Daily Excelsior... Editorial

EDITORIAL

By Vinod Vedi

The Mumbai blasts have demonstrated that those entrusted with the job of ensuring security have failed to prevent the preventable. It was not a failure of intelligence, as argued in many quarters but a failure of those who are supposed to provide leadership and direction. Unless we make them accountable these disasters will continue to happen and what is being dished out by Railway Minister Lalu Prasad Yadav as fail-safe security for railway property and passengers....more

VP Singh and his politics

By Kedar Nath Pandey

The Mandal messiah Vishwanath Pratap Singh is trying a second coming. His moribund political outfit Jan Morcha has roped in filmstar-MP-cum-SP-rebel Raj Babbar as its public face, the question now is: can the Jan Morcha chip away a section of votes in the UP poll slated for February 2007? "Come on, everything's changed now", protests Vishwanath Pratap Singh. "After I have written my own .......more

Give fertilizer subsidy to farmers directly

By Dr Bharat Jhunjhunwala

The Government is providing huge subsidies to the manufacturers of fertilizers, especially urea. Many of these companies are inefficient. According to a document of the Finance Ministry . . ....more

EDITORIAL

Too obvious

The report of an attempt by militants to blow up a Sufi shrine in Poonch district on Wednesday is bound to cause concern everywhere. It is in line with their wicked objective to create communal divide. By now they have adopted this strategy too often. Every time they have failed they have become more desperate. They have hardly spared any top place of worship in the country. There is a long list of religious centres they have defiled. Akshardham in Ahmedabad, Kashi-Vishwanath in Varanasi and Jama Masjid in the national capital all figure in their blood-stained catalogue. In the State too they have been virtually run amok on more than one occasion. In the Valley they have ruthlessly targetted Charar-e-Sharif and violated the sanctity of Hazratbal. They had succeeded in converting the Raghunath Temple complex in this city into a battlefield at least for some time. Khatiqan Talab mosque has been witness to the unprovoked killing of people offering prayers. They have gunned down devotees while they were bowing their heads in reverence to the Almighty. A measure of their sense of adventurism is that they have even nursed the thought of corrupting the environs of holy caves of Vaishno Devi and Amarnath. If one recalls they had begun their evil pursuit by throwing bombs on spiritual congregations outside temples and mosques. Their nefarious approach did not work. As a result they turned more fanatic and forced their way into sanctum sanctorum. Since they claimed to operate in the name of one particular religion everyone felt that they would at least be sympathetic towards the symbols of their faith. All such ideas turned out to be totally misplaced. They had no such conviction and consideration. Their murderous spree transcended religious barriers. It continues to be so even today. There is one difference though. First, they were confident. Now, they are wailing and gnashing their teeth in sheer disappointment.

Clearly the agents of murder and mischief have underestimated the inherent strength of secular fabric of open and liberal societies. Instead, they seem to revel in the experience of their counterparts in theocratic countries like Iran and Pakistan where they have thrived. It is strange and ironical. Brutality in mosques in self-professed Islamic nations has been without fail followed by an inflammatory impact. It has resulted in serious sectarian clashes and triggered deep-rooted mistrust. By and large this is an inexplicable phenomenon. Why should the people belonging to the same creed be taken in by a few hooligans among them? There can't be two opinions that the terrorists have managed to cause cleavage in supposedly well-knit environs. This has obviously emboldened them. They think that they can do even better in multi-ethnic, multi-lingual and multi-religion countries like ours.

Apparently what they don't appear to realise that the people at large have seen through their filthy game. However, there is no ground for complacency on our part yet. To the contrary there is need for persisting with all-round vigilance. It is evident that the terror machine is unsparing in its deadly chase. It keeps manufacturing one provocative ploy after the other. Scriptures are torn apart. Belief is misinterpreted. Blasts are engineered. The faithful are deprived of their lives. These are all mischievous occurrences. We can answer them by standing firm as we have done so far.

