heaven-born supermen draw unconscionable salaries in millions a year, experienced post graduate college lecturers can still be hired in the city of Bangalore
Dear reader, please compare this with the pay package of One crore and twelve lakh rupees per annum, that is nearly ten lakh rupees per month, offered this year to a fresh IIM graduate at the time of leaving college. To the “FREE MARKET” economy, which guides our destinies, his worth is three hundred times that of a learned professor.
At this rate, if of two brothers with the same background one joins an IIM and the other opts for teaching in a college, the latter will have to slog for his entire working career of thirty years, till retirement, to earn what his brother will rake in within the first month of leaving the management institute. So now we know the true meanings of the magic words “FREE ENTERPRISE”.
If this does not prick your conscience nothing ever will. And if you have tears of shame to shed over the tragic devaluation and demise of true learning and scholarship in this country, and indeed of the entire gamut of basic human values, you can shed them now.
Also, according to published reports, the same “FREE MARKET” allows a mere actor to walk away with a pay packet of two crores and thirty-three lakh rupees as his wage for anchoring a single episode of an hour-long TV programme, making a total earning of two hundred and eighty seven crores for just 120 episodes.
9. The indigenous models cited here require very little or no investment on infrastructure by way modern international airports, five-star hotels, luxury cars and buses, six-lane highways, fly-overs, grand shopping malls, casinos, night-clubs, sex-parlours and all the other paraphernalia needed to build a mini-America in India, entirely at the expense of the poor peasant and small man of the cities, who is thereby squeezed into further poverty. No MacDonalds’ burgers or Coca Cola to cheer the workers!
10. These models do not require the creation of a ‘super-state’ of Maharajas and Rajas and their millions of millionaire minions.
11. They check large-scale migration of people from villages to the cities by bringing prosperity directly to the villager in his home.
12. Perhaps one of the most serious arguments against the Bangalore India
13. The indigenous systems leave no room for capitalist tycoons to siphon off the benefits as their private loot.
14. In short, the protagonists of the Bangalore model who champion the so-called ‘free-market’ revolution, refuse to accept that India Indias
5
The spectacular achievements of the Punjab-Gujarat-Mahrashtra experiments have been deliberately pushed under the carpet by both the Right and the Left in this country because small and cottage industry and the cooperative system do not fit the rule book of either of them. The Western champions of globalisation and their Indian stooges are out to wipe out all grass-roots activity, in any sector whatsoever––from retail to big marketing to distribution to production––and reduce the poor man to the status of an unemployed beggar. Any commonsense look at the economy can prove this point.
Except in West Bengal , the left tends to concentrate on trade unions which do not cover even one percent of the country’s work force of four hundred and fifty million. They end up by pampering the creamy layer of teachers, bank clerks and the like who would think nothing of spending Rs ten lakhs on a daughter’s dowry.
The vacuum created by this high neglect is an open invitation to the Naxalites to fill it. Already they are believed to be calling the shots in more than a third of the country. Citigroup Inc, an international financial services company with some 200 million customers in more than 100 countries, has said in its report on ‘India in 2007’ that the Naxalite movement “has spread to 165 districts in 14 states covering close to 40 per cent of the country’s geographical area and affecting 35 per cent of the population”.
Ridiculing our tall claims to super-power status, Cait Murphy, Assistant Managing Editor of ‘FORTUNE’ magazine describes India as the “world leader in hunger, stunting and HIV” since “half the world’s hungry live in India
Quoting UN statistics she writes:
· 47 percent of Indian children under the age of five are either malnourished or stunted.
· The adult literacy rate is 61 percent (behind Rwanda and barely ahead of Sudan
· Only 10 percent of the entire Indian labor force works in the formal economy; of these fewer than half are in the private sector.
· The enrollment of six-to-15-year-olds in school has actually declined in the last year. About 40 million children who are supposed to be in school are not.
· About a fifth of the population is chronically hungry; about half of the world’s hungry live in India
· More than a quarter of the India
· India
The ‘FORTUNE’ article further points out that the 2006 UN Human Development Report, which ranks countries according to a variety of measures of human health and welfare, placed India
In the midst of the euphoria over their feigned achievements our leaders should take time off to study how the world looks at us.
Clearly, no society or government has the right to call itself “Civilized”, if it permits the manufacture, sale and consumption of luxury items of life of any description, and in any manner, within its territory, until the minimum needs of the whole population for food, water, shelter, medicine and education are met and there is no case of starvation and malnutrition, more particularly among children. In a just dispensation every citizen should receive his equitable share in the total resources of the nation. No extenuating circumstances can be cited to defend violation of this cardinal principle of social justice.
That the poorest country in the world, with half its population of over a billion living at near starvation level, should flaunt the largest number of billionaires in Asia, including two trillionaires, is an eloquent testimony to the spurious quality of Indian democracy. It throws open the question whether democracy, as we have practiced it over the last sixty years, can ever represent the wishes and aspirations of our people.
Says New York WALL STREET
“Few countries, however, can match India
“Prior to the elections (in UP), slightly more than half of the 403 legislative assembly members, faced criminal charges. In the first six phases of the elections, there were 48 constituencies offering four or more candidates with criminal cases pending against them…”
“Many of India’s legislators in legal trouble faced criminal charges well before their political careers began, according to I.C. Dwivedi, former director of police for Uttar Pradesh and now the state’s head of Election Watch, an NGO. “They were criminals first and politicians later,” he says”...
“Last year, the Congress Party lost a key ally, Coal Minister Shibu Soren from the regional Jharkhand Mukti Morcha party, who was convicted of the 1994 kidnapping and murder of his former personal secretary”….
The World Bank, which has approved about $3 billion in loans for Indian projects, is among the increasingly anxious foreign backers. “It is easy to be optimistic about India ’s economic prospects,” the bank stated in a 2006 India
“The latest family health survey, conducted by India ’s Ministry of Health, showed child malnutrition levels even higher than in Sub-Saharan Africa . According to the survey, 46% of children under 3 in India India
It is a sad reflection on the myopic state of India Bangalore
“Seeds of Despair”
In a study of the Indian Economy, titled “Seeds of Despair”, by Simon Robinson, the American magazine TIME says:
“The income disparity in the new India is massive: there are now 36 billionaires in India India
“The financial hardships are so extreme that thousands commit suicide every year. Far from benefiting from the country’s new prosperity, whole villages of India’s rural poor are being left adrift, eager to join in the boom but unable to afford it.- - - - More than 1,250 farmers committed suicide in Vidarbha’s six central districts alone in 2006, up from 248 in 2004.”
