VOX POPULI

by

Aam Admi

Issue:125

Date: 11.08.2012

Contents:

1. The Recent Electrical Grid Failure & The Way Forward

2. Casino Revenue To Support Humanitarian Causes!

3. A Little Balance, Please!

4. The Problem Is Not With The Intent, But With The Implementation

5. Managing Poverty Numbers To Make The NAC & Sonia Gandhi Look Good

The Recent Electrical Grid Failure & The Way Forward‏

The recent electrical grid failures covering the North, East and North-East impacting some 600 million people for a minimum of 12 hours has generated a lot of debate on the revenue model of the electricity generating utilities and the need for increasing tariff levels. The failures have been attributed apart from excess drawal by States like Uttar Pradesh on that fateful day on the fact that essential equipment for containing the spread of the grid failures was not in place and that maintenance of existing equipment had been curtailed because of budgetory issues. It has been widely touted that the solution is to raise tariff levels in a cascading manner so that the end customer is finally overburdened. It is not that the existing electricity utilities are not increasing tariffs which they are as one would notice over the last few months in Delhi and many places across India supported by the Electricity Tariff Commissions in the respective States. But in all this surprisingly no one is talking of efficient management and optimal deployment of resources. Increasing tariffs is not the be-all and end-all solution to the electricity outages that are faced across India more so in our rural areas. There is also no talk of trying to curb our transmission and distribution losses which are close to 40 - 50% of our total generation and power stolen through illegal connections with the connivance and patronage of our politicians. If we are able to manage these matters then the power situation in India will see a dramatic change what with the addition of some 55,000MW of power in the last few years. Better management is suggested since there was a report that due to faulty equipment supplied from China some 40,000MW has remained idle for extended periods of time. Why we should source sub-standard industrial equipment from China on count of low prices alone is something that is not understood and given our inimical relationship with them and purely on strategic grounds we should not source any critical equipment from a not so friendly neighbour. After the massive grid failure we have had all kinds of experts telling us what we should have done and what we should do among them some foreign. It is all right to listen to everyone but we should at the end find our own solutions to our own problems that comes out of our own thinking since that is what will stand to our own good in the long run. The fact of the matter is that the grid failures happened mostly because with the threat of a deficient monsoon in the North and North-West India all the farmers in the region connected their pumpsets to the nearest power line resulting in the serial tripping of the grid. It is a shame, is it not that 65 years of Independence our agriculture is still dependent on a favourable monsoon. So much for being a technological literate nation.

Casino Revenue To Support Humanitarian Causes!

The logic for justifying the casinos in Goa is getting curiouser and curiouser. The last in this series of laughable ploys is that the revenue to the government from the casinos will be used for humanitarian causes like funding the Provedaria, setting up centres for the treatment of the old and those suffering from Alzheimer's disease etc. One has heard of raffles and lotteries used for generating revenue for such causes but licencing casinos must be the first in the world and for that we have to give the credit to Manohar Parrikar, Chief Minister of Goa! One does not understand why someone has to think that he can fool the people all the time and not most of the time. By any yardstick and mostly on counts of practical common sense, his above logic falls flat. Take for example that you have a woman involved in prostitution in your locality who also happens to run an orphanage. Would the society and the locality allow her to continue her business because she is using her earnings for a good cause! Since if she is allowed to continue she would have polluted every adult male in the locality. The casino issue is one of morality and whether a society should live of its licentious earnings. All the measures announced in the Assembly session on managing casinos, however brilliant and innovative they may be, are quite unnecessary since the basic premise of having gambling and casinos in our society is wrong. Therefore there is no question of managing it but only of shutting them down. The effort that the CM and the government puts in managing the casinos can be better used elsewhere once they are closed. Much has been made of jobs being generated for Goans from the casinos which in any case is a small proportion from the total employment by this business and at some 2500 persons is less than the number of lives it destroys by addiction to gambling. Unfortunately the number of families turned destitute by the casino business is not being highlighted in any of the statistics generated by the government or other agencies. The other aspect that has come to the fore after the recent Kanda case who is the owner of the Casino Rio is that the ship is moored in the Mandovi without any clearances from the DG, Shipping for being sea-worthy. Thus are the rivers of Goa to be used by outsiders to park their junk casino ships on one pretext or other and block navigation and create congestion for our fishing trawlers and cruise ships that support livelihood and healthy tourism respectively. At this rate the beautiful Mandovi will end up as a graveyard for dead ships. Therefore let us stop beating about the bush on the casino issue and close them down once and for all in Goa.

