VOX POPULI

by

Aam Admi

Issue: 115

Date: 02.06.2012

Contents:

1. Gen Bikram Singh Has The Nation’s Best Wishes

2. Massive Coal Reserves Nullify Nuclear Power Need

3. Why Is Pakistan's Nuclear Program Ignored While Iran's Is In The Scope Sights

4. Media Should Expose Coal Scam

5. Mapping Gen V K Singh's Psychographic Profile

Gen Bikram Singh Has The Nation’s Best Wishes

The nation welcomes Gen Bikram Singh as Chief of Army Staff and wishes him all the best in the assignment to restore morale in the rank and file of the Army and get back its position as the 3rd best fighting force in the world. Gen V K Singh with his massive ego and psychological drawbacks had used the position as Chief of Army Staff to whitewash himself and blame the rest of the world for his insecurity with scant regard to the effect it would have on the Army. Gen Bikram Singh has to put all these issues behind him and move forward to evolve a better relationship with the Defence Minister, MoD and other branches of government. We are sure that he is up to the job and will show excellent results in a short frame of time.

Massive Coal Reserves Nullify Nuclear Power Need

Proven coal reserves in India are 118 billion tonnes which can be mined up to a depth of 1.2KM and which GSI has estimated that it will last India for another 200 years. While Kakodkar, the erstwhile head of India’s Atomic Energy establishment, has been plugging for India’s nuclear program by saying that our coal reserves will finish in another 50 years! This is clearly a case of massaging data statistics to suit one’s objectives like what is represented in the saying – Lies, Damn Lies & Statistics! The 118 billion tonnes is just the proven reserves while the estimated total reserves for coal are put at 293 billion tonnes. With such massive local coal availability we continue to import coking coal for our thermal power plant (TPP) and other industrial needs. Mind you this has gone on for the last 60 years or so without any serious large-scale effort made to process our domestically available coal to be suitable for our bulk users like TPP’s or approaching the problem from the other direction, to engineer our boilers to accept domestic coal. We have taken the easy way out and deliberately resorted to imports and made mostly the Australian mining Cos. richer. It is a comedy of errors that foreign mining Cos. like Broken Hill and Rio Tinto are coming into India to seek mining leases and may ultimately take over our coal mines and supply us our own coal which we have been chary of touching. Many a time over the last 40 years there have been plants set up to liquefy coal and convert it to fuel that would replace imports of fossil fuels like petroleum, furnace oil and the like. None of these in the early years could be accepted because of the cost difference of imports of fossil fuels and the expensive coal-to-oil process. But over the last 10 years or more with the petroleum prices hovering at US$100 a barrel and even touching at one time some 3 years ago US$150 a barrel, it was time to review these coal-to-oil projects and put them on the fast-track. However, from our governments which are perennially stuck in banality we have not seen any plans to use our coal either way, that is direct or through the coal-to-oil process.

Why Is Pakistan's Nuclear Program Ignored While Iran's Is In The Scope Sights

There has been news that Pakistan is putting on-stream its fourth nuclear reactor which considering the anarchic state of the country poses a big security risk not only to its neighbours like India but also to the rest of the world. This is something that the West particularly the US has been overlooking time and again. What needs to be done is to analyse this in perspective given the fact that almost every terror incident particularly in the West has had a Pakistani hand in it. Apart from that the obduracy shown by various incumbent regimes in Pakistan in not toeing the logical line for fighting terror and continuing to shelter as we had seen Osama Bin Laden & now the Taliban leaders like Mullah Omar and others, the continued interference in Afghanistan affairs by supporting the tribals linked with the Taliban operating out of Waziristan and the other North West Frontier provinces along with blackmail of the West in keeping open the overland transit routes to Afghanistan, shows Pakistan’s complicity in keeping the terror machine against the world alive and ticking. And to a nation like this the West not only continues to give aid but allows it to operate its nuclear program. This obviously should be clear and present danger to the world and in the target of the IAEA & other UN watchdog bodies. Iran in comparison is a future nuclear threat, if and when, it is able to process higher grade nuclear fuel and again, if and when, it can make a fissionable bomb. Thus the myopic approach of the US and the West is to ignore what is under their very nose and look askance at Iran’s nuclear program. This could be because as it was widely rumoured that the Pakistani nuclear weapons arsenal is under the control of the US, though the Pakistani establishment vehemently denies this fact, which if true can lead to India and the rest of the world heave a sigh of relief.

Media Should Expose Coal Scam

The easiest way to put something that is embarrassing to any incumbent government is to have a JPC constituted for it. Look at what has happened in the case of the JPC on the 2G scam, there is nary a murmur from it and with A Raja, named as the main perpetrator, out on bail and also attened Parliament just before the last session ended, we wonder whether anything will come out of the JPC except for a stale report which may not be worth reading. Since the 2G scam being so long in the media focus, the whole of India knows everything about it and there is no new light that the JPC can throw on the matter. Similar is the case on the CWG scam where all the accused including Suresh Kalmadi are out on bail and no status indicated on what is happening on the prosecution of the case. These comments are being made in the context of the coal allocation scam to the private sector being suggested for a JPC probe. Nothing will come out of it and it will just be taken off the public eye. Therefore it is time that the media got interested in it and exposed the actual facts to the citizens of India.

Mapping Gen V K Singh's Psychographic Profile

Gen V K Singh should have been sacked the day he moved against the government in the Supreme Court on his date of birth (DoB) issue. This was a clear case of indiscipline and going against the service rules. For lesser aberrations in the Army you would get courtmartialled and Gen Singh also would not have been averse to taking such kind of action against his juniors. The fact that the government had let Gen Singh off lightly has boosted his courage and if you his public statements since that time concluding with the latest interviews to some of the TV news channels he has been bad-mouthing everyone starting from his immediate junior officers, to the Defence Ministry, to the PMO, the Defence Minister. Why he has spared the PM is not understood? What he is saying is like a release from him at the end of his career and the disappointments he has had particularly at the fag end relating to the stirring up the muck on the DoB issue. But in trying to whitewash himself, he has been playing havoc with the institution that is the Army and its morale down to the serving jawans. By casting slander against his successors and at levels of Lt General, he is not exactly ensuring a smooth transition for the Army organization, which he claims he respects. In fact there is something wrong in Gen Singh’s psychological make-up which should have stopped him from holding any leadership position. Now that we have all been exposed to Gen Singh’s behaviour, the MoD and the three service arms of the armed forces – Army, Air Force and the Navy along with maybe the para-military and police set-ups should incorporate in their systems that all senior officers after a particular level should go through mapping of a psychographic profile to determine whether they are suitable to handle the pressures of their job and lead their men in times of adversity so that they do not get the nation into an unavoidable mess. On Gen Singh, he still got a farewell dinner from the PM in spite of his mal-utterances. One wonders, going by things whether Manmohan Singh lives at all in this country. You know the rarely seen, and even rarely heard syndrome!

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