One can safely assert without fear of contradiction that in the prevalence of inequality between the rich and poor, by any yardstick India not only tops the list, it has practically no rivals, so wide is the gap between the two classes. This unique distinction for the land of Gandhi, the ‘naked fakir’, is in part the legacy of our deeply embedded caste system which gives us a divine license to be insensitive to the sufferings of the poor (‘castes’) whom, so the average Hindu seems to believe, God has made as substitutes for animals to carry the proverbial beast’s burden for the upper castes.
Or else how can one explain the disappearance, at the hands of professional kidnappers, of nearly 2,500 children of the poor from Bangalore
The poor parents have to run from pillar to post and move heaven and hell to persuade the almighty city police to condescend to merely record the case of a lost child in their register. Its being pursued and investigated is out of the question.
By contrast, take the recent case of a top executive of Abode, a software multi-national company, in Delhi Delhi
In its report on the kidnappings THE TIMES OF INDIA said quoting a source “we only hope there is not a repeat in Karnataka of the gruesome Nithari” (a Delhi
The only parallel I can think of to such callous indifference towards the anguish of the poor, which has been a typical feature of our Aryan culture for thousands of years, is the treatment of the Black African slaves in America before Abraham Lincoln----one of the greatest men of all times----abolished slavery in that land.
M.B. LAL
_______________________________
Glamour of the New Urban Colonialism
We were all very happy when in July 2011 Rekha, daughter of our neighbour’s maid, Nandi, got admitted to a Delhi University college where the “cut-off” point is above 80% marks in the CBSE exam. A few days ago in the first week of November, she came home donning plaited bobbed hair, her pony tails cut off by the ladies barber who changed her hair style to make her look more modern and attractive. Ever since that day Nandi has got seriously busy to look for a suitable boy and get Rekha married off to him as fast as possible, thus ending her further education.
Nandi is a divorcee with three daughters to support. She cannot take any chances of her eldest daughter going astray. “All day her mobile phone keeps ringing with calls from boys and girls of her college”, she complains about Rekha and adds “she can compete with them in marks but she cannot compete in other things. Some of them come in a chauffer driven cars. Most of the boys have motor-bikes, the girls wear fancy dresses to look like English Mem Sahebs. All of them have computers and all kinds of machines we cannot afford. They buy costly snacks with Pepsi-Coke bottles, go to expensive movies and so on. How can we ever be equal to them in these things? Together with the Rs.3000 I get as alimony from my ex-husband I make Rs.8000 to Rs.10,000 in a month and am always under a loan to the madams I serve.”
Nandi is fortunate to own room ten foot long and ten feet wide in a slum adjoining our colony with a bathroom which is shared by four families. If she had to live in a rented room Rekha would have had to work like her mother as a house maid to earn the extra Rs.4,000 needed to rent such a room. Several girls who have passed their CBSE 12th class examination and are working as maids like their mothers in our colony. They like doing these jobs because it gives them some extra money to indulge in luxuries like buying beauty aids.
Rekha’s case reminded me of Bholu, son of our family cook Bishen Mishra back in 1938. Bishen was paid nine rupees per month and lived with his wife and son in a servant room at the back of our house. Bholu attended the same school with me. It was a mile away and we both walked to it, wore shirts and shorts and had no pocket allowance whatsoever. In those days you could busy a leaf bowl of spicy “chaat” for just one paisa, but that paisa was never given to me. Bholu passed high school and fulfilled his father’s ambition by becoming a clerk. In those days matriculation was the equivalent of today’s graduation.
I am relating these two examples because Bishen Mishra and his son Bholu were more comfortable on a salary of nine rupees per month than Nandi and Rekha are on an income of nine thousand rupees. Has Independence of India brought any real benefits to the poor classes or has it made their lives even more miserable than they were seventy years ago? Nandi and Rekha are typical examples of their class in urban India
Bishen, being a Brahmin used to preside over the daily afternoon gossips of the servants of two or three houses in our lane, each smoking his own hookah and sharing it only with members of his caste. Occasionally I would drop in at these gossip sessions.
Bholu played in the street with his friends and had no worries about the future. If not a Babu he could always become a peon in an office and that would be fine too. He could still make both ends meet and live comfortably.
What has 65 years of independence brought to the poor classes?
In the first place we should not mix up the issue of poverty with women’s emancipation which is a historic social development that would be inevitable in India
On the economic front, however, opinions clash. Proponents of the “trickle down effect” theory would argue that the large scale development projects, including the urban sprawl of huge dimensions, has created a variety of jobs for the poor who would have been otherwise rotting in villages without hope and without even food. So far so good. Nobody denies this elementary fact. But let us not forget that this is not a new phenomenon. This has been the way of all feudal and imperialist civilizations throughout history. The Aryans created an elite of Brahmins and Kshtriyas and also created a two-tier service class of Vaishyas and Shudras with no rights of citizenship. The Greek, Roman and Egyptian empires of Pre-historic times captured or brought willing slaves from Black Africa. The British Empire adopted the Aryan two-tier practice and took Indian doctors traders, teachers, babus and also ordinary menial labour in very large numbers from India Americas
In India India
How do these maids spend their salary which, as I said above, is a thousand times that of their counterparts in the Nineteen Thirties? Nearly half of it willy-nilly goes on house, transport and fuel. These are products of modern civilization whose chief beneficiaries are builders, contractors, manufacturers of cement, concrete, steel and other materials that go into the building of a great city. They include manufacturers of whole plants and distribution networks for power and water supply, bus and car makers, traders who run movie houses, hotels, restaurants and other expensive “necessities” of city life like fuel gas cylinders. It is to be noted that the real beneficiaries of creating all these facilities are the rich. Life in the cities is like a railway train in which the poor can travel only on its roof at their own risk, without bars or railings to save them from falling off the train or any warning signs to make them duck their heads before passing under a bridge or tunnel. With each new “facility” added to the city the burden of the rich on the poor increases. A whole new mass of elite springs up overnight claiming a large share of whatever is left, squeezing the poor into a still tighter corner, or pushing them out of city limits to some remote slum and forcing them to spend more money on transport and also more time and energy travelling in crowded buses, which they could have spent otherwise on productive work.
Believe it or not, despite all these hardships these maids, and also their male counterparts, spend at least one-fourth of their incomes on aping the rich. There is no maid in my colony in the below 30 age group who does not visit a beautician once a week. My own full time maid keeps in the bathroom fancy cosmetics, advertised on TV, which visitors to our house often mistake to be the property of a female member of the family. A year back she spent her two months’ salary to get her front teeth pushed back and properly set by an expensive dentist. She spurns home food on her days off and must dine with her friends in a restaurant.
