Issue 12 (Low Res)

Narmada saga: Costs keep rising, lives are ruined and few have benefited p.
16
Jairam bats for Laila with humane draft rules on dog breeding p.22
Home secretary G K Pillai speaks on Maoists, terrorism and security p.08
July 16-31, 2010 | Vol. 01 Issue 12 | Rs 30
Losing Kashmirs GenNext

Now that Im a teen, waking up every day to get ready for college and very often going back to sleep again because curfew was declared in the dead of night, is a daily routine. Now that Im a teen, the voice of my mother imploring me to stay indoors whenever the khaki brigades are on the prowl is a regular feature.
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Founders Team
Gautam Adhikari Markand Adhikari Anurag Batra (abatra@governancenow.com) Editor B V Rao bvrao@governancenow.com Managing Editor Ajay Singh ajay@governancenow.com Peoples Editor Anupam Goswami Deputy Editors Prasanna Mohanty, Ashish Mehta, Ashish Sharma Assistant Editors Samir Sachdeva, Kapil Bajaj Special Correspondents Brajesh Kumar, Trithesh Nandan Principal Correspondents Geetanjali Minhas, Danish Raza, Jasleen Kaur Correspondents Shivani Chaturvedi, Neha Sethi, Sarthak Ray, Sonal Matharu Chief of Bureau (Special Features) Sweta Ranjan sweta@governancenow.com Design Parveen Kumar, Noor Mohammad Photographer Ravi Choudhary Sales Sr. Manager Sales Gautam Navin (+91-9818125257) gautam@governancenow.com Marketing Asst. Manager Marketing Shivangi Gupta shivangi@governancenow.com Circulation & Distribution Head Rajshekhar Chakrabarty Senior Executive, Distribution Banisha Verma banisha@governancenow.com Manager IT Santosh Gupta Asst. Manager HR Monika Sharma Design consultants LDI Graphics Pvt. Ltd. www.liquiddesigns.in info@liquiddesigns.in Printed and published by Markand Adhikari. Printed at Utkarsh Art Press Pvt Ltd, D-9/3, Okhla Industrial Area Phase I, New Delhi, 110020. Tel: 011-41636301, and published at 24A, Mindmill Corporate Tower, Sector 16A, Film City, Noida 201301. Tel: 0120-3920555. Editor: B V Rao (Responsible for selection of news under the PRB Act) Volume 01 Issue 12 UPENG03560/24/1/2009-TC www.governancenow.com feedback@governancenow.com
photo i m agi ng: as his h as t hana
contents

08 Interview with home secretary G K Pillai
We are not losing the war on Naxals... We are not winning it, not yet
22 Jairam bats for Laila

28 Conceived in conflict

16 A dam is filled, the dream is unfulfilled

If their mothers came into conflict in 1989, an entire generation of Kashmirs teenagers was born into and brought up on strife. Making a difference to their lives is as much a governance challenge as it is a political one
Rules framed for dog breeding and selling are so humane they even prescribe temperature ranges for the animals shelter!
12 Government itself is a hurdle in tackling Naxalism

Interview with NAC member Ram Dayal Munda
Financial and human costs of Sardar Sarovar continue to climb up without any accountability. The project has created lakhs of development martyrs Declaring war is much easier than sustaining it, let alone winning it, as the home minister is finding out in his operation against the Naxals
24 Chidambaram faces some home truths
50 Last Word

On the whole Prime Minister, we are fully prepared to host the best Games ever
38 Attaching wheels to healthcare

Working in public-private partnership mode, GVKEMRIs ambulance service is seeking to redefine response to medical emergencies in Tamil Nadu Every inch of the citys roads has been dug up. Delhi has indeed opened its heart out for the Games!
www.GovernanceNow.com 3
42 Delhi, dug up & ready