Stok Palace

Tucked below the Stok glacier across the Indus at the outskirts of Leh town is a palace of the same name. The 1822-made, four-storey, 77-room marvel glistens in sunshine like a white gem studded with ruby diamonds. Several artifacts kept in a richly endowed museum inside the fort reveal the idyllic past of Ladakh. These also speak of the glory of Buddhism that has remained in tact only in this part of the State. At one time, as all of us are aware, Kashmir was a bastion of Buddhism. Gradually, however, the Valley had turned to Islam in a peaceful transition. Some signs of the Buddhist link between the Valley and Ladakh can be seen even today. There are ancient murals at the globally famous Alchi monastery drawn by Kashmiri artists. Developed sculptural art of the Valley has left a discernible impact on rock sculptures of Mulbek and elsewhere in Ladakh, and in some of the Ladakhi Buddhist bronzes. Likewise, the Valley bears an imprint of these ties. There are stated to be Buddhist sculptures in Kashmir dating fifth century onwards. Historians have recorded that with Kashmir ceasing to be a Buddhist centre the people of Ladakh had turned towards Tibet for spiritual and cultural inspiration. The first king of Ladakh, Skit-lde-Nyima-mgon, had come from central Tibet. Way back in 925 he had formed a separate kingdom which remained independent for more than nine centuries till General Zorawar Singh conquered it on behalf of Maharaja Gulab Singh. King Tsepal Tundup Namgyal (1790-1830) was deposed by Zorawar Singh and forced to leave his nine-storey palace in Leh to the village of Stok where a palace had been built in 1922. He was given Stok village as a jagir. Since then it has been the residence of the royal Namgyal dynasty. Its current generation has adjusted itself remarkably well with the changed times. Rani Parvati Devi (real name Gyalmo Disket Wangmo), who presently heads the erstwhile princely family, became a Member of Parliament in 1977. Her elder 40-year old son, Jigmed Wangchuk Namgyal, enjoys a pre-eminent position in public functions highly regarded especially in rural areas. He and his wife Spalzes Angmo (Nubra Kalon family) run Leh's only non-governmental organisation dedicated to mentally and physically challenged. Mr Thupstan Chhewang, Lok Sabha member from Ladakh, is married to Rani Parvati's eldest child Sarla Chhewang (known as Jigmet Angmo on the home turf), a top social activist. Rani Parvati's other two children --- younger son Karma Konchok Namgyal and daughter Rinchen Angmo --- assist family members in Delhi-based Namgyal Institute on Research in Ladakhi Arts and Culture. Another key family functionary is Raja Thinles Namgyal, younger brother of the Rani's late husband Raja Kunzang Namgyal. He is the manager and personal representative of Hemis Gompa's Head Lama Stagtsang Raspa who is in Tibet.

The Palace museum gives a definite picture of ethnic unity of the remote region. It has two Baltistan necklaces belonging to Queen Gyal Khatoon, mother of formidable 17th century ruler Senge Namgyal. The Queen had retained her Shia sect even after her wedding. The museum has several other valuable features like imperial robes, stuffed animals of Ladakh and more than 30 Thankas typical of Buddhism. It takes visitors to a hoary age crucial for the complete understanding of Ladakh.

Murder in Mumbai

By Vinod Vedi

Unless we make them accountable these disasters will continue to happen and what is being dished out by Railway Minister Lalu Prasad Yadav as fail-safe security for railway property and passengers needs to be examined with a critical eye because whoever has formulated the supposed upgradation is leading the nation up the garden path. The promise that more metal detectors will be set up at all railway stations is the kind of placebo that will lull us into complacency once again. Metal detectors cannot detect explosives. Only properly trained sniffer dogs can. That too cost effectively. The minister did mention that the number of sniffer dogs would be increased to handle this task but he was economical on details, as usual.

The entire security apparatus, be it the military, the paramilitary and the police has been extremely reluctant to make use of sniffer dogs in sufficient numbers. The ratio between the number of dogs and vital installations -the borders, military cantonments, railway stations, airports, VVIP residences and offices, bridges, and what has only just been added as a possible target for terrorists, waterworks -is abysmally inadequate.