Most of the maids regularly visit tailors to get their dresses in proper shape. They abhor free government schools and put their children in private schools which have mushroomed in response to the public demand. The children, in turn, demand cokes, bottled water, chocolates, ice-creams and packaged foods like pizza and nodules. Higher college education has been privatized and placed beyond the reach of the poor classes.
When some one falls sick, and this happens quite often because of the polluted environment and their living conditions, many of them avoid the government dispensary and go to a private doctor. They all watch TV ads and buy whatever they can afford among the advertised products.
One fact that no one sees in this whole phenomenon of massive urbanization is the hidden arm of the multi-nationals who thus force the poor to spend whatever they earn on the products of their companies and work for them for free. They or their Indian subsidiaries and collaborators are the manufacturers of all the items that go into the making of a city. Whatever is notionally believed to be the job of the government or the public sector is in fact a task outsoured to specialized firms in the private sector.
The more a city grows the greater is the hold on it of the upper class which spreads out in every direction, flaunting its wealth. You have shopping malls in every quarter which sell every thing from a match box to sugar to salt to flour in retail stores run by big chains owned by the likes of Birlas and Ambanis. Slowly but steadily the big companies are taking over the small man’s job of not only vending everyday needs but also of making them. A multi-national has recently taken over one of India
The small trader, farmer and industrialist is being slowly pushed out and with him what used to be the middle class which has no place left to hide its head under a roof but the slums. Can you believe it? The price of housing plots in Delhi
I got more and worthful information by reading your article affection towards city life.
Facilities only for rich people. Poor people are becoming more poor.
Sir, I read in Hosathy Kannada Monthly magazine.
Thanks for your concern towards poor people.
Suresh Angadi
Head Master
Tungabhadra High School
Huuina Hadagoli – 583219
Bellari (Dist)
Karnataka (State)
Head Master
Huuina Hadagoli – 583219
Bellari (Dist)
Karnataka (State)
_______________________________
BLACK MONEY BUYING UP ALL URBAN HOMES AND WIPING OUT MIDDLE CLASS
Dear Justice Katju
I hope this message manages to reach your desk despite your numerous pre-occupations.
As an 83-year old journalist of the Gandhi-Nehru era I would like to thank and congratulate you for the great service you have done to the whole nation in telling THE TRUTH about the Indian media, specially the Press. To my ears, dinned by the noise of this 100% hired Press and TV, every word of what you say is true.
GIVEN BELOW IS A GLARING EXAMPLE OF YOUR STAND that the Press is not doing its duty to place the truth about the facts of life before the public. It is a case which shows how the entire media world has entered into a conspiracy of silence on grave issues and developments disastrous for the masses but beneficial for the tycoons who own the media.
Following recent government announcements about house tax circle rates I discovered that over the last 50 years land prices in Delhi have shot up 100,000 times and the trend continues unabated.
Today a situation has arisen which has no parallel in the history of free India. Suddenly the middle class finds itself homeless and on the verge of extinction with land prices shooting up 100,000 times in 50 years while population if Delhi Union Territory has increased only seven times in this period, as is clearly made out by the figures published in newspapers over the last few weeks. At the same time prices of goods and commodities and salaries across the board have increased only 50 to 100 times in this period. In Delhi's upscale colonies prevailing land prices are Rs 10 lakhs or $20,000 per square meter while even in equally congested Tokyo (with much higher per capita incomes} according to internet they are only about $4,000.You will find the same story repeated all over urban India.
The harsh truth that the press is shy of reporting is that black money is buying up our cities and driving out the middle class and the poor from there. The Two-G and other scams are mere drops in this ocean of corruption in land deals (cumulatively worth trillions of rupees all over India) which are paid for 80% in black and 20% in white money. The beauty is that the whole world knows the actual total price which is also published in newspapers. This is corruption in the open and has assumed such huge proportions because nobody dares to raise his finger at it.
Availability of land is not the issue at all. I have calculated that if the government sells or provides only six square meters of land per person, (or 25 square meters per family of four), the entire Indian population of 1.2 billion can be covered by giving them 7.2 billion square meters, of 7,200 square kilometers which is 0.25% of India’s total land mass of 3.2 million square kilometers.
(This translates into 500 to 600 square foot flats per family in a multi story complex as explained below).
My only regret is that our politicians have failed to see the writing on the wall: This is the stuff that revolutions are made of. How far can you stretch the common man in this country? Add to this the high cost of education, health care power, fuel and transport and you can see a real people's uprising in the making.
Disturbed by these trends I sent the following story to four national newspapers named below.
The Times of India
The Hindustan Times
The Hindu
Mail Today
All four of them have rejected it. Nor have they done stories of their own on this subject which seems to be forbidden territory for them. My point is not the non-publication of my story but that this horrendous public issue must be discussed threadbare by our economists and intellectuals.
Our newspapers have done a great job exposing big scams but they have completely ignored this massive loot of perhaps trillions of rupees of public money by the rich class as a whole. If I may venture a theory: our newspaper owners give us the freedom to expose individual acts of corruption but forbid any exposure of "systemic loot" or talk of structural reform. In the name of self-regulation they are indulging in self-censorship to protect organized loot by the upper classes.
Best wishes
M.B.LAL
I hope this message manages to reach your desk despite your numerous pre-occupations.
As an 83-year old journalist of the Gandhi-Nehru era I would like to thank and congratulate you for the great service you have done to the whole nation in telling THE TRUTH about the Indian media, specially the Press. To my ears, dinned by the noise of this 100% hired Press and TV, every word of what you say is true.
GIVEN BELOW IS A GLARING EXAMPLE OF YOUR STAND that the Press is not doing its duty to place the truth about the facts of life before the public. It is a case which shows how the entire media world has entered into a conspiracy of silence on grave issues and developments disastrous for the masses but beneficial for the tycoons who own the media.
Following recent government announcements about house tax circle rates I discovered that over the last 50 years land prices in Delhi have shot up 100,000 times and the trend continues unabated.
Today a situation has arisen which has no parallel in the history of free India. Suddenly the middle class finds itself homeless and on the verge of extinction with land prices shooting up 100,000 times in 50 years while population if Delhi Union Territory has increased only seven times in this period, as is clearly made out by the figures published in newspapers over the last few weeks. At the same time prices of goods and commodities and salaries across the board have increased only 50 to 100 times in this period. In Delhi's upscale colonies prevailing land prices are Rs 10 lakhs or $20,000 per square meter while even in equally congested Tokyo (with much higher per capita incomes} according to internet they are only about $4,000.You will find the same story repeated all over urban India.