EDITORIALS
The burden is all ours, Mr Pawar

If the agriculture minister of a hungry country thinks his portfolio is a burden on his time, god save us.
harad Pawar has never been particularly known for giving up anything, least of all power and portfolios. Yet, on July 5, a few days after taking over as the head of the International Cricket Council (ICC), he met Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to request the latter to reduce the burden of his ministerial work. Burden, did we hear Mr Pawar say? The responsibility of overseeing the production of food grains for 1.2 billion people, the responsibility of looking after the interests of 1.2 billion consumers and the responsibility of delivering food to about 850 million poor people, is that what a minister should define as a burden? For six years spanning two terms of this present government Mr Pawar has held on to, what you may call in the context of a poor, hungry country, the three most important portfolios: Agriculture, Consumer Affairs and Food and Civil Supplies. He took all these ministries by choice and by the hegemony of the power of the small parties. He would not flinch when people pointed out that the same minister cannot look after the interests of farmers and consumers at the same time, he did not let go of any one of the ministries. But within six days of taking over the ICC, Mr Pawar realised what a great burden all these ministries are on his time?
Pray, what has Mr Pawar done in the six years that he cant carry this burden anymore? In the six years of his agriculture ministership, thousands of farmers have committed suicide, he is not known to have lifted his little finger in support of consumer rights and the less said about the public distribution system the better. The moment you hear the name P Chidambaram, you immediately associate the description strong (not always right, but stong) home minister. Jairam Ramesh conjures up an image of a minister who is trying to change the eco-governance of the country. Kamal Nath is trying to build 20 km roads every day and Kapil Sibal wants to perform an open-heart surgery on our education systems. And what do we associate our agriculture cum food and civil supplies cum conusmer affairs minister? Cricket. Right from engeering a coup against Jagmohan Dalmia to ascending the throne of ICC, Mr Pawar has had time only for the money, power and politics of cricket. In 2009, when the prime minister restricted foreign tours of ministers, Mr Pawar was one of the frequent travellers abroad. Most of his tours had nothing to do with anything that he has been elected by the people of the country to do. Because most of the tours were concerning cricket. It might be a stretch, but it is quite possible that the prime minister has visited Pawars backyard of Vidarbha more often to enquire about the plight of the farmers than has Mr Pawar himself. In these six years of clingling to three very important ministries, we cannot remember one instance where we could say Mr Pawar acted in public interest or accomplished something
If we had our way with the prime minister, we would advise him not to heed Mr Pawars request to lessen his burden. We would advise him to completely, totally and absolutely free him of all burden.
This time, just dont take that call from the PMO, Mr Ramesh!
MoEFs position on certain isssues may ruffle the union cabinets feathers but they show a rare concern for rules and ecology.
I
4
t is not at all common or usual for a minister to take a principled stand; or having taken it, to stick his or her neck out to defend that position. In that sense, environment and forests minister Jairam Rameshs position on a few contentious issues is admirable. His refusal to bow to pressure from his cabinet colleagues in the coal, aviation, power and surface transport ministries has sent a strong signal that environmental clearance is neither a matter or routine nor right. That there will be rules and rules will
be followed. In showing that he is no pushover, Ramesh has rubbed many a minister the wrong way. Any place else he would have been feted for his independent stand on issues, but here there are already murmurs of Ramesh losing his portfolio in the soonto-happen reshuffle of Manmohan Singhs cabinet. These ministers want a more pliable colleague in the green ministry and that includes even the prime minister, who ordered that Ramesh take a fresh look at the classification of go and no-go
areas for mining in such a manner as to dramatically increase the latter area. No-go areas are very dense forests strictly out of bounds for mining. But alas, Ramesh has caved in. On July 6, he announced what we all feared he would be forced to do. He reduced, in one fell stroke, the no-go areas by ten percent, meaning that mining will now be allowed in 35,000 hectares of thick forests that Ramesh thinks/thought are ecologically too sensitive. Much as we must appreciate his commitment to the cause, we cannot overlook the fact that by succumbing to this demand from the highest quarter he has shown himself as unreliable. Either Ramesh had then taken a whimsical decision to declare such substantial areas (where projects had already been announced) as no-go zones or he has now taken an equally whimsical decision to roll back that area by 10 percent. So what are we to believe, that in a matter of two weeks, 10 per cent of the forests have disappeared into thin air because the prime minister said swoosh?!
GovernanceNow | July 16-31, 2010
for the larger public good, apart of course, from predicting with great precision when and by how much prices of sugar, rice and milk would ride up by. But yet, we should be grateful to cricket and and ICC. If questions had not been raised about how much time Mr Pawar can give to cricket, considering his ministerial preoccupations, it would never have dawned on Mr Pawar that there are only 24 hours to the day. Mr Malcom Speed, a former ICC boss, taunted Mr Pawar that a man who is responsible for feeding 1.2 billion people can only be a part-time ICC president. Hes wrong, of course. A man who is ICC president can only be a parttime minister. And in this case, an unwilling part-time minister. No, the ministries Mr Pawar so zealously held to his bosom for six long years have not suddenly become a burden on his time. Mr Pawar has long been a burden on these ministries. If we had our way with the prime minister, we would advise him not to heed Mr Pawars request to lessen his burden. We would advise him to completely, totally and absolutely free him of all burden. Go play cricket, Mr Pawar.
Keshub asks where are the evidences. Yes, indeed, where are the evidences?
Gassed. Dead. Gone. Buried. All 15,000 of them. Or is it 25,000?
ormer Union Carbide chairman Keshub Mahindra was in Bhopal on July 6 to complete some legal formalities relating to his bail and said he wanted to do something concrete for the victims. We are not easily moved by the stuff. But reading what he said about the plight of the Bhopal gas victims, right there from ground zero, brought tears to our eyes. Have we misunderstood this angel all this while, did we fail to recognise the good heart in that corporate body? Surely, somebody who feels so strongly for the victims of the Bhopal gas tragedy needs a patient hearing. So listen to this: I have said for 20 years that my sympathies are with the people of Bhopal. I think something should be done quickly. If they need compensation, give them quickly. Help them with health. Instead of spending time on legal matters, we should help the people of Bhopal. Ignore the irony that he was in Bhopal for doing exactly what he advises we should avoid doing: spending time on legal matters that had nothing to do with helping the people of Bhopal. That would be reading his mind and heart in fragments. Look at the complete
picture, look at the sentiment! For 20 years, he has been saying his sympathies are with the people of Bhopal. If he has failed to show his sympathies it is perhaps because he still doesnt know what needs to be done, all he knows is something needs to be done quickly. He doesnt even know if they need compensation, but he is still willing to help. We cant believe this is the man our courts have hauled over the coals for 25 years and sentenced to two years. The law is an ass, indeed. Mr Mahindra, too, agrees. He says the charges framed against him for criminal negligence causing death do not hold. He is unhappy with the trial court verdict because he says there is absolutely no evidence to prove his role in the gas leak that turned Bhopal into a mass grave on that fateful December night. Where are the evidences, he asks. Come to think of it, where are the evidences? Gassed. Dead. Gone. Buried. All 15,000 of them. Or is it 25,000? So, why dig up old graves? Why dont we take Mr Mahindras advice and do something quickly? Forget that Bhopal ever happened? Quickly.
The explanation offered for the change in policy is specious: that the areas now opened up are for underground mining and they will not deplete the forest cover. Thats so clearly an afterthought. Rameshs capitulation is sad not just because he has given in on the no-go areas. You can bet your carbon credits that this will not be the last time that the prime minister will call Ramesh. Already Praful Patel is making noises about Ramesh obstructing the Navi Mumbai airport project. Ramesh has steadfastly maintained that serious environmental issues are involved and he would not budge without a proper environment impact assessment (EIA) studysomething that is beyond Patels comprehension. For his benefit and the benefit of others, Ramesh listed out these concerns: the airport expansion entails destruction of 400 acre of mangroves; diversion of two rivers and blasting of a 80-ft island! So far Ramesh has also taken a tough stand on not allowing private helipads in Mumbai, which
Either Ramesh had then taken a whimsical decision to declare such substantial areas (where projects had already been announced) as no-go zones or he has now taken an equally whimsical decision to roll back that area by 10 percent. So what are we to believe, that in a matter of two weeks, 10 percent of the forests have disappeared into thin air because the prime minister said swoosh?!
is bound to rub many the wrong way. Talking to reporters on July 6 in New Delhi, he spelt out his stand: Private helipads are a complete no-no. All helipads should be owned by the government and should be used for public servicemedical emergency and strategic need. His stand is based on a recent study by the Maharashtra Pollution Control Board which shows noise pollution at the time of take-off and landing of helicopters at 100-120 decibelwhich is twice the permissible level in residential areas. Mukesh Ambani has been allowed three helipads on his 27-storey residential complex. Ramesh said those too violated noise pollution rules and his ministry would look into it. In both these cases, Ramesh, as you can see, will ruffle a lot of feathers in high places once again. The prime minister might be tempted to call Ramesh once again with friendly advice on how important all this is for 10 percent growth. Our advice to Ramesh: This time round just dont take that call from the PMO, Mr Ramesh!
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R E A D E R S S PA C E
Halls of Shame Bhopal and elsewhere

An extremely disturbing photograph, showing the face of a child half buried after the Bhopal tragedy of 1984, is so effective because the dead child has its eyes open. The years 2009 and 2010 in India have thrown up the macabre spectacle of failure of not just our justice system, but also our administrative complacency, political negligence and an overall state of societal dysfunction. We have failed ourselves and nobody else. We have proven that we only ask questions, but never answer. The Liberhan Commission took 19 years to complete its investigation in a matter that very closely involves our social fabric. Close on its heels came the revelation that it took over 19 years for a young girls molester to be booked under our criminal justice system. And we now have the first rung of justice delivered for one of the largest tragedies of our times, 25 years after it happened. While the debate on the adequacy of the result of these investigations or delivery of justice is yet another matter to review, what is appalling is that as a nation, we do not have any sense of time, any sense of empathy for the aggrieved or any semblance of civilised outlook on human values that should normally address the suffering of fellow countrymen. It is also very disheartening that we are witnessing the denigration of contemporary of bestowing honour to the exit of the prime accused of the Bhopal tragedy from India. Over the past one month, we have seen how Barack Obama has repeated that the buck stops with him and he is responsible for solving the unfolding tragedy in the Gulf of Mexico. On the other side of the globe, in India, we are seeing how in the system we do not see anyone who would stand up and own the responsibility. We are witnessing a phenomenon in which the political leadership tries to see itself above accountability, judiciary asserts that it role is only technical, the media lives in the glory of hindsight and society just does not care. The 9/11 investigations took one year to complete. The World War II investigations concluded in two years. The Hiroshima atomic bomb investigations were brought before the world in 11 months. More than all, those who suffered in all these enormous tragedies began rebuilding their lives with the help of society, media, administration and political leadership within a span of two years. We have reduced this nation to such a moral low that the dead have their eyes open and the living have their eyes closed. V K Saxena President, National Council for Civil Liberties, Ahmedabad
political leaders. It was at first shocking to see that L K Advani was accused of lying to the nation. Then we saw N D Tiwari walk into disgrace. Now we see the rank and file of political leadership including Arjun Singh, P V Narasimha Rao and Rajiv Gandhi being mentioned as those who are part of the national shame
Governance lessons from Nithari