There are reports that India-Pak bhai-bhai has induced so much euphoria that the patrolling pattern along the international border and the Line of Control has slackened giving the terrorists plenty of opportunity to fling one-kg packets of explosives and drugs over the barbed wire fence. These eventually find their way as deep as Aurangabad, Ayodhya and Akshardham.

The absence of closed circuit television cameras (CCTV) in marketplaces and crowded localities is due to the morbid fear among security personnel, particularly the police, that their attempts at extortion and collusion in smuggling and other anti-social activities will be caught on camera. In any case a CCTV surveillance system usually ends up as being more useful for post-mortem investigation than prevention of crime largely because the personnel manning the surveillance stations do not have an adequate database to initiate an interception before the crime is committed.

In the case of the Mumbai local train services the close-packed nature of the crowd will itself be a major challenge to the method of deployment of both sniffer dogs and CCTV. The many entrances, which perforce are the first line of defence, will demand that the dog will have an adequate opportunity to get a sniff at every passenger entering the premises because it is impossible to detect anything once the passengers squeeze into the compartments. Therefore, the numbers of dogs per station will depend on the number of entrances multiplied by the attention span of the dog and the tenure of its endurance. Three hours of sustained duty will be extremely taxing on the animal.

Metal detectors do have a place in the scheme of things particularly because hand grenades have become the weapon of choice for the Pakistani trained terrorist mainly because it is easy to conceal and throw into crowded areas and achieve maximum damage. However, the manner in which they are deployed leaves much to be desired. The one in Paharganj ( close to the New Delhi railway station), the scene of a bombing last year, is useless because the crowd is allowed to walk away from the side and rickshaws, scooters, bicycles and cars just scoot past without being scanned.

Only after the Mumbai blasts security experts are also talking of likely threats to airports as well. The major threat to an aircraft is when it is taking off and landing; Delhi airport which hosts the VVIP bay has acquired greater vulnerability by the publication by Google.com of aerial photographs of the complex of buildings.

There has to be better utilization of manpower in the security services. There is a tendency to bunch a large number of armed personnel which does not make for optimum utilization of a resource critical to counter-terrorism which is a manpower-intensive activity. The sight of four or five constables walking down the platform is neither a deterrent to any terrorist nor does it inspire confidence among the passengers because one is never sure if they know what to look for. One thing is for sure they cannot either singly or collectively sniff out the presence of explosives.

Thus, what is required is a proper mix of manpower, dog squads, metal detectors, and CCTVs before a viable deterrent to a terrorist attack can be put in place at any given vital point. Above all there must be adequate synergy between security forces inside a complex and personnel posted outside. This micro level of synergy in security deployment must be the focus of attention. Sadly it is missing at present.

The serial bombings in Jammu and Kashmir and Mumbai have shown that there is need for a well-networked security apparatus at the national level. Unfortunately, turf wars and jurisdictional contradictions tend to sap the efficiency of whatever is already in place. Forget about learning lessons from the hard experience of the Khalistani terrorism in Punjab in the 80s and the insurgencies in the north-east, what is baffling is the failure of the mandarins to at least read the Kargil Review Committee report which spelt out the road map on the strengthening of internal security at the grassroots level. The blasts in Delhi last year and now in Mumbai show that we have not learned a thing. (Syndicate Features)

VP Singh and his politics

By Kedar Nath Pandey

"Come on, everything's changed now", protests Vishwanath Pratap Singh. "After I have written my own political obituary, what's the point of discussing strategy?" Has he really? A lot of people aren't convinced. Because the phone rarely stops ringing. Because the day's visitors' register team with names. And because the Raja no longer needs the keys to the kingdom - he has found a secret passage that guarantees as much access.

It is clear he will never rule again. But this man can never be entirely written off: he is likely to help pick the winners in electoral battles to come. After all, he's managed to bag his prize all his life, sometimes through his abilities - and sometimes through sheer luck.