The harsh truth that the press is shy of reporting is that black money is buying up our cities and driving out the middle class and the poor from there. The Two-G and other scams are mere drops in this ocean of corruption in land deals (cumulatively worth trillions of rupees all over India) which are paid for 80% in black and 20% in white money. The beauty is that the whole world knows the actual total price which is also published in newspapers. This is corruption in the open and has assumed such huge proportions because nobody dares to raise his finger at it.
Availability of land is not the issue at all. I have calculated that if the government sells or provides only six square meters of land per person, (or 25 square meters per family of four), the entire Indian population of 1.2 billion can be covered by giving them 7.2 billion square meters, of 7,200 square kilometers which is 0.25% of India’s total land mass of 3.2 million square kilometers.
(This translates into 500 to 600 square foot flats per family in a multi story complex as explained below).
My only regret is that our politicians have failed to see the writing on the wall: This is the stuff that revolutions are made of. How far can you stretch the common man in this country? Add to this the high cost of education, health care power, fuel and transport and you can see a real people's uprising in the making.
Disturbed by these trends I sent the following story to four national newspapers named below.
The Times of India
The Hindustan Times
The Hindu
Mail Today
All four of them have rejected it. Nor have they done stories of their own on this subject which seems to be forbidden territory for them. My point is not the non-publication of my story but that this horrendous public issue must be discussed threadbare by our economists and intellectuals.
Our newspapers have done a great job exposing big scams but they have completely ignored this massive loot of perhaps trillions of rupees of public money by the rich class as a whole. If I may venture a theory: our newspaper owners give us the freedom to expose individual acts of corruption but forbid any exposure of "systemic loot" or talk of structural reform. In the name of self-regulation they are indulging in self-censorship to protect organized loot by the upper classes.
Best wishes
M.B.LAL
THE REJECTED ARTICLE
PRIVATIZE GROUP HOUSING TO SAVE
THE MIDDLE CLASS AND FIGHT CORRUPTION
THE MIDDLE CLASS AND FIGHT CORRUPTION
Delhi land prices shoot up 100,000 times in 50 years, Population seven times Two developments in the last two weeks appear to be pointers to the imminent death of the middle class in Delhi and other metropolitan cities. One is the tale told by New York Times of Moulshri Mohan, the girl who obtained 93.5% marks in her CBSE exam and still could not get admission to a Delhi University College though Ivy League universities in America welcomed her with open arms.
The other story is the announcement by the Government of new circle rates for housing plots in different areas of Delhi ranging upto Rs 218,000 per square meter... Since everywhere in the capital the actual price of land is at least four to five times the new circle rate, it would mean that in the upscale areas it would be around 10 lakhs rupees a square metre or even higher. This is about one lakh times the price at which some of my colleagues bought similarly developed plots from DLF in similar colonies half-a-century age, in the 1955-60 period.
Most readers would have missed the intimate link between these two major trend setting stories. Why are Moulshri and her generation of high scorers so set upon getting admission into the best institutions in the world?
It is because these young people have set their eyes on the same plots which they will need to survive at the top of the social ladder. This is a target a thousand times more difficult to attain than it was for a young man or woman starting a career in 1955 (assuming that the price index has risen a 100 times since then). What is worse for this generation, they have no other option to survive with dignity. The combined onslaught of rising prices, especially of houses, and the cult of consumerism have virtually wiped out the middle class in India which is the backbone of any cultured community.
The first need of any one starting life is that of a place to live. While during this half-century population of Delhi Union Territory has grown seven times land prices have taken an astronomical leap of 1,00,000 times.
Moulshri is lucky to be born in a family that can afford to educate her abroad. There are thousands of other equally bright aspirants whose ambitions to scale great heights in society are abruptly thwarted by their inability to enter the portals of a good college.
The answer lies not in opening more colleges but in making life more bearable at the middle level.
This is not as difficult as it seems. The Government can achieve this objective within the frame work of its existing policies. Today a fresh post-graduate from college starts life with a monthly salary of either a lakh and above or just Rs.10,000 to 15,000 a month. Within a few years the former’s salary takes quantum leaps to three or four lakhs a month while the latter keeps hopping from job to job to get a raise of few thousand. To add salt to his wounds comes the news, a few days ago, that Delhi is the richest metropolis in the country with a per capita income of Rs 1.6 lakhs or Rs 6.4 lakhs for a family of four.. Most middle class families do not earn even a half of this figure. Life of the slums scares them but that is all they will be able to afford with current high rents and land prices.
This is where the Government comes in the picture. The census figures show that 65% of India’s population is below 35 and 50% below 25.On their own members of this large segment cannot own a house. The Government has done a great deal in the housing sector in Delhi but it has committed three blunders which nullify much of the good that its policies would have yielded:
First Mistake. The Government has built tens of thousands of houses and sold them at cheap rates to individuals who use them as an item of trade and speculation. If, instead, the same houses had been sold to a builder or contractor, at the same price, and allotted to the same occupants on a monthly rent so that the builder could realize his costs within eight or 10 years, there would be no scope for private profiteering at public expense by individual allottees who would be treated as permanent irremovable tenants and not owners. Civic services within each colony could still be run by an allottees’ cooperative. When a tenant leaves the flat goes to the next allottee on the waiting list.
To give an example, the house in which I live, in a cooperative housing society, was allotted to me 40 years ago for Rs.one lakh which I paid partly from my provident fund and partly through monthly installments. It is now worth Rs.2.5 crores in the market, a climb to 250 times. Of this the price each member paid to DDA for the land is only Rs.5000/-, which at current prices works out to Rs.6 lakhs per sq metre, an increase of 75000 times over what we paid to DDA, only 40 years ago. Over night I find myself catapulted from the middle to the upper class. In my wildest dreams I had never fancied myself as a crorepati.
Second Mistake. The government has distributed large areas of land to rehabilitate the poor at the rate of 25 sq metres per family. This was a blunder, a waste of resources. If the same land had been given to a builder or a cooperative who would build multi- storeyed houses for the allottees and realize a fixed rent from them they would each have a more decent living space. For instance, if the 25 sq meter per head allotment of 12 allottees is clubbed it becomes 300 sq metres on which the builder can build larger multi-storeyed apartments of 50 to 60 square meters each leaving some open space around them for social purposes.
Third Mistake. DDA has gone upto three storeyes in the flats it has built. It could go upto seven storeys instead and provide lifts for going to the upper floors. Statistics clearly show that urban housing has grown into a horrendous problem simply because it is treated as wealth first and a place for shelter last. For instance Union Territory of Delhi has a density of about 11,000 person per sq kilometer which gives 90 sq meters space to each person or nearly 500 sq metres to each family of five, while all it needs in a multi-storey complex is 25 sq metres or just 5% of its own share of Delhi ’s land.