This is in reference to Nithari and the collapse of governance (June 1-15). The systemic apathy that has been so clearly brought out here makes us all seethe with rage, but how do we channel that rage into outcomes that protect our children in the future? Arent we past the point of expecting governance to work in India? Time and again, the Indian model of governance has proven its incompetence in serving the interests of people - be it petty crimes, serial killings or abject acts of terror. We, the people, are invariably left holding the basket. That said, before far-reaching changes can come to fruition, one has to fight this malaise of systemic apathy from within the system. I can think of a few ideas: 1. Our country has no dearth of lawyers willing to take up cases for the public good. I hope some of them use this case to haul all levels of government to court. Granted our judicial process takes time, but someone
ought to signal the country that we are not letting this issue die. 2. Lobby with our state and central legislators to frame new laws that require swift investigation of crimes against children and punishing those officials who were sleeping at the wheel. 3. Relentless focus by the media on the topic. The slur on innocence that this incident has brought about should be ingrained in the collective consciousness of this country. Achieving long-term changes is going to be particularly hard in our system. But that does not mean we should not pursue it. In my limited opinion, the root of systemic apathy in India is that our local governments have little to no power - they are subservient of the state and central machinery.
If the havaldar at the local police station and the clerk at the RTO consider themselves as state government employees and not as servants of the local population, nothing will ever change. And to bring about that kind of change, every panchayat, town and city needs to steer its own destiny. The expenses of the local government should be funded by the tax inflows at the local level and the local officials hold on to their jobs at the discretion of the local populace. Bala Janakiraman Massachusettes, USA Write to Governance Now We invite your suggestions, reactions to the stories and analyses and, of course, your own take on all matters related to governance. You can email or send snail mail. All letters must accompany your postal address. feedback@governancenow.com SABGROUP Publishing Division 24A Mindmill Corporate Towers Film City, Sector 16A, Noida 201301
6 GovernanceNow | July 16-31, 2010
Tharoor relives Twitter glory for a while

is tweets may have caused a string of controversies back home, but Shashi Tharoors comments on Twitter made him a favourite of the US government. The US Department of Health and Human Services launched a new website, HealthCare. gov, which had a Twitter feed with a list of 14 favourite tweets, including
people
Obama picks another Indian
ts never been so good for Indian-Americans in US administration. The latest to join Team Obama is lawyer Preeta D Bansal. She has joined as the vice chair of an administrative reform body described as a public private partnership designed to make government work better. According to a report by news agency IANS, the appointment of Bansal and nine other officials and non-official members of the Administrative Conference of the US was announced on July 8. Considered to be part of Obamas inner circle, Bansal has also been a Commissioner of the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom. Serving as chair in that capacity, Bansal participated in US diplomatic missions to Iraq, Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, Saudi Arabia, China, Russia, Vietnam, Turkey, Hong Kong and South Asia.
one from Tharoor: On board Air Mauritius, but no takeoff: cargo door was damaged in baggage loading! So all in seats waiting 2 see if Airbus will clear flight. No, that wouldnt have caused a flutter back home. When questioned, the department admitted the list was a glitch and promptly removed it.
hiv Nadar, founder of IT firm HCL Technologies, donated more than Rs 580 crore that he earned by selling his 2.5 percent stake in the company owned by him and his family. The amount, which will be used for education initiatives of the Shiv Nadar Foundation, is far bigger than that donated by much larger Indian firms. According to a study by Bain & Co, donations in India totalled about Rs 3,487 crore last year. Software czars N Narayana Murthy and Azim Premji have also figured among the list of mega donors, following the example set by Microsoft chairman Bill Gates.
HCL founder donates Rs 580 crore
Raju has little appetite to attend court

Ramalinga Raju, Satyams former chairman, cited itching behind ears and loss of appetite among a host of medical reasons to continue to evade appearance in court. Rajus doctor Ajit Kumar from Nizams Institute of Medical Sciences submitted a report which said that the result of his medical investigations was expected by July 17. But the Central Bureau of Investigation wanted the doctor to clarify Rajus condition in the court. Kumar also said that it was unethical to treat Raju unsupervised.
HC steps in to assist George

hen the custody battle over George Fernandes, the 80-year-old ailing former defence minister and Samata Party leader, turned ugly, the Delhi High Court had to step in to ascertain what he wants. Ranged on opposing sides of the battle were Fernandes longstanding companion Jaya Jaitly, who was denied entry to his home, and his estranged wife Leila Kabir, who recently returned to stake her claim to his property worth an estimated Rs 20 crore.
people politics policy performance

SecretarySpeak
INTERVIEW Gopal Krishna Pillai
We are not losing the war on Naxals...We are not winning it, not yet.
ntensifying Naxal violence has Gopal Krishna Pillai, the topmost bureaucrat in charge of law and order, on the hot seat. Every other major cause of unrest in the country and there have been many adds to his onerous job. In this interview with Sweta Ranjan, Pillai, the home secretary, talks about the centres strategy against Naxals, the Hindu right wings potential to cause violence, the need to give greater autonomy to CBI, and other issues.
Do you link them somewhere to the RSS or VHP?
Some of them have said they are members of these organisations, but we have no evidence to definitively establish the linkage.
Who do you blame the June 12 rail track blast near Perani station in Tamil Nadu on?
I have not been briefed by the team, but all available indications show that we had complete and unimpeded access to David Headley. The team could ask any question they wanted to and Headley answered all the questions posed to him.
Was he helpful?
There are reports that Hindu right wing groups are carrying out subversive activities in the country. Are organisations like Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) under your lens?
I dont think I can blame it on anybody. The needle of suspicion has pointed towards the LTTE (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam) because its an area where they may have some influence. Some posters of the LTTE protesting the visit of the president of Sri Lanka (were found), but the matter is still under investigation; so I wont like to comment further.
Yes, he was helpful.
Were you able to get helpful information?
Yes; there has been some information that is currently under analysis by the NIA.
Right wing elements, which are Hindu right wing elements and are carrying out any form of illegal activities, are under our lens. A number of cases have been registered in some of the states, some by the CBI, and we have seen a pattern in these whereby some extremist elements among the Hindus are stated to have targeted Muslim shrines.
Since the investigators have not ruled out the possibility of the involvement of Naxals in the blast, do we have reason to believe that Naxals are present in Tamil Nadu too?
The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) has sought greater clarity in its role and authority; there is already a draft CBI legislation that is proposed to replace the Delhi Special Police Establishment Act, 1946. How do you view the move?
At the moment we have not been able to pin down any organisation that is doing this. Its a set of individuals in three-four states who have been carrying out this. Whether there is some connection between these groups is still a matter of investigation.
Who do you think are responsible for these terror activities organisations or individuals?
Naxals have been there. They have been in Karnataka; we have seen Naxals in Kerala and Tamil Nadu also. So its nothing new. But overt (Naxal) activities have been very low in Tamil Nadu. Tamil Nadu police have kept Naxal activity completely under check. At this moment, in this case, the needle of suspicion is towards the LTTE.
A National Investigation Agency (NIA) team visited the US in June to interrogate David Coleman Headley. What kind of interrogation was that and are you satisfied with the American assistance in this regard?
All investigative agencies should have much greater autonomy and more powers to investigate. Currently, until and unless there is permission from the state, they cant take up a case. Thats the law that stands today. Suppose its a case that happens in a state, then there are inter-state ramifications. For example, some of these Hindu right wing fundamentalists cases are in Madhya Pradesh; they have been investigated by the Madhya Pradesh government, which has not been able to find any clues. Some of the cases have been closed. We are saying hand them over to the CBI which has been investigating similar cases. We want to see if there is a linkage between the two. We have to write to the government
GovernanceNow | July 16-31, 2010
p h otos: Sweta ranjan
of Madhya Pradesh and they have to agree to do it. So, what the CBI is asking for is that in such cases you should amend the law in such a way that you dont need the state governments permission.
and the states, we will win the war against the Naxals.
By just arresting a few of their men, are we on the path to winning the war?
Naxal attacks, such as the one on April 6 that claimed the lives of 76 CRPF men?
So, you are in favour of the draft CBI legislation?
I am in favour of greater autonomy and greater powers for the CBI, definitely.
Do you think that the war against Naxals has been a failure?
I dont think so. We have been having greater successes. We arrested a member of Maoists state committee in Andhra Pradesh; we have arrested a member of Naxals central military commission in Bihar and eight Naxals have been killed in West Midnapore. I dont think we are losing war against Naxals at all. If you ask me whether we are winning the war, I dont think we are winning the war yet. But I have no doubt whatsoever that as we mobilise our forces and build up a coordinated approach of the centre
There are two phases of the operation. One is to regain territory in the area where there is a lack of administration, which we have brought out in places like Rajnandgaon (Chhattisgarh) and Lalgarh (West Bengal). We have been able to reopen a police station where it was closed down. You can see the success taking place in Lalgarh. So, administration is starting to function in these areas. We are also seeing that in Kanker district of Chhattisgarh, where we have retaken about 1,500 square kilometres. Buses that never plied for seven years have started plying; markets that were closed for seven years have reopened. A girls hostel that was to be constructed in 2002 got completed and we hope a bridge will be completed shortly.
You cant stop it if people are desperate. Once we get better control of the things, you will find intelligence flowing in.
You mean to say such attacks are part of the game?

