VOX POPULI
by
S Kamat
as
Aam Admi
Issue: 196 Date: 10.04.2017
Contents:
1. Nitin Gadkari As A Peddler of Dreams
2. Rejecting EVM's Will Be A Retrograde Step &
Bring Down India's Image In The World
3. India Continues To Look For Hand-Me-Downs In
Nuclear Energy Which By Itself Is An Unnecessary Initiative
4. Handling The Aussies Better Steven Smith Et Al
Nitin Gadkari As A Peddler of Dreams
Nitin Gadkari should be re-designated as a peddler of dreams with
his latest proposal of installing a ropeway from Mormugao to Mopa with the
ostensible purpose of connecting Dabolim air passengers to Goa's latest
international airport which still remains in the draft stage and one never know
whether it will at all see the light of day. Gadkari by his very nature is
adept at flying kites to audiences which readily buys into his logic. In the
ropeway instance being up in the air, there is very much the possibility of flying
kites from the ropeway! One thing that Gadkari does not realise
is that Goa has recently seen the return of another 'peddler of
dreams' in the form of Manohar Parrikar. Gadkari himself had no little hand in
this event and was party in overturning the verdict of the people which had
given the larger number of seats to the Congress. Thus we have one too many of
the 'peddlers of dreams' for a small State like Goa whose people are
content and happy with their simple lives and do not dream much but to have
a life where their livelihood, ethos and culture is protected. Coming back to
the ropeway proposed by Gadkari, one wishes that some kind of a technical
feasibility was made before he went public with his idea. Simply put anything
up in the air will be costly than anything created on the ground like an
expressway and also by the forces of gravity there is every chance it
coming to the ground to face its hard reality or destiny, one can say. We will
all remember the celebrated Skybus project which Manohar Parrikar at that
time widely touted and the State Govt. went and funded the project mooted by
V Rajaram of the Konkan Railway Corporation. It did not take long for the
Skybus to come crashing down and for its infrastructure built near Madgaon
station to be ordered for demolition burning the Goa Govt. for its investment.
The reason for the failure of the Skybus project was that no
techno-economic feasibility by independent authorities was done. Similarly the
ropeway project from Mormugao to Mopa would fail on economic considerations
while another proposed ropeway project in Panjim to connect Campal to
Reis Magos will fail on safety considerations since the high winds particularly
during the monsoons will curtail its operations and it will become a fair weather
project. Yet another harebrained idea was mooted by Parrikar before he was
called up at the Centre was to make a tunnel to connect Verem to Candolim and
the beach belt that would run through a hill in the area which also has not
been tested for technical feasibility but clearly fails to put Goa on the
tourist map since where we should have our tourists seeing from the open
nature's bounty that has been bestowed on Goa, we burrow them underground maybe to be
buried in soft laterite stone like the many accidents that the Konkan
Railway Corporation has encountered in its many years of operation. Thus it is
recommended that in this modern day and age peddlers of dreams should at
least get past the first pass of technical and economic feasibility before they
announce their dreams to remain credible.
Rejecting EVM's Will Be A Retrograde Step &
Bring Down India's Image In The World
When Charan Singh became Prime Minister albeit for a short span of
time, a Union Budget was presented which touted the essential nature of the
bullock cart to the Indian economy and gave a benefit to those that fitted
rubber surrounds to the wooden bullock cart wheels and/or used rubber tyres
thus making the burden of the bullock lighter when it pulls the cart. This
measure was seen with great amusement in
both political and economic circles and it was widely commented that
Charan Sigh was leading India backwards to the bullock cart age. The same thing
is being done now by the 16 parties that met the Election Commission and
demanded that EVM's should not be used in any further elections more so in the
upcoming Delhi municipal elections and those in Gujarat shortly. As has been
said this demand is being made by the losers in the elections while neglecting
that some of their own candidates did win in the recent Assembly elections
including those held in Punjab and Uttar Pradesh and in fact technically
the BJP lost in both Goa and Manipur. Thus there seems to be no basis for this
short-sighted demand to withdraw the EVM's. The Election Commission has
clarified that the EVM's are not tamperable and considering that they do not
use any wireless technologies and are also not connected to the Internet there
is no possibility of the EVM's being hacked. This advice seems to have fallen
on deaf ears of those political parties who seem to
mistakenly believe that using the good old ballot paper will improve their
chances of winning the elections. These parties have also quoted that
Western countries 6 out of 8 have gone back to ballot papers after having tried
electronic voting. There is no merit in this claim since we have to assess what
we use rather than look for references of what others use and/or discard. The
truth of the matter is that electronic voting was tried out by several of the
Western countries based on
connected computer terminals which was susceptible to hacking and in some
countries the law necessitated that you should use ballot paper which legal
statute none of the political parties had deemed it necessary to be
amended before electronic voting was used. Thus electronic voting resulted in
an illegal election. The UN had recommended the use of EVM's in all elections
including its own internal elections after evaluating it but the Western
nations scuppered the chances of use of EVM's because it was not something
designed by them but by a country like India. At this instance the UN took the
path of least resistance and recommended its use for elections in the emerging
new democracies in Africa. Some of these countries even witnessed demonstrations
of the EVM's and tried them out. As late as end of March 2017 the Russian
government had evinced interest in EVM's which news was reported in the Indian
press. If EVM's are dispensed with in the upcoming elections then we will be
showing the limited mindset of our political class. We will also succumb
to goonda raj in our future elections and one will see widespread booth
capturing. Is this what the Opposition parties want? Do they want to prove that
their might is right which one predicts will end up as a bloody war and many
loss of lives in these times of explosive sentiments. Discarding the EVM
will be a retrograde step which is a proven technology and truly Indian. If accepted this measure
will take India back to the Dark
Ages a la Charan Singh who at least was not very wrong with bullock
carts considering that 70% of India still lives in the rural areas and the
bullock cart remains the vehicle
of choice of transporting at least goods in our villages.