The harsh truth that the press is shy of reporting is that black money is buying up our cities and driving out the middle class and the poor from there. The two-G and other scams are mere drops in this ocean of corruption in land deals (cumulatively worth trillions of rupees all over India) which are paid for 80% in black and 20% in white money. The beauty is that the whole world knows the actual price which is also published in newspapers. This is corruption in the open and has assumed such huge proportions because nobody dares to raise his finger at it.
Availability of land is not the issue at all. I have calculated that if the government sells or provides only six square meters of land per person, (or 25 square meters per family of four), the entire Indian population of 1.2 billion can be covered by giving 7.2 billion square meters, or 7,200 square kilometers or 0.25% of India’s total land mass of 3.2 million square kilometers (This translates into 500 to 600 square foot flats per family in a multi story complex as explained above)
A sinister by-product of this phenomenon of astronomically high land prices is large-scale corruption and emergence of powerful land Mafias There is nothing that even a respectable man will not do to find an affordable roof over his head. Mafias naturally exploit that instinct and operate freely throughout the city, promoting not only dubious land deals but also other major crimes.
M.B.LAL
The other story is the announcement by the Government of new circle rates for housing plots in different areas of Delhi ranging upto Rs 218,000 per square meter... Since everywhere in the capital the actual price of land is at least four to five times the new circle rate, it would mean that in the upscale areas it would be around 10 lakhs rupees a square metre or even higher. This is about one lakh times the price at which some of my colleagues bought similarly developed plots from DLF in similar colonies half-a-century age, in the 1955-60 period.
Most readers would have missed the intimate link between these two major trend setting stories. Why are Moulshri and her generation of high scorers so set upon getting admission into the best institutions in the world?
It is because these young people have set their eyes on the same plots which they will need to survive at the top of the social ladder. This is a target a thousand times more difficult to attain than it was for a young man or woman starting a career in 1955 (assuming that the price index has risen a 100 times since then). What is worse for this generation, they have no other option to survive with dignity. The combined onslaught of rising prices, especially of houses, and the cult of consumerism have virtually wiped out the middle class in India which is the backbone of any cultured community.
The first need of any one starting life is that of a place to live. While during this half-century population of Delhi Union Territory has grown seven times land prices have taken an astronomical leap of 1,00,000 times.
Moulshri is lucky to be born in a family that can afford to educate her abroad. There are thousands of other equally bright aspirants whose ambitions to scale great heights in society are abruptly thwarted by their inability to enter the portals of a good college.
The answer lies not in opening more colleges but in making life more bearable at the middle level.
This is not as difficult as it seems. The Government can achieve this objective within the frame work of its existing policies. Today a fresh post-graduate from college starts life with a monthly salary of either a lakh and above or just Rs.10,000 to 15,000 a month. Within a few years the former’s salary takes quantum leaps to three or four lakhs a month while the latter keeps hopping from job to job to get a raise of few thousand. To add salt to his wounds comes the news, a few days ago, that Delhi is the richest metropolis in the country with a per capita income of Rs 1.6 lakhs or Rs 6.4 lakhs for a family of four.. Most middle class families do not earn even a half of this figure. Life of the slums scares them but that is all they will be able to afford with current high rents and land prices.
This is where the Government comes in the picture. The census figures show that 65% of India’s population is below 35 and 50% below 25.On their own members of this large segment cannot own a house. The Government has done a great deal in the housing sector in Delhi but it has committed three blunders which nullify much of the good that its policies would have yielded:
First Mistake. The Government has built tens of thousands of houses and sold them at cheap rates to individuals who use them as an item of trade and speculation. If, instead, the same houses had been sold to a builder or contractor, at the same price, and allotted to the same occupants on a monthly rent so that the builder could realize his costs within eight or 10 years, there would be no scope for private profiteering at public expense by individual allottees who would be treated as permanent irremovable tenants and not owners. Civic services within each colony could still be run by an allottees’ cooperative. When a tenant leaves the flat goes to the next allottee on the waiting list.
To give an example, the house in which I live, in a cooperative housing society, was allotted to me 40 years ago for Rs.one lakh which I paid partly from my provident fund and partly through monthly installments. It is now worth Rs.2.5 crores in the market, a climb to 250 times. Of this the price each member paid to DDA for the land is only Rs.5000/-, which at current prices works out to Rs.6 lakhs per sq metre, an increase of 75000 times over what we paid to DDA, only 40 years ago. Over night I find myself catapulted from the middle to the upper class. In my wildest dreams I had never fancied myself as a crorepati.
Second Mistake. The government has distributed large areas of land to rehabilitate the poor at the rate of 25 sq metres per family. This was a blunder, a waste of resources. If the same land had been given to a builder or a cooperative who would build multi- storeyed houses for the allottees and realize a fixed rent from them they would each have a more decent living space. For instance, if the 25 sq meter per head allotment of 12 allottees is clubbed it becomes 300 sq metres on which the builder can build larger multi-storeyed apartments of 50 to 60 square meters each leaving some open space around them for social purposes.
Third Mistake. DDA has gone upto three storeyes in the flats it has built. It could go upto seven storeys instead and provide lifts for going to the upper floors. Statistics clearly show that urban housing has grown into a horrendous problem simply because it is treated as wealth first and a place for shelter last. For instance Union Territory of Delhi has a density of about 11,000 person per sq kilometer which gives 90 sq meters space to each person or nearly 500 sq metres to each family of five, while all it needs in a multi-storey complex is 25 sq metres or just 5% of its own share of Delhi ’s land.
The harsh truth that the press is shy of reporting is that black money is buying up our cities and driving out the middle class and the poor from there. The two-G and other scams are mere drops in this ocean of corruption in land deals (cumulatively worth trillions of rupees all over India) which are paid for 80% in black and 20% in white money. The beauty is that the whole world knows the actual price which is also published in newspapers. This is corruption in the open and has assumed such huge proportions because nobody dares to raise his finger at it.
Availability of land is not the issue at all. I have calculated that if the government sells or provides only six square meters of land per person, (or 25 square meters per family of four), the entire Indian population of 1.2 billion can be covered by giving 7.2 billion square meters, or 7,200 square kilometers or 0.25% of India’s total land mass of 3.2 million square kilometers (This translates into 500 to 600 square foot flats per family in a multi story complex as explained above)
A sinister by-product of this phenomenon of astronomically high land prices is large-scale corruption and emergence of powerful land Mafias There is nothing that even a respectable man will not do to find an affordable roof over his head. Mafias naturally exploit that instinct and operate freely throughout the city, promoting not only dubious land deals but also other major crimes.