In the initial phases, yes.
Do you think you will be able to fight Naxals without army or airpower?
How do we stop the ferocious
Yes, without the army I think we can fight. Physical presence of the army we dont require. We take the assistance of the army in so far as training is concerned, we take their advice also. From the air force, we are basically using the helicopters. Not for offensive operations but for movement of forces, evacuation and for logistics supplies in remote areas. We have got some air force helicopters, some of our own helicopters and some we will hire from other agencies, depending upon our requirement.
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SecretarySpeak
many ministries to fight Naxal menace. The whole government has to fight the Naxals. I need all the other ministries cooperation because there is need for housing, health, education.
G K Pillai Home secretary
It is not just the home ministrys function. It will take
But you did seek the help of the army and the air force.
Yes, we had sought (the help) initially. See, the more forces you have, the better it would be. And the army is definitely far better trained and has far better expertise than CRPF, which is basically a law and order force. But the cabinet committee on security had considered this very exhaustively and the final decision was that we should manage without the army. We have managed with the augmentation of state police forces, modernisation and better training, and further induction of paramilitary forces.
training institution, but what will I do with the rest? In Bihar, they recruit constables, but they dont have training institutions to train them. Training institutions capacity is very limited in our country.
its a vacuum again. In many parts, like Dantewada, you go there and you would find nothing. You have a police station but it has not more than two people.
With our current capacity, it will take us more than five years to have enough trained police personnel to take on the Naxals effectively.
Are you also talking to other ministries to bring developmental changes in the Naxal-affected areas?
Why was the suggestion to use the army turned down?
First of all, we made the suggestion primarily because of the shortage. We have four lakh vacancies of policemen and we are building up the paramilitary forces. We are raising 50 battalions which will take fivesix years. So, the home ministry thought if we had more (troops), we could finish it quickly. But the (cabinet) committee felt that the use of the army at this stage would not be correct. And they felt that we should proceed on the lines which we have already done.
Naxals can be fought in two ways first, through the security forces and second, by taking away their grassroots support, that is, by a series of development as well as policy measures. There are a number of issues health, schooling, tribal land rights, minor forest produce, etc. On many of these issues government has to act. It is just not (our) department but many departments have to put their efforts together and this is what the new policy is putting everything together.
I had meetings with the secretaries of tribal affairs, health, panchayati raj and rural development. We are telling them the issues. It is not just the home ministrys function. It will take many ministries to fight Naxal menace. The whole government has to fight the Naxals. I need all the other ministries cooperation because there is need for housing, health, education. Everybody has to fight in a coordinated manner.
Does it mean that the government needs to change its strategy to fight the Naxals?
Naxals have repeatedly spurned the offer for talks. How do you plan to bring them to the negotiating table?
I understand that we are currently recruiting only about 1,50,000 policemen and policewomen whereas, according to the UN standards, we have a shortfall of about 8,00,000.
The constraining factor is the capacity to train. We dont have enough training institutions in the country; we cant train more than 1,50,000. I can recruit 8,00,000 people today. I will put 1,50,000 in the
Strategy is increasing focus while we are also doing the paramilitary and police augmentation. We also need to augment development administration in these areas. For example, there are vacancies of 3,50,000 teachers in Bihar. There is shortage of one lakh development personnel in Jharkhand. If we dont have doctors, nurses and teachers, how do we provide the services? We are changing the strategy by also making sure that if the security cover is provided the administration must move. If the administration is not moving or they dont have enough people,
We have made an offer to them to abjure violence and come for peace talks without any conditions. We are waiting for a response from them. My personal assessment is that they will not come for peace talks unless they are under tremendous pressure. They are not yet comfortable with the offer of peace talks. They are making money and killing people. This year they have killed around 400 innocent civilians, half of whom are tribals. That is their way of terrorising the local population. The whole focus of the government is to put them under pressure.n sweta@governancenow.com

Brief Case
Ashish Sharma
But minister, minister, why were you carrying so much cash?