"Did you know I once shot a tiger with just a 12-bore when I was in high school?" asks Singh. "My brothers were supposed to bag it - they had proper hunting rifles - and both missed. So there was this tiger hurtling towards our machan. My 12-bore was loaded with 'lethal ball', a plain cartridge tipped with a solid lead round. But it dropped the cat in is tracks, piercing the soft tissue above the left collar-bone, and then passing through the lung and heart. Lucky he was barrelling in head-on, or the round have just bounced off his side. It was a great hunt."

Yet, V.P. Singh has faltered after the kill equally often. The Raja goes back even further in time, to when he was 11 and staying at Varanasi with an appointed guardian. He had shot a bird in the driveway with his air-gun when the gentleman was away, sighted him returning and stuffed the bloody evidence of his crime into the letter-box. "The servants had told me that when the postman put a letter in there, it travelled under the ground, into the house and to the person it was intended for," says Singh. "I believed them and thought the system would work for dead birds too. Next morning, the mail was in a mess and I was caught." He wriggled out of that one because of his 'little boy lost' looks, which often make him, seem more the injured party than the offender.

Singh's image will always feature this strange mix. He takes on foes twice his size with no firepower beyond the courage of his convictions. If he fails, he can effortlessly metamorphose into the hapless youth who didn't know better but had his heart in the right place, beating for all the right things. If that doesn't remedy the situation, he still comes up trumps - by cashing out of the game. The Indian electorate has always been a sucker for the act of renunciation, and Singh has been beefing up his resignation act right from the age of 16, when he was a student at Varanasi's UP College.

"I was a prefect there when student body elections were held for the first time," he recalls. "The head prefect called us together and announced his candidature. Naturally, we would support him. But then he said that the principal was also backing him." Singh took serious exception to that! "What was the head of an institution doing in student politics? I resigned my prefectship immediately." The rest of the story portends Singh's rise to the PMO decades later. "Then the students wanted me to represent them. I refused, but stood as an independent candidate, won the election and framed the student union's constitution. It's still in force."

The Fairfax affair also manifested itself in embryo at the same college, the event triggered by the principal who had promised to back the head prefect. "I had to prepare for an inter-college debate and skipped two of the principal's poetry classes," recalls Singh. "I won the trophy for the institution but the next day, the principal harangued me for missing class without permission." Singh had to tender a written apology. "Then, years later, there was Fairfax," he says. "Some parameters: me acting in the larger interest, delivering the goods, and then authority asking that old, familiar question: 'Did you take permission?' It'll keep cropping up."

"Look, life isn't driven by logic," he continues, "though people like to believe it is. They think in straight lines. And when one straight line goes forth expecting to meet another and finds it isn't there, some degree of misunderstanding is inevitable. I've always worked outside the normal political format." On the other hand, Singh does admit that "there has always been something odd" about him.

With a childhood as unsettled as his, it comes as no surprise. After the age of six - which, incidentally, is when he fired a gun for the first time-Singh changed parents, guardians and addresses with alarming regularity? First, he was adopted by the Raja of Manda, the princely state adjacent to Dhaiya (Allahabad district), where he was born to the royal family.

"They cut me off totally from my natural family," he recalls without rancour. "They wanted all emotional ties to die out. My mother wasn't even allowed to see me from a distance." Then his adoptive father contracted tuberculosis and the child had to be kept away from him. He was sent to live with Amar Singh, the manager of the estate who was on loan from the government.

But the arrangement did not last. When Singh was 10, his adoptive father passed away. His will nominated Amar Singh as the legal guardian of the child, but his natural parents decided to contest it. "The pressure got too much for Amar Singh when my father got the government to recall him to service," says Singh.

The next day, the Raja of Dhaiya was in Amar Singh's drawing room, waiting to take the child back. "I was crying," says Singh. "By that time, I remembered nothing of Dhaiya. I clung to the arm of a chair to stop them taking me away. But they just picked me up and bundled me off in the car." Singh was not to see his guardian's family until he was in college, when he got their address in Delhi from the invitation card to a wedding in the family.