M.B.LAL
Housing prices rise most in India
This is an over six-fold increase compared to the 47% rise in
In India , prices have risen maximum in South Delhi , Gurgaon and Noida. Prices in some of the markets in NCR rose by 1,100% including inflation.
_______________________________
MINIMUM WAGES ACT A NON-STARTER
BULK OF WORK FORCE LIVES ON STARVATION WAGE –––
AN OPEN INVITATION TO EXTREMISM
By M.B. Lal
Over the past few weeks I have discovered that the government's Minimum Wages Act has proved to be a total non-starter. This condemns the bulk 0f the "unorganized sector" which constitutes 94% of the work force to a starvation wage.
Leave alone the business community; my survey has revealed that even the so-called enlightened and highly educated classes are dead set against implementing this Act in their posh housing societies, luxury clubs, cultural and academic institutions, among others, even when they are flush with funds.
Through this denial of the minimum wage, every month the average worker in most establishments is being denied Rs 2,000 to Rs 4,000 of his legitimate salary which to him has the same value that a sum of Rs 30,000 or one lakh has for us. This is robbery in broad daylight about which he can do nothing Members of our nouveau riche middle class have lost the capacity to feel the joy a little extra money can bring to a poor man's life. Like us, he also has a family to support. He loves his children as dearly as we love ours. We often suspect these workers of causing thefts in our homes and keep our valuables at a safe distance from them, little knowing that all the while it is we who have been wrongfully robbing them of their rightful dues. Clearly, the boot is on the other leg.
After much investigation and deliberation I have come to the conclusion that resistance to this Act is so great that it can never be implemented unless the government makes it's violation a serious cognizable offense under the criminal law for any organization employing more than six persons (including regular workers supplied by a security agency or contractor). It should be directly actionable by the police as a case of theft or robbery. In the absence of such harsh measures to enforce it and give due protection to the working class, workers will have no option but to turn for support to extremist parties who encourage and sponsor social change through violence.
I broached this subject with residents and managers of a few upper and upper middle class colonies where every other house has two cars and many have three. Almost all of them gave me a cold shoulder. A key official of a colony said he would sooner resign than yield to such a demand "I do not want to make a laughing stock of myself in the colony".. I later realized that he was right in judging the mood of the community that inhabits these elitist colonies.
Housing societies constitute only a minuscule part of the violators of the Minimum Wages Act. Ask any delivery boy (from shops stocked with goods worth crores) his salary and he will tell you he works 12 to 14 hours from 8 a.m. to 10 p.m. for anything from Rs 2,500 to Rs 4,000 a month, while the minimum wage fixed by the government for unskilled labour for an eight-hour shift is Rs 6,422 a month and for the semi-skilled Rs 7,098.
The concept of an eight hour shift has all but vanished from almost the entire "unorganized sector". These days 12 hours are the norm and that too at half the statutory minimum wage. Some employers do not even give their workers a weekly off. While the Government and political parties submit to all kinds of pressures from the organized unionized sector they care two hoots for the far more numerous unorganized sectors, not knowing they are sitting on a time bomb ticking under their seats.
The scenario is the same, in air conditioned malls, cinema halls, nursing homes, elite clubs, restaurants, transport companies, motor workshops and among rickshaw pullers and construction workers and so on. Like many cooperative housing societies where the minimum price of a flat is Rs two crores, none of them is short of money. It is just that they have got used to flouting the law because they know that they can get away with any thing they do.
As prices of all essential commodities rise, government and big business houses promptly raise the salaries of their staff which further adds to the inflationary spiral. Workers in the unorganized sector who have to bear the shock of this upheaval are left high and dry, without any protection or support, the Minimum Wages Act being totally defunct for them. Sector-wise, one of the worst culprits of this phenomenon are the shooting real estate prices which are leaving the worker in the unorganized sector virtually roofless, or forcing him to commute anything between 20 and 50 kilometers to his work place and back home at exorbitant costs in time and money. His living conditions are worse than those of bonded labour. Nurses in private nursing homes live four to six to a room and are paid around Rs 3,000 a month while their diplomas are retained by their employers.
Workers in the unorganized sector, social activists and intellectuals who support their cause are often accused of being anarchists or even Maoist. But I ask those high brow critics "to whom else should we turn for support?" The present system offers us only two options: coalitions led by the Congress or BJP. Both compete with each other in framing labour friendly laws but they do so only after ensuring that those laws will never be implemented.
The more the violations the better for them, for then they can claim immunity from taking any action at all, the offence being too widely rampant and beyond their control. To cap it all they have appointed inspectors many of whom have allegedly paid lakhs in bribes to politicians and officers for appointing them. They have to recover that money from us and more.
The Hindu
March 19, 2012
ENFORCE MINIMUM WAGES ACT
The Hindu has done a great service to the millions of homeless in the country by reporting the seminar on homelessness organized by the Indo-Global Social Service Society. Allow me to point out the two factors that are primarily responsible for urban homelessness:
The first is that urban housing has become a safe haven for Black Money with the result that in the last 60 years land prices have shot up 100,00 to 300,000 times in posh colonies and at least 2,000 to 10,000 times in the unauthorized slums. Slowly but surely the poorest of the poor are being driven to living in the streets.
But the second and more important reason for the growing destitution and homelessness of the working class in the urban unorganized sector is the refusal of our middle and upper middle classes to implement the Minimum Wages Act. Ask any messenger delivering goods worth thousands per day from a nearby store about his salary and he will tell you he is paid just about Rs 2000 to Rs 4,000 per month for working from 8 am to 10 p.m. against the Rs 6,422 fixed for an eight-hour day in the Minimum Wages Act.
The story is the same of workers in all establishments, be it posh housing societies where the minimum price of a small flat is two crores, big restaurants, clubs or private educational institutions. While according to an Indian Census report published in The Hindu Delhiites are the richest people in the country, the story of the vast working class is entirely different though Delhi
About the Government's complete indifference to the open violation of the laws against Black Money and non-payment of the minimum wage to labour, the less said the better.
M.B.Lal
_______________________________
May 5, 2012
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/06/opinion/sunday/the-outsourced-life.html?_r=1&emc=eta1&pagewanted=print
The Outsourced Life
By ARLIE RUSSELL HOCHSCHILD
IN the sprawling outskirts of San Jose, Calif., I find myself at the apartment door of Katherine Ziegler, a psychologist and wantologist. Could it be, I wonder, that there is such a thing as a wantologist, someone we can hire to figure out what we want? Have I arrived at some final telling moment in my research on outsourcing intimate parts of our lives, or at the absurdist edge of the market frontier?
A willowy woman of 55, Ms. Ziegler beckons me in. A framed Ph.D. degree in psychology from the University of Illinois hangs on the wall, along with an intricate handmade quilt and a collage of images clipped from magazines — the back of a child’s head, a gnarled tree, a wandering cat — an odd assemblage that invites one to search for a connecting thread.