Are we getting desensitised to unaccounted for money because of rampant corruption in high places?
oney seems to have lost its shock value. Even in a country where 80% of the population lives on less than $2 or Rs 94 a day as per World Bank estimates. Else why wouldnt anybody be surprised over Rs 9 lakh (some newspapers reported Rs 2 lakh) that Nagaland home minister Imkong L Imchen was reportedly found carrying in a suitcase at Kathmandu airport? The media duly reported that the minister was briefly detained because he was carrying currency notes in denominations of Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 and that he was released after he explained he was simply not aware that Indian notes of these denominations were banned in Nepal. But nobody appears to have been even mildly curious over the amount of cash that the minister was found carrying while returning from a four-day private trip. Of course, there may be a perfectly rational explanation in this case. We know, for instance, that Indian banks advise against using debit and credit cards in Nepal. So the minister may have been forced to carry all this cash and more since this was the amount found on him while he was about to take his return flight. It is also possible that the minister may not have known about the ban on Indian Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes in Nepal. But why didnt anybody raise their eyebrows over the fact that somebody could be carrying Rs 9 lakh or even Rs 2 lakh in cash just like that? Is it because money has got so devalued over time? No, that couldnt possibly be the case because a majority of Indians continues to aspire to earn the mandated minimum wage for a skilled labourer, all of Rs 248 for an eight-hour workday in Delhi, which continues to be denied to most workers in the unorganised sector. Is it, then, because of growing corruption in high places involving increasingly larger sums of money? Even in the early 1990s, when stock market trader Harshad Mehta claimed he had paid Rs 1 crore in cash to the personal secretary of the then prime minister PV Narasimha Rao, people at large felt a
bit let down by the modest sum. Not surprising, perhaps, because just a few years earlier, the then prime minister Rajiv Gandhi had come under a cloud for 64 times that amount. The second half of the 1990s set a much higher benchmark when then Bihar chief minister Lalu Prasad figured in a Rs 950 crore fodder scam. And now, with union telecom minister A Raja being accused by the opposition parties of a 2G spectrum auction scam of anywhere between Rs 20,000 crore and Rs 1 lakh crore, the threshold has gone through the roof. The home minister of a state of this country does not even bother to explain why he was carrying so much cash. He could be fighting hard in his own state to deal with the humungous problem of counterfeit currency, of the same denominations as he was carrying, flooding our economy, wait, wait, was that not the reason we leaned on Nepal to ban the notes in the first place? Yet, the minister mumbles nonsense about not knowing the Nepal law (you really worry if he knows that this is part of his job back home) and he is let off without explanation. It could all be perfectly legitimate cash, but there were times once upon, when a minister would have turned pink trying to explain this way because there would have been many more inconvenient questions asked. It does seem that one of the weird aspects of development is the constant recalibration of our own shock meters. Unless each scam is bigger than the previous one we have no interest in it: ah, well, weve seen much worse, havent we? Thus even as the aam aadmi or common man struggles to eke out a living, it is perhaps natural to get desensitised to somebody elses money that defies comprehension in any case. The Nagaland home minister may well have carried several times the amount without anybody popping the once-natural question: But minister, minister, why were you carrying so much cash? n ashishs@governancenow.com

AdvisorSpeak
INTERVIEW RAM DAYAL MUNDA
Government itself is a hurdle in tackling Naxalism

am Dayal Munda, a member of the National Advisory Council (NAC), which was reconstituted recently, is acknowledged as the most prominent tribal academician and intellectual in his state. Born in 1939 at Diuri village in Ranchi district of Jharkhand, Munda has been a musician, anthropologist, linguist, development activist and, of late, politician as well. He obtained a Masters degree in anthropology from Ranchi University and went on to do his PhD in linguistics at University of Chicago. He taught for 10 years at University of Minnesota before returning to India in 1981 to establish a regional and tribal language department at Ranchi University, where he served as the vice-chancellor from 1986 to 1988. He is regarded as a spiritual leader of the successful movement for separate statehood for Jharkhand. Munda joined the Congress party in 2004 and contested the 2009 assembly elections from the Tamar constituency. He became a Rajya Sabha member in March this year as one of the nominees of the president. He also heads the Tribal Advisory Council of Jharkhand, a constitutional body. In an exclusive conversation with Trithesh Nandan, Munda spoke about the NACs deliberations, the governments seeming ineptitude in its handling of Maoists, corruption in Jharkhand and his agenda for development of his state. Edited excerpts:
pleasant surprise, I received a phone call from Prime Minister Manmohan Singh himself. He offered me the membership of NAC which I accepted then and there, even though, frankly, I did not know much about the work of this body. I also found myself wondering why the NAC would want me.
So did you accept the offer because the prime minister himself called you? Did you have occasion to work with the prime minister earlier as well?
I came to know Dr Singh in the early 1990s when he was the finance minister. Those were the times when the Jharkhand movement was in full swing. I met him a couple of times to demand more central funds for the areas that came to form the new state. By the way, I had had a pleasant surprise in March 2010 too when the prime minister called me personally to offer me the Rajya Sabha seat. I was then coming out of Kolkata airport and it took me a few minutes to realise that the prime minister was trying to contact me.
people and you cant solve the problem by waging war against them. However, if we need to counter those who are trying to overthrow democracy, then we must have the same sincerity, planning and intensity that they have. We also discussed the Food Security Bill, communal violence and other issues of governance.
How do you view the genesis of the leftwing extremism? Where is the state lacking in its response to the situation?
What exactly did you know about the NAC when you got the offer to become a member?
I did not know much except that such a body existed under the chairpersonship of Sonia Gandhi. After that phone call, I learnt more about the NAC from close friends. I then prepared myself for the first meeting on June 10.
How did you come to be appointed as a member of the reconstituted National Advisory Council?
I was away in a remote village of Ranchi district, overseeing some developmental projects, in early June when, to my
How did this first meeting go?
The first meeting was introductory and loosely structured. Each member was given five-six minutes to speak; I raised the issue of absence of development and the problem of Naxalism in tribal areas. I made the point that Naxalites are our own
The current violent manifestation of Naxalism is linked to the fact that our growth has not been inclusive and there is a lot of resentment against the government. Tribals do have land but they do not have assured supply of food and other basic necessities; tribal areas also dont have roads. Government officials do not go to these areas. Naxals have occupied this vacuum. I have been working recently at village Kurchudih in Ranchi district, where you see absolutely no development except an open-air primary school and a hand pump for drinking water. I recently got a road constructed there. It is not that development cant reach these areas, but, unfortunately, government officials themselves are a big hurdle. At Kurchudih, the local BDO, to my disbelief, tried to obstruct my effort to get a road built. There was no opposition from the red brigade or local people. The BDO even considered lodging an FIR against me. Fortunately, the district collector was very helpful. I told the PM that if that attitude did not change, the government would continue to lose ground to the Naxals. I told him that the government was indeed losing this battle. The Naxals work 24 hours a day and
p h oto : t RI ThESH NAN DAN
our security forces work effectively for only eight hours. We need to assess their strength and evolve our strategy. You must also empower people, which is not happening. Good governance is not happening. In fact, government has to integrate the planning of these areas in an honest way.
entry. They knew I would do my brand of developmental politics. I have carried on despite these local Congressmen. Finally, I got the ticket to contest the Tamar assembly seat in 2009, which I lost.
The NAC is generally seen as a super cabinet. Do you share this perception?
You have always wielded considerable influence in your region. So why did you feel the need to plunge into active politics?
I dont think it is appropriate to brand the NAC as a super cabinet. It has become an important body in formulation of policy by virtue of the fact that Sonia Gandhi heads it. A country as big as India cannot be run only by the government. It would be better to say that the NAC is an interface between civil society and government. My only concern is: NACs decisions should be implemented and not just remain in the records of its meetings.
What made you join politics at what many would consider a late stage in life?
I have become more involved in politics during the last six years. I joined the Congress party in 2004, having realised that development was not reaching the people even after the formation of Jharkhand. It was not easy to join the Congress party because local leaders were against my
Because of my total dissatisfaction with the way things turned out after the creation of Jharkhand. Corruption has ruined the state. As a spiritual leader of the Jharkhand movement, it is disheartening to see the leaders we prepared not having the commitment, dedication and farsightedness to take the state forward. Now the state leaders are committed only to their own good. Shibu Soren also got trapped in corporate culture. So I thought: Let me also give politics a try to help people out of their misery.
Various chief ministers of Jharkhand have ruined the TAC by imposing their narrow agenda on it. I have a plan to revive the TAC by incorporating the peoples agenda. We will call a larger meeting of the TAC where every village head will be invited to share his or her experience. My aim is to empower the local people so that they are involved in their own development. When I met governor MOH Farook, who took charge in June, I told him to take steps to hold panchayat elections as soon as possible. I also demanded reviewing the Memorandums of Understanding (MoUs) for mining and industrial projects that have been signed so far and the alleged misuse of central aid.
At 70, you have clearly set youself several goals to accomplish. What are your immediate priorities?
I am satisfied with my personal achievements but not with the state of affairs in Jharkhand. I became a Rajya Sabha member without spending a single penny; I became the virtual chief minister of Jharkhand by being appointed the head of the TAC. Now I want to live up to the expectations of the people of Jharkhand and contribute a lot to their benefit. n trithesh@governancenow.com
You have an important duty to perform in the Tribal Advisory Council (TAC) as well. What is your agenda there?
I was appointed the head of the TAC of Jharkhand in the first week of June. I have to pay more attention to the TAC than NAC. Its a challenging job because you are accountable to the local people.
policy
A legal cover for UID
inally, it took the National Advisory Council to do the obvious: make Right to Food a universal entitlement under the National Food Security Bill being considered by it. This is something that the GoM under Pranab Mukherjee should have done, instead of towing the bureaucratic line and limiting the right to the BPL families alone. Given the enormity of the task, NAC has done well to propose
NAC makes right moves