India Continues To Look For Hand-Me-Downs In
Nuclear Energy Which By Itself Is An Unnecessary Initiative
News coming out of the US is that the nuclear
energy industry giant, Westinghouse is the latest to file for bankruptcy
proceedings considering that this sector has been seeing massive setbacks with
major projects mostly in the American South going into huge overruns running
into billions of dollars and negative public sentiment about nuclear
projects in the US with the background of accidents at Three Mile Island,
Fukushima and Chernobyl. India's nuclear energy plans are linked with all the
countries in which the above named places are located. The first being the US with whom the Indo-US
Nuclear treaty is in limbo in which uncertain scenario the US government has
been trying to push the Westinghouse reactors into India for its nuclear
energy program possibly to save the Co. from shutting down completely. Westinghouse
being a Toshiba Co., Japan is involved in the deal and their Prime Minister
during his last visit to India was making the right noises to push the business
through. Even in Japan as a consequence of the Fukushima disaster where leaks
have been reported as late as last month and with concerns of resettlement of
people in the vicinity still dominating the public dialogue there is widespread
public resentment towards the deploying of any more nuclear reactors. In
summary what the US and Japan are doing is just as in the colonial days and
thereafter also in the name of free trade, they are trying to dump the risky
and unsafe reactors in India by Cos. which will be going out of business. India would then be saddled holding the sack
of outdated and faulty equipment. As for Russia, we all know that equipment
coming from that country which India has used in the steel industry and also nuclear
energy are not technologically of the same class as the West but are sturdy and
functional to perform to desired levels of operational efficiency. Even in
terms of economic assessment of performance, the Russians are proven at the
800MW capacity reactors while the other vendors have moved up in excess of
1000MW and some to 1600/1700MW. This has a direct relationship to the unit rate
for the power tariff, the larger reactors being able to give a lower rate. Thus
the Russians are delivering a category of reactor which is somewhat behind that
of the West in technology terms but gives no improved guarantee of safe
operation. We also need to remember that Chernobyl remains the most grievous
nuclear accident in the history of nuclear energy and what is more important is
that Russia is not deploying any more new reactors in their own country but is
concentrating on export to countries like India. Thus the Russian approach is
no different of sending out their reactors for trial to India and others and
then maybe consider using them in their own country. Looking at these scenarios
of nuclear energy worldwide where there is a definite aversion in terms of use
of this form of energy why India should go in for it is something that needs to
be explained clearly by our government. We have the third largest reserves of
coal in the world which may be having a large ash content but we can still burn
this to generate electricity in the modern plants available today which have
the ability to use it and also limit environmental pollution. Then we are a
sunshine rich country and with the prices of solar power should we not consider
using that for our power needs. Again wind power is fast becoming popular with
unit costs of generation dropping and with our vast coastline and hilly terrain
we have the potential to generate huge amounts of wind power, another safe and
clean option for generating electricity. When all this is available our
government continues to hanker for nuclear energy where again we have to import
a large part of the fuel since domestic production is minimal and we have the
added policy constraint of signing up for the NPT (Nuclear Proliferation
Treaty) without which the fuel will not be supplied to Indi and neither would
India be accepted as a member of the NSG (Nuclear Suppliers Group). The moral
of the story is simple. Use your own and become independent in terms of energy
security with a similar or lower carbon footprint rather than beg others for
things that you do not possess making
your own energy security uncertain and fragile.
Handling The Aussies Better Steven Smith Et Al
The war of words between Virat Kohli and the
Australian cricket establishment including the sports scribes from there seems just
after the India – Australia series seemed to show no signs of ending. We had
the Aussie ex-cricketers and coaches joining in with Mark Taylor, Dean Jones
and David Lloyd pitching in with
their two bits of advice to Kohli which was quite unnecessary. The problem with
all 'ex's' is the need to remain in the news and that is possibly why this trio
had weighed in on the issue. We in India never learn how to tackle the
Western community in terms of a public relations exercise. We should have
handled the Steven Smith incident of looking at the pavilion for advice prior
to a DRS referral purely on factual evidence and not fallen for the 'brain
fade' claim by Smith. Further BCCI after having filed a complaint with the ICC,
there was no need to withdraw the same after a meeting with the CA CEO
Sutherland and that too without the presence of both the captains involved in
the incident. We need to understand that the West in the first instance tries
to defuse a situation more so when they are in the wrong and makes sure that
there no legal loose ends remaining. That is why the charm offensive against
the BCCI to withdraw the complaint which trap our one-legged BCCI, these days,
fell for. Hardly had this meeting got over and on the very next day Sutherland
started picking on Kohli once again. Additionally we again fell for Smith's
ploy in apologising for his conduct in the series at the last press conference
and an unconditional pardon was given to him by all including by even the redoubtable
and plain-speaking Sunil Gavaskar who is no great fan of the Aussies having
once threatened to walk out of a Test match Down Under. It must have been the
euphoria of winning the Test series and India having regained the No. 1 spot in
Test cricket. And what do the Aussies do, instead of being gracious have their
ex-cricketers and their press call our captain Kohli names! It is time we
understood how to handle these countries like Australia and England on any
matter and also on the playing field is that to stick to the letter and spirit
of the law and the rules of the game and ask for a fair judgment. Otherwise
they will continue to slander and make our players like Kohli the 'bad guy'
while actually the offender was Steven Smith who has got off on the 'brain
fade' ploy and a faceless apology which conduct is a shame for a 26-27 year old
adult.
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