After a 20-year career as a psychologist, Ms. Ziegler expanded her practice to include executive coaching, life coaching and wantology. Originally intended to help business managers make purchasing decisions, wantology is the brainchild of Kevin Kreitman, an industrial engineer who set up a two-day class to train life coaches to apply this method to individuals in private life. Ms. Ziegler took the course and was promptly certified in the new field.
Ms. Ziegler explains that the first step in thinking about a “want,” is to ask your client, “ ‘Are you floating or navigating toward your goal?’ A lot of people float. Then you ask, ‘What do you want to feel like once you have what you want?’ ”
She described her experience with a recent client, a woman who lived in a medium-size house with a small garden but yearned for a bigger house with a bigger garden. She dreaded telling her husband, who had long toiled at renovations on their present home, and she feared telling her son, who she felt would criticize her for being too materialistic.
Ms. Ziegler took me through the conversation she had with this woman: “What do you want?”
“A bigger house.”
“How would you feel if you lived in a bigger house?”
“Peaceful.”
“What other things make you feel peaceful?”
“Walks by the ocean.” (The ocean was an hour’s drive away.)
“Do you ever take walks nearer where you live that remind you of the ocean?”“Certain ones, yes.”
“What do you like about those walks?”
“I hear the sound of water and feel surrounded by green.”
This gentle line of questions nudged the client toward a more nuanced understanding of her own desire. In the end, the woman dedicated a small room in her home to feeling peaceful. She filled it with lush ferns. The greenery encircled a bubbling slate-and-rock tabletop fountain. Sitting in her redesigned room in her medium-size house, the woman found the peace for which she’d yearned.
I was touched by the story. Maybe Ms. Ziegler’s client just needed a good friend who could listen sympathetically and help her work out her feelings. Ms. Ziegler provided a service — albeit one with a wacky name — for a fee. Still, the mere existence of a paid wantologist indicates just how far the market has penetrated our intimate lives. Can it be that we are no longer confident to identify even our most ordinary desires without a professional to guide us?
Is the wantologist the tail end of a larger story? Over the last century, the world of services has changed greatly.
A hundred — or even 40 — years ago, human eggs and sperm were not for sale, nor were wombs for rent. Online dating companies, nameologists, life coaches, party animators and paid graveside visitors did not exist.
Nor had a language developed that so seamlessly melded village and market — as in “Rent-a-Mom,” “Rent-a-Dad,” “Rent-a-Grandma,” “Rent-a-Friend” — insinuating itself, half joking, half serious, into our culture. The explosion in the number of available personal services says a great deal about changing ideas of what we can reasonably expect from whom. In the late 1940s, there were 2,500 clinical psychologists licensed in the United States. By 2010, there were 77,000 — and an additional 50,000 marriage and family therapists.
In the 1940s, there were no life coaches; in 2010, there were 30,000. The last time I Googled “dating coach,” 1,200,000 entries popped up. “Wedding planner” had over 25 million entries. The newest entry, Rent-a-Friend, has 190,000 entries.
And, in a world that undermines community, disparages government and marginalizes nonprofit organizations as ways of meeting growing needs of working families, these are likely to proliferate. As will the corresponding cultural belief in the superiority of what’s for sale.
WE’VE put a self-perpetuating cycle in motion. The more anxious, isolated and time-deprived we are, the more likely we are to turn to paid personal services. To finance these extra services, we work longer hours. This leaves less time to spend with family, friends and neighbors; we become less likely to call on them for help, and they on us. And, the more we rely on the market, the more hooked we become on its promises: Do you need a tidier closet? A nicer family picture album? Elderly parents who are truly well cared for? Children who have an edge in school, on tests, in college and beyond? If we can afford the services involved, many if not most of us are prone to say, sure, why not?
And the market expands to fill increasing demand. The director of research and development at the company eHarmony, for example, the champion of the marriage market, has envisioned expanding the company’s operations into later stages of adult life, and into workplace and college relations. EHarmony now operates in Canada, Brazil and Australia, as well as across Europe. The more members of diverse communities hunger for counsel, comfort, dates, support, the more outfits will spring up to extend services for those who can pay. The cycle takes another turn.
Paradoxically, the more we depend on market services — and market logic — the greater its subtle but real power to undermine our intimate life. As the ex-advertising executive and author of “In the Absence of the Sacred,” Jerry Mander, observed, “With commerce, we always get the good news first and the bad news after a while. First we hear the car goes faster than the horse. Then we hear it clogs freeways and pollutes the air.”
The bad news in this case is the capacity of the service market, with all its expertise, to sap self-confidence in our own capacities and those of friends and family. The professional nameologist finds a more auspicious name than we can recall from our family tree. The professional potty trainer does the job better than the bumbling parent or helpful grandparent. Jimmy’s Art Supply sells a better Spanish mission replica kit than your child can build for that school project from paint, glue and a Kleenex box. Our amateur versions of life seem to us all the poorer by comparison.
Consider some recent shifts in language. Care of family and friends is increasingly referred to as “lay care.” The act of meeting a romantic partner at a flesh-and-blood gathering rather than online is disparaged by some dating coaches as “dating in the wild.”
We picture competition as a matter of one business interest outdoing another. But the fiercest competition may be the quiet continuing one between market and private life. As a setter of standards of the ideal experience, it often wins, whether we buy the service or not.
The very ease with which we reach for market services may help prevent us from noticing the remarkable degree to which the market has come to dominate our very ideas about what can or should be for sale or rent, and who should be included in the dramatic cast — buyers, branders, sellers — that we imagine as part of our personal life. It may even prevent us from noticing how we devalue what we don’t or can’t buy.
As Michael J. Sandel, a Harvard professor of government, notes, a prison cell upgrade can be purchased for $82 a day in Santa Ana, Calif., and for $8 solo drivers in Minneapolis can buy access to car pool lanes on public roadways. Earlier this year, officials at Santa Monica College attempted to allow students to buy spots in oversubscribed classes for $462 per course. The school’s trustees dropped the proposal only after large-scale protests. Even more than what we wish for, the market alters how we wish. Wallet in hand, we focus in the market on the thing we buy. In the realm of services, this is an experience — the perfect wedding, the delicious “traditional” meal, the well-raised child, even the well-gestated baby.
As we outsource more of our private lives, we find it increasingly possible to outsource emotional attachment. A busy executive, for example, focuses on efficiency; his assistant tells me, “My boss outsources patience to me.” The wealthy employer of a household manager detaches herself from the act of writing personal Christmas-present labels. A love coach encourages clients to think of dating as “work,” and to be mindful of their R.O.I. — return on investment, of emotional energy, time and money. The grieving family member hires a Tombstone Butler to beautify a loved one’s burial site.