rolling out the scheme in 150 poorest districts of the country in the first phasejust as it had done with the NREGS. The area of coverage can be expanded later. The next key thing is to fix the entitlement basket. The NAC is in favour of 35 kg of wheat/ricein line with the Supreme Courts directive which the GoM had ignored by deciding on 25 kgand adding millets, pulses and oil to complete the nutritional requirements.
Rights for the mentally ill
H
he Unique ID Auhority of India (UID) has come out with a draft bill to make itself a statutory body, which will be called National Identification Authority of India. It will have penal powers against impersonation or giving wrong biometrics and accessing its data base without permission. The maximum punishment provided is three years in jail with or without a fine of Rs 1 crore. The draft has now been put in the public domain to elicit peoples response.
uman rights of persons with mental illness will soon be protected by law. The government is planning an amendment in the existing Mental Health Act of 1987, which will ensure the rights of such people to get proper medical care. Persons with mental illness are a vulnerable lot. The
law, as it stands today, does not even define mental illness. Instead, it defines a mentally ill person. No wonder most of such persons are dismissed as mad. The amendment proposes to bring all institutions that has anything to do with them, within the purview of the law so that they get proper medical attention.
Onus on the tourists!

aving failed to check sexual abuse of foreign tourists in the capital, the tourism ministry has come out with an elaborate code of conduct for the tourists as well as the tourism industry. Among other things, this code provides for an undertaking from the tourists to dress and conduct themselves in a manner that shall aid their own protection against exploitation and show respect to local culture. And, instead of acting tough, it advises hotels to prohibit the use of their premises for drug and sexual abuses. Brilliant!
Maharashtras big step towards e-Gov

n an effort to become more public friendly, the Maharashtra government plans to provide various services online by making it mandatory for all the departments. A law is being planned for the purpose, titled Mandatory Electronic Delivery of Public Service Act, 2010. Services like birth certificates, land documents and property papers will then be available online for public. All the departments have been asked to set a time frame in which such services can be provided. The legislation is likely to be introduced in the winter session.
A dam is filled, the dream is unfulfilled

Financial and human costs of Sardar Sarovar continue to climb up without any accountability. The project has created lakhs of 'development martyrs' for derisory irrigation benefits.
know if his name appeared on the list of 6,417 project affected families. Now the project entered the state of planning and impact assessment studies. A detailed project report was ready in January 1980. In the second half of the 1980s, Devilals family received land acquisition notice. The land of their forefathers for centuries was taken away from them without so much as any talks about consent or participation. Thus, land was acquired from Mokhadi and other villages, people were displaced, tenders for dam construction called and opened, and a few hundred crores spent. All this, before the grant of even a conditional environmental clearance from the Ministry of Environment and Forests! The ministry, of course, did the formality in June 1987 by granting a conditional clearance two months after construction had started, but before all the environmental impact studies were in. That was the beginning of a trend: repeated noncompliance and construction outpacing environmental safeguards and rehabilitation of the displaced. Time for one more clearance, albeit conditional. In October 1988, The Planning Commission granted a conditional clearance to the cost estimates for the project at Rs 6,406.04 crore (at 1986-87 prices). Cost estimates had presumed that dam would be built in 17 years and canal network in 22 years. Kisanbhai told his teenaged son that Narmada waters would come through canals and he would not have to rely on rain and groundwater then. His son, a maps enthusiast, would listen to his geography teacher attentively. So next day he asked his teacher if the canal would indeed be of the size of a runway and would pass through his village. He looked several times at the map that figure out that it was a momentous day in their lives. Initially, nothing happened on the ground. For the first eight years, Gujarat, Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh bickered over the sharing of resources. From 1969 to 1979, Narmada Water Disputes Tribunal (NWDT) heard the parties before deciding on the height of the dam (138.64 metres) and the rehabilitation conditionality. It is called conditionality and not merely package, since NWDT laid down in unambiguous terms that rehabilitation must precede the construction and submergence. During these years, Kisanbhai started to get an idea that Gujarat was demanding a higher dam on Narmada to bring irrigation canal to his village. Devilals family knew nothing about the gigantic dam and drowning of their farmlands. He didnt
Himanshu Upadhyaya
magine a farmer in Kutch. Let's call him Kisanbhai. Imagine a tribal farmer living on banks of the river Narmada in a village called Mokhadi. Let's call him Devilal. The two of them have never met but their fates have been intertwined ever since Jawaharlal Nehru landed at Navagam village in Rajpipla district of Gujarat on April 4, 1961. Our protagonists, let's imagine, were quite young then to
photo courtsey narmada.org