Later, when Singh was chief minister of UP, his brother was shot dead by dacoits while out on shikar near Allahabad. Singh was rounding off a massive statewide operation against dacoit gangs. "He still insisted on taking my punishment," says Singh. "Even when I was grown up and a chief minister."

Despite reminder of his confused past, however, Singh was beginning to lead a normal life for the first time at Allahabad's Dhaiya House. Like any self-respecting princeling of the forties, he was developing his shooting skills. At the age of 12, he bagged his first panther in the Rewa forests. And prevailed upon his father, in an indulgent mood, to give him some heavy artillery. He got the gun that won the West: "My elder brother had a Winchester 44 - lever action and 14 rounds in the magazine. I had really coveted it."

Married by now, he wasn't being the model father either. With his second child on its way - and just about a decade after he took his law degree, he took a snap decision to study science while flipping through a physics text. He did the two-year intermediate course in six months at Allahabad University and moved to Pune for a bachelor's degree. "Allahabad had social expectations," he says. "People gave me thee strange looks when I said I was studying in my thirties."

"I'd never been interested in politics," he says. "It all began with a very commonplace situation. The road through Manda was in miserable repair and buses were refusing to ply on it. I got the community involved and in 15 days, we had everything done except laying the macadam. And there was no chance of getting a roadroller. We had lost the game: any two-bit politician could have got the whole thing done by using the phone."

Now, Singh, who will be 75 in August 2006, may not have lost the game, but he has to sit out a round. He is no longer electorate friendly: the Mandal episode showed that while he may really feel for the disadvantaged, his politics is driven by more down to earth concerns. But he remains at the centre of the web that central politics has become, and will influence the fortunes of today's major players from the sidelines.

He has a little more time for his hobbies - photography, painting and Hindi Poetry. In 1994 he had gone to London and New York, where he was diagnosed with multiple myeloma, a cancer that has affected his blood cells. He put the long hours spent waiting for the news to good use, turning his old Nikon F2 on whatever caught his fancy-floral studies, the fluid, distorted reflection of the cityscape on the glass frontages at the UN Plaza in New York, a bushy little squirrel in a London park.

That squirrel has also started Singh on sketching in Chinese ink he's put together a small portfolio featuring the animal. Painting, however, is on the back burner. Everything on the walls of the drawing room is old, including the talking point: an excellent oil-on-canvas study of his niece in monochrome.

But the bulk of his day is still spent meeting people - though it isn't exactly wheeling and dealing. But that's precisely how Singh seems to be trying to position himself right now, as a sort of political consultant. He'll be helping the political process along and nudging in into channels that are beneficial to him at the same time. The idea, it appears, is that he will not have to go to the people. They'll be coming to him. INAV

Give fertilizer subsidy to farmers directly

By Dr Bharat Jhunjhunwala

The Government is providing huge subsidies to the manufacturers of fertilizers, especially urea. Many of these companies are inefficient. According to a document of the Finance Ministry (http://finmin.nic.in/downloads/reports/cgsi-2004.pdf) only 46% of the amount was reaching the farmers in 1999-2000. The balance 54% was subsidizing inefficient producers. The situation may have improved somewhat after the implementation of New Pricing Scheme for urea but the basic anomaly of providing subsidy to producers rather than consumers remains. Second problem is that the farmer must have access to other complementary inputs, particularly irrigation, in order to buy the subsidized fertilizers. These inputs are available mostly with rich farmers. Thus the benefit of this subsidy accrues to rich farmers.

The Government had constituted a Committee under the Chair of Dr Y K Alagh to study this issue. Among the suggestions made by Alagh, one was to give fertilizer subsidy to the farmers directly in three districts on experimental basis. The Standing Committee on Chemicals & Fertilizers in its Ninth Report for 2005-06 also suggested giving "direct payment of subsidy to the farmers." The fertilizer companies are opposing this move which is understandable. They stand to loose the subsidies being got by inefficient producers. But it is surprising that the Government has also dismissed this proposal on the grounds of administrative impracticability.