Focusing attention on the destination, we detach ourselves from the small — potentially meaningful — aspects of experience. Confining our sense of achievement to results, to the moment of purchase, so to speak, we unwittingly lose the pleasure of accomplishment, the joy of connecting to others and possibly, in the process, our faith in ourselves.
There is much public conversation about the balance of power between the branches of government, but we badly need to confront the larger and looming imbalance between the market and everything else.
A society in which comfort, care, companionship, “perfect” birthday parties and so much else is available to those who can pay for it?
What would we say if a wantologist put us on a couch and asked, “Is this the kind of society we want?”
_______________________________
http://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/Delhi/article3435469.ece?css=print
Increase in violence against SCs and STs, reveals report
Decades after enacting a legislation to prevent atrocities against
the Schedule Castes and Schedule Tribes through the SCs/STs (Prevention of
Atrocities) Act, 1989, and the SCs/STs (Prevention of Atrocities) Rules, 1995,
the picture continues to remain quite grim, according to a civil society report.
The report on the “Status of Implementation of SCs and STs
[Prevention of Atrocities] Act 1989 and Rules 1995” reveals that there has been
substantial increase in cases of violence against SCs and STs.
Released by Justice K.G. Balakrishnan, the first Dalit Chief
Justice of India, here on Thursday, the report highlights loopholes in the
implementation of the Act and argues that it has not been able to check
atrocities against Dalits and Adivasis in an effective manner.
Prepared after collecting evidences by visiting the places of
incidents and talking to victims across the country, the study says “to begin
with first the cases of violence against SCs/STs are not registered” and even in
those that are registered the conviction rate is quite low. “At least one-fourth
of the cases have been disposed of at the investigation stage itself by the
police and these complaints have been referred to as ‘mistake of fact,” adds the
report which was prepared by the National Coalition for Strengthening SCs &
STs (Prevention of Atrocities) Act
The report which explains in details the trends and nature of
discrimination and atrocities against SCs/STs over the years, recommends that “a
high-level committee should be appointed to review implementation of the Act and
the Rules in all the States”.
While expressing disappointment over the States' failure to check
crimes against Dalits and Adivasis, Justice Balakrishnan favoured the reports'
recommendation that “exclusive special courts with powers to take cognizance of
the offences under the Act should be set up and special public prosecutors for
speedy trials of cases registered under the Act should be appointed”.
According to the report crime rate against SCs has increased from
2.6 per cent in 2007 to 2.8 per cent in 2010. In 2010, Uttar Pradesh accounted
for 19.2 per cent of the total crimes against SCs (6,272 out of 32,712) in the
country. In the same year, Rajasthan reported the highest rate of crimes (7.4
per cent) against SCs compared to the national average of 2.9 per cent.
According to the report, the number of crimes against STs
drastically increased in 2010 to 5,885 cases and murder cases of STs alone
totalled 142.
When it comes to registration of atrocity cases, the report says
“police resort to various machinations to discourage SCs/STs from registering
cases, to dilute the seriousness of the violence, and to shield the accused
persons from arrest and prosecution. FIRs are often registered under the PCR Act
and IPC provisions, which attract lesser punishment than PoA Act provisions for
the same offence.”
At national level, only 11,682 (34.2 per cent) out of 34,127
atrocity cases were registered under PoA Act in 2010.
Of all the cases registered in 2010 investigation was completed
only for 37,558 cases of the total of 51,782 cases. Charge sheets were submitted
only for 26,480 cases (51 per cent) because of which even by the year end,
around 14,092 cases remained pending for investigation.
In 2010, of the 16,601 cases registered across the country under
PoA Act for atrocities against SCs, the police closed almost 2,150 cases (13 per
cent) in 2010. Meanwhile, of the 1,714 registered cases of atrocities against
STs, 223 (13 per cent) were closed.
The report says that with 101,251 cases of crimes against SCs/STs
(80 per cent) pending for trial by the end of 2010, no significant improvement
was seen in the trial pendency rate (82.5 per cent) at the end of 2011.
_____________________________
Resident Welfare Association raises Rs 1.4 lakh for dead cop in Delhi
NEW DELHI: Head constable Sanjeev Malik, who was killed in Meerut in an alleged road rage incident on Tuesday, is fondly remembered by residents of Malviya Nagar where he served as beat constable in a previous stint. In a heartwarming gesture, the colony's RWA has stepped in to raise money for Malik's family - his wife and two children aged six and two.
Sanjeev Rao, president of the East Malviya Nagar RWA said he read about the constable's death in TOI on Wednesday and immediately sent out an SMS asking residents to contribute money. By late evening, the RWA collected Rs 1.38 lakh. With money still pouring in, it is confident of collecting over Rs 1.5 lakh by Thursday.
Malik, 36, was declared one of the best beat officers in February 2011, when he was posted in Malviya Nagar. Residents remember as an honest and efficient cop. "He was an upright man, helpful and pleasant," said Rao.
"If a small association of 150 residents can collect so much money in such little time, I am sure if more people contribute, a larger amount can be collected. This is a small gesture to help a good man's family in this hour of need," he said.
The south Delhi cops too hail Malik as an officer who knew his job well. A specialist in collecting information about western UP-based criminals, he earned praise when he joined the anti-auto theft wing of the south district. He was also known to cultivate sources across NCR and was a good analyser of mobile calls.
A day after the south Delhi special staff cop died in a case of apparent road rage, questions are being raised over the Delhi Police's version of events. The Meerut police, meanwhile, claimed that Malik may have been killed elsewhere as no blood drops were found at the incident spot. They added that just one .9mm cartridge shell was recovered from the site.
Delhi Police denied the claim, saying at least six rounds were fired at the cops by the miscreants. After a postmortem, Malik's body was handed over to his family, which took it to his native village of Sarang in Saharanpur.
According to sources, the Meerut Police is trying to find out whether the presence of an informer - one Pankaj from Ghaziabad - in the car along with the three Delhi Police cops had something to do with Malik's death.
"Since the miscreants were in their Santro car, travelling in opposite direction to the WagonR of the Delhi cops, it is likely that Pankaj was identified. The attack could have been a ploy to draw out the Delhi cops and then shoot at them, staging the entire incident as road rage. They had gone to get a wanted car-lifter from Muzzafarnagar. When they checked the mobile location of the accused, it showed he was at Khurja. The possibility that his gang members are involved cannot be ruled out,'' said an officer accompanying SSP (Meerut) S Satyanarayan.
___________________