Damming the Narmada
change of political regime. Meanwhile, Devilals family heard about other displaced families challenging the dam construction, but the dam height kept scaling up and now they started laying even the main canal. His village soon became out of bounds for him and dam site had been declared to be a place under the Official Secrets Act (OSA). He wondered if Nehru would have approved of lathicharge on protesting oustees who came to challenge OSA. This non-violent resistance inspired him to think that rehabilitation would not be an elusive dream. A few years later, in 1994, even as the dam height was nearing 80 metres, his son shared with him news he had heard on radio. The Supreme Court had asked to stop the dam construction. There was a hope for justice. One morning in October 2000, Devilals teenaged grandson brought home shattering news. The apex court had permitted dam to be built to its
A file photo of fishermen and boatmen of the Narmada during one of their protests against the project.
his teacher said showed command area of the Sardar Sarovar and the figure of cultivable land that it encompassed. He even asked his teacher if the epithet lifeline of Gujarat was an honest expression, since the canals would just irrigate 1.94 percent of cultivable land in Kutch. Kisanbhai had read that the Gujarat government argued for a dam of 455 ft height, stating that they needed to take irrigation water to Kutch. However, now that the command area map and intra-state water allocation were out, he noticed that the water that was allocated to Kutch out of Gujarats share didnt tally with those projections. Then came those three years
Land was acquired, people were displaced, tenders for dam construction called and opened, and a few hundred crores spent. All these, before the grant of even a conditional clearance from the Ministry of Environment and Forests!
of drought: 1987-1989. Suddenly, Sardar Sarovar started getting projected as if it was primarily a dam to meet drinking water demands. The number of villages that were promised Narmada waters started to rise mysteriously. In 1979 it was 0, in 1983-84 it was 4,720, in 1990 it was 7,235, and in 1991 it rose to 8,215 villages and 135 towns. Throughout the 1990s, while the successive governments kept on using drinking water from Narmada Dam as rhetoric and propaganda, the pipeline project kept getting proposed and scrapped with the full height. Kisanbhais son had just finished building one more checkdam when the news came in. No doubt, his village had received scanty rainfall in the drought year of 1999. But decade long efforts on harnessing what lay at hand provided his village drinking water security. Kisanbhais grandson whispered in his ears, Will the CM stop selling grand dreams of Kalpsar (an ambitious project that envisaged damming the Gulf of Cambay) and start building canals to bring Narmada waters now? Two years later, in August
2002, the dam height had reached 100 metres, main canal was built up to Ahmedabad and the chief minister was seen boating. However, branch canals, minors and sub minors that will bring irrigation water to Kutch progressed sluggishly. Earlier that year Kisanbhais grandson read in newspapers that Sardar Sarovar Narmada Nigam Ltd, the dam building corporation, had spent 22 percent of total expenditure on repayment of debt due to its indiscriminate market borrowing prior to the Supreme Court stay. He had also read that the money that it got from the central government for the specific purpose of building canals, were spent on other components of the project. In May 2003, Kisanbhais grandson heard about Narmada waters reaching Kutch through pipeline, but the euphoria didnt last long. The supply turned out to be erratic and irregular. First the officials tried to explain away the stoppage of water supply, stating that the Saurashtra branch canal needed to be cement lined to prevent the seepage. Next time the Kutch farmers had to take their grievance to Gandhinagar and seek a political intervention to curb farmers in Surendranagar district from lifting water en route from the branch canal through diesel pumps. Sometimes breaches in canal also endangered their drinking water supply.
Narmada Canal Network: Tracking mileposts
As on March 31, 2008 SSNNL claims to have developed 2.98 lakh hectares of command area (Narmada Control Authority or NCA status report April 2008). The latest figure quoted in the CAG audit report puts it at 3.41 lakh hectares as on March 31, 2009. CAGs detailed scrutiny of the irrigation component reveals 669 and 130 numbers of missing links in Phase I and II A of command area (i.e. districts in central Gujarat) respectively.
Narmada Saga: why both Kisanbhai and Devilal are unhappy

The first protagonist of our story: Kisanbhai, a Kutch farmer who badly needs water. And here is the other protagonist: Devilal, a tribal farmer, who loses land to the project. For the first eight years, not much happened on the ground as Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra bickered over the sharing of the resources.
Their fates were linked on April 4, 1961, when Pandit Nehru laid the foundation stone of the dam project. As farmers in drought-prone Saurashtra and Kutch waited for Narmada waters...
June 1987 Construction works had already started when the environment ministry granted a conditional clearnace to the project. In October 1988, the Planning Commission granted a conditional clearnace to the cost estimates for the project:
The second half of the 1980s: Devilal got eviction notice.
...those in the Narmada valley were afraid of losing their homes. Kisanbhai read that the Gujarat government had argued for a dam height of 455 feet so that waters could be taken to Kutch for irrigation.
The land of his forefather gone forever with a piece of paper. 1987-1989: Three years of drought and Gujarat started projecting the Sardar Sarovar as if it was primarily for meeting drinking water needs.
The price? Rs 6,406.04 crore. Plan: to build the dam in 17 years and the canal network in 22 years.
As human and environmental costs of the projects made it controversial, the World Bank withdrew from supporting it in the early 1990s.
However, he noticed that the water allocation for Kutch out of the state's share did not match those projections. Devilal's son heard it on radio: In 1994, the Supreme Court stayed dam construction following a petition.
In 1994, hearing a Narmada Bachao Andolan (NBA) petition, the Supreme Court stays dam construction. Stay was lifted in 2000.
Over the next six years, the all aspects of the project were debated threadbare in the court.
In October 2000, the court decided to lift the stay in a 2-1 judgment. The dam and canals should've been completed couple of years later.
In May 2003, Kisanbhai's grandson heard about the Narmada waters arriving to Kutch through pipeline, but the supply has been erratic and irregular.
Illustrat ion: ash ish asthana

Damming the Narmada
Narmada canal network: pathetic progress

Date March 31, 2009 Main Canal (458 km) 458.00 (100%) Branch Canals (2,759 km) 1,821.40 (66.02%) Distributaries (5,347 km) 1,533.87 (28.69%) Minors (20,027 km) 4,954.05 (24.74%) Sub Minors (61,798 km) 10,035.99 (16.24%) Total (90,389 km) 18,803.31 (20.80%) Source CAG (2010: 29)
Increased allocation for domestic and industrial use
NWDT envisaged providing 1.06 million acre feet (MAF) water for domestic (0.86 MAF) and industrial use (0.20 MAF). But capacity that is created towards this purpose as on March 31, 2009 (1.29 MAF), under progress (0.09 MAF) and planned for (1.63 MAF) totals up to 3.01 MAF. That is to say a threefold rise from what was proposed before the Tribunal. So, what impact would this increased allocation for domestic and industrial use have on the command area of 18 lakh hectares that was envisaged to be irrigated from 7.92 MAF (i.e. 88 percent of Gujarats share of Narmada waters estimated at 9 MAF)? Kisanbhais son fears that reliable and regular drinking water and irrigation from Narmada may remain elusive for many more years. His fears are neither imaginary nor ideological. The proportion of domestic use (0.22 MAF) and industrial use (1.07 MAF) within the capacity already created brings home the warped priorities. Kisanbhais son has lately earned much respect in his village because of his work on harnessing rainwater. One fine morning in April this year, he read in newspapers that the dam would be finally built to its full height, since the Environment Sub Group of Narmada Control Authority chaired by the secretary, Ministry of Environment and Forests, has cleared installation of gates. The clearance, yet again, is a conditional one. In third week of May this year, the father-son duo kept reading in one newspaper after another that the Planning Commission has approved the revised cost estimates for the project at Rs 39,240 crores and SSNNL now hopes to get Rs 7,000 crore from the centre under 'Accelerated Irrigation Benefit
Kisanbhai's son fears that 'realiable and regular drinking water and irrigation from Narmada' may remain elusive for many years. His fears are neither imaginary nor ideological.
Programme' (AIBP). Kisanbhais grandson laughs sardonically at the use of the adjective 'Accelerated' in that terminology.
Continued disregard for accountability
The question that shall puzzle economists is what SSNNL did with finances received under AIBP so far? Has AIBP funds meant for the construction of the canal network been spent on other components of project in violation of norms? A CAG audit report that was tabled in assembly in 2002 stated, The funds released under AIBP were specifically meant for the construction of canal and distributaries. However, no such segregation of funds was made from 1998-99 to 2000-01. Entire amount (Rs 1,077 crores) was provided for SSP inter alia also for construction of dam, hydroelectric facilities, establishment charges etc. Eight years from that observation, a recent CAG audit report stated yet again, SSNNL diverted Rs 1,833.12 crore from AIBP funds, meant for
the development of main canal and distribution network to other areas of the project which led to the delay in creation of irrigation potential. The question that remains unanswered is: can better performance on canal construction be expected with scant regard for accountability? What is needed on the Narmada front at this moment is a substantive regard for accountability and environmental compliance, not clearances granted under political expediency ensured by remarkable cooperation between the ruling BJP and the opposition Congress in Gujarat. Meanwhile, Devilals son toils as a migrant labourer in Surat and Kisanbhais son stares at the map that shows a sub minor canal bringing irrigation water to his village. Crores have been spent, rhetoric on Narmada and political manipulations are still around. Kisanbhais grandson also hears much talk on unfinished canal network these days. However, his father has shown him that Gandhis Gram Swarajya is better than Nehrus Developmental Raj. Lets wish Kisanbhais grandson meets Devilals grandson soon. For, we are told that Devilals son is trying hard to encourage his son to study economics and probe what NREGA entails for him. n
Upadhyaya, an independent researcher, writes on environmental issues. himanshugreen@gmail.com
It just Occured to us
A survey says India has the highest number of NGOs in the world: 1 NGO for every 400 persons. Not surprised: we already knew there's more non-government in India than government!