At the outset it may be pointed out that the United States runs a system of giving direct subsidies to its farmers for many decades. Indian leaders are ever willing to emulate that country in matters such as patents laws, free trade and human rights. Then why not follow that same country where direct subsidies are concerned?

That said let us examine the objections to the scheme by the Government. The proposal is that farmer first purchases the fertilizer thereafter approach the designated authority with proof of purchase and claim subsidy thereon. This system is indeed cumbersome. A much simpler alternative would be to give the average entitlement of subsidy to every farmer irrespective of his use of fertilizers. The total consumption of fertilizers in a district divided by the cultivated land area gives the average use of fertilizer per acre. Say this comes to 50 kg per acre. Further assume the government is presently giving a subsidy of Rs 2 per kg. The entitlement of subsidy then is Rs 100 per acre. This amount can be sent to all farmers by registered post by cheque or tradable coupons. The farmer can purchase fertilizer against the coupon from open market at commercial rates and use coupons to pay for the same. The seller can claim the value of the coupon from the government. This scheme is administratively practicable.

The first objection to the giving of subsidy directly to the farmer is identification of the farmer and establishing that he has actually purchased the fertilizers. These problems do not arise in the alternative scheme. All farmers may be given the coupons irrespective of whether they use fertilizers or not. It is likely that some farmers will sell the coupons to other farmers or to traders. But that will not reduce the use of fertilizers. Another person will purchase and use that fertilizer. The trader too will have to sell the fertilizer to claim reimbursement of the coupon. The farmer should be given the freedom to either buy fertilizers with the coupons to encash them because the total consumption of fertilizers remains unchanged. The gain is that the government is freed from giving subsidies to manufacturers. Secondly, fertilizer will be sold in the market at the commercial rate. This will cause the farmers to use Nitrogen, Phosphates and Potash in tune with their market prices. Presently farmers are using excess Nitrogen because that is heavily subsidized.

Another second objection is that the farmer can divert the subsidy for purposes such as marriages etc. This will lead to less use of fertilizers and lower food grain production. There is merit to the argument. But diversion of subsidy by one farmer will not make any difference. The farmer who purchases the coupon will use the same fertilizer. The total consumption of fertilizer will remain as previously. Only it may be applied by farmer 'B' instead of farmer 'A'.

Moreover, the problem of food security is related more to the price of food grains and less to the price of fertilizers. The farmer will produce more food grains if the price is high. But the Government is importing food grains to lower domestic prices and less production. At the same time government is giving subsidy on fertilizers to ensure high production. The Government must remove this contradiction in its policies. Imports must be restricted and domestic prices allowed to rise if food grain production is to be increased. There is no need to adopt the circuitous route of giving subsidy on fertilizers for a job than can be done easily by price management.

The main benefits of this scheme are (1) The use of fertilizer will be in relation to its real commercial price and lead to efficient allocation of the nation's resources; (2) Subsidy will reach the farmer rather than be appropriated by inefficient manufacturers; (3) Farmers will not be agitated by the high market prices of fertilizers because they are getting coupons; and (4) Government will make 54 percent savings instantly. It will be necessary for the government to distribute coupons of 46 percent of the present level of subsidy since that is what the farmers are receiving.

A more important issue is whether we must give subsidy on chemical fertilizers or on straw and green manures. The government could provide subsidy on imports of straw so that the production of farmyard manure increases. Likewise subsidy can be provided on cultivation of green manures. May reports are available which indicate that the use of chemical fertilizers in the advanced regions of the country has exceeded the optimal levels. Farmers are using higher levels of fertilizers but the production is stagnant because the ability of the soil to absorb the fertilizers and provide it to the plants is being eroded in absence of organic matter. Substituting fertilizer subsidy with these subsidies on straw and green manures will lead to higher organic matter in the soil and help the country attain long term food security. Subsidy on imported pulp will lead to the same result. Paper factories will purchase less straw from the farmers and that will lead to more production of farmyard manure. The government must formulate a policy for the long term food security of the country. It must not hide behind the façade of administrative impracticability in order to provide benefits to the inefficient fertilizer industry and rich farmers.