A Little Balance, Please!

In the shooting incident at the gurdwara in the US recently the number of dead were 6 while the number of dead in the riots in Kokrajhar, Assam have reached 73 but if you look at the media coverage for the incidents, it is disproportionately in favour of the US incident. This includes the reactions from our government and our Prime Minister who happens to be a Sikh while he also represents the State of Assam in the Rajya Sabha. Is it that it is more grievous when someone dies in a foreign country from incidents of terror or communal strife rather than in our own country. We have seen this unbalanced reaction from Western countries where when a few tens of people die in a terror attack a big issue is made out of it, candle light vigils are held thereafter and commemoration of the attack in memory of the victims are organised while hundreds of people are dying almost every day in one or the other country in the Third World from bomb attacks etc. and it is very rare that one sees any concrete step taken to sympathise with the victims except the standard statements which are issued. We also seem to be following the same tack. A life lost in the US or in India should be the same. Like we discriminate against each other in life in India, have we come to a pass where we tend to discriminate in death also. Someone said that on the gurdwara shoot-out the amount Manmohan Singh spoke is much more than he has ever spoken in the two terms that he has held as PM except for maybe when he is holding his press conferences on board aircraft while going or coming back from a visit abroad.

The Problem Is Not With The Intent, But With The Implementation

The CCTV's installed on Junglee Maharaj Road in Pune where we had the latest bomb blasts were not working as reported in the media. In the same manner the CCTV on the Worli Sealink, a very prominent and prestigious structure and therefore a target for terrorists, was also not working to record the suicide of the businessman Sheth involved in the travel business. In the same way for all the lipservice paid in sympathy to the victims of the 26/11 terror incident in Mumbai and the mobilisation to improve preparedness against terror attacks, it was found that after the last attack in Mumbai a couple of months ago that nothing had been done on CCTV and also on buying bullet proof vests for our police personnel which was a hot topic when senior police officer Karkare was shot dead pointblank by the terrorists. Thus the issue is not of intent but implementation. The politicians and the authorities will all make the right noises just after the incidents of terror as in the German Bakery case in Pune and the recent one but a few months down the road, operating on the premise that public memory is short, nothing will be done until the next incident. Thus all this talk that CCTV's costing some Rs. 30 crores will be installed in Pune by the Maharasthra Dy CM Ajit Pawar and the Home Minister, R R Patil are to be taken with a large 'dose' of salt since even if the cameras are installed, the politicians and authorities would have extracted their pound of flesh from the purchases which will be part of the reason why the systems will never be working since the contracts would be placed not based on professional considerations but on the convenience and the ability to pay? The problem is that in India life is cheap and the establishment care two hoots for the aam admi since they know that irrespective of what happens they can fob off the public by donating a few lakhs for those killed and shirk their primary responsibility. It is time we changed this attitude and got things work better so that our society is safe and secure from dangers thrust upon it.

Managing Poverty Numbers To Make The NAC & Sonia Gandhi Look Good

The NSS survey on poverty released recently which says that the poorest in India in the villages live at about Rs.17 a day and in the cities at about Rs23.50 a day is a deliberate ploy to further lower the Planing Commission estimates of around Rs. 22 and Rs.29 respectively. This is being done to set poverty levels for those who would be eligible for government benefits under its various schemes. The lower you set the threshold levels for defining poverty the lesser will be the number of those who are poor. This is how the poverty numbers are managed to fit the NAC guidelines on the Food Security Bill so that it becomes affordable which otherwise has been criticized on two counts, first that in the long-term and during monsoon failures there would not be enough food to meet the requirements and secondly, that the government would have to fund the difference given the high MSP’s and the subsidized lower prices that the food would have to be given to the poor. In these times of criticism of subsidies and growth problems resulting in lower revenue these resources would be difficult to find if 55% of the rural poor and 50% of the urban poor are to be included under the Food Security Bill. Therefore manage the numbers of the poor so that both these problems of availability and funding are tackled by artificially defining them in the NSS survey as above. Thus the objective is not to feed the poor and alleviate their suffering but to prove that the thinking of the NAC is right led by the redoubtable Sonia Gandhi whose image will be automatically enhanced. These are the unfortunate circumstances that this country has fallen into.

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