People Power
Elected representatives have completely failed us. Its time to give citizens a measure of direct control over governance
ILLUSTRAT ION : ashish asthana
India should move towards direct democracy

was delivered recently, the media has been flooded with stories of how the man behind the tragedy was treated almost like a state guest and was provided a safe passage out of the country. All the above incidents make me wonder: Is India in safe hands? Can we entrust our destinies in the hands of a few politicians and bureaucrats? We have tried every political party and leader since independence. Almost everyone failed us. The way things are deteriorating, we actually may not have much time left. Today, everything is up for sale. Forests are being sold along with mines and minerals; rivers are being sold; land is being snatched away from farmers and sold to corporates. A sense of injustice affects not just the poor but also the middle classes, who find themselves helpless before completely insensitive governance. All this has provided a fertile ground for Naxalites. The problem actually lies in the politics of this country. We have a representative democracy whereby we elect a few people and completely entrust our destinies to them for the next five years. They become powerful to the extent that the power corrupts them or makes them arrogant and unresponsive. It is time to demand some shift towards direct democracy. The citizens should have some kind of direct control over the political system. It should not be limited to changing a government every five years, but the people should be able to participate in and even change the decisions of an elected government on a dayto-day basis. Is that possible? Can the people directly govern themselves? Yes. In the US, Brazil and Switzerland, to
Arvind Kejriwal
n the late 1990s, when I used to work with the income tax department, we surveyed several multinational companies for their tax compliance and some of them were caught red-handed evading taxes. They admitted their fault and paid up taxes without any appeals. If they had been in any other country, their bosses would have been put behind bars. During one such survey, the chief of Indian operations of a company, who was a foreign national, threatened the income tax team: You are a poor country and depend on us for investments. If you trouble us, we will leave your country. We can also get any law passed through your parliament. Interestingly, the head of that income tax team was transferred out a few days after that incident. I did not take the comments of this MNC boss seriously, but the developments of the last few years make me wonder whether he was actually telling the truth. In July 2008, when the UPA government had to prove its majority in parliament, TV reportage gave us a very good picture of how MPs could be bought and sold. It sent a chill down my spine. What value does my vote have? Whoever I vote for can be purchased! Just as an MP belonging to a political party can be purchased by another, he/ she can also be purchased by other countries. Who knows if it might already be
happening! Now I think: Am I a citizen of free India? Are the interests of Indian citizens really uppermost in the minds of our lawmakers? When I read the highlights of the Nuclear Civil Liability Bill recently introduced in parliament, my fears seemed to be coming true. The Bill deals with a foreign company setting up a nuclear plant in India. In the eventuality of a nuclear accident, the total liability of the company responsible would not exceed Rs 500 crore. No criminal action would lie against the company. On the face of it, the Bill sounds completely absurd. It amounts to playing with the lives of the people of this country. Then why is our government proposing such a law? Obviously, it is under external pressure. After the Bhopal gas tragedy verdict
take three examples, people enjoy varying degrees of direct control over their governments. We can learn a lot from them. Fortunately, we do have local citizens assemblies called gram sabhas, which came into being through the 73rd constitutional amendment that can directly participate in deciding their local issues, but can also be encouraged to have their say first on state-level matters and then on some issues of national importance. Similar citizens assemblies should also be formed in urban areas. These citizens assemblies should hold regular meetings and decide in a democratic manner all local-level matters schools, health centres, roads, sanitation, etc. That will be the first step in directly engaging the citizens in their own governance; it will be like a nursery of citizenship and democracy, where people will learn to make compromises and take collective decisions. Gradually, these assemblies should also deliberate upon and decide larger issues, such as whether they want an industrial project in their area. They should also be allowed to express their views on statelevel policy and legislation. If more than five percent of the citizens assemblies in a state propose a law, the state government should be required to send a copy of the draft law to all such assemblies to seek their approval. If 50 percent or more of citizens assemblies propose a piece of legislation, the state government should be required to pass that legislation. The citizens assemblies should also be given the power to recall their elected representative panchayat representative/ municipal councilor, MLA and MP if he or she has not lived up to their expectations. Based on federal principles, we can evolve a system in which all jurisdictions village/urban locality, block/municipal ward, district, state, country can smoothly function without interfering with each other but by being ultimately subservient to the will of the citizens assemblies. It is time to say that we the citizens of India refuse to be fobbed off by promises of development. We want direct political power for ourselves. Once we have that, we can decide for ourselves what kind of development we want. n
Kejriwal runs PCRF, an NGO, and is generating support for more citizen participation in Panchayat and municipal governments.
imply put, direct democracy means citizens participating directly rather than through their elected representatives in taking decisions and shaping public policy. Direct democracys simplest manifestation is a local citizens assembly convening in an open meeting where every voting-age local resident has unrestricted access and discussing and deciding local issues. Referendum and the power to recall an elected representative are other two examples of the practice of direct democracy. The Swiss way Switzerland is considered by many to be the most democratic country in the world. Swiss political institutions have done well to ensure that ordinary people have a voice in how they are governed while balancing the interests of its multi-cultural people. The country is divided into 26 areas called cantons. The cantons, in turn, are made up of about 3,000 communes. The country is a three-tier federation; so citizens are subject to three legal jurisdictions: the commune, canton and federal levels. The 1848 federal constitution defines a system of direct democracy. The instruments of Swiss direct democracy at the federal level, known as civil rights, include the right to submit a constitutional initiative and a referendum, both of which may overturn parliamentary decisions. By calling a federal referendum, a group of citizens may challenge a law that has been passed by parliament, if they can gather 50,000 signatures against the law within 100 days. If so, a national vote is scheduled where voters decide by a simple majority whether to accept or reject the law. Eight cantons together can also call a referendum on a federal law. Referendums on more than a dozen laws per year are not unusual in Switzerland. For the
Direct democracy in action
Kapil Bajaj
past century and a half, the Swiss electorate has given its opinion on over 534 federal bills, while also taking part in thousands of cantonal and local votes. Similarly, the federal constitutional initiative allows citizens to put a constitutional amendment to a national vote, if they can get 1,00,000 voters to sign the proposed amendment within 18 months. Parliament can supplement the proposed amendment with a counter-proposal, with voters having to indicate a preference on the ballot in case both proposals are accepted. Constitutional amendments, whether introduced by initiative or in parliament, must be accepted by a double majority of both the national popular vote and a majority of the cantonal popular votes. A central (or federal) government links the cantons into one unified country, but this central government controls only those affairs which are of interest to all the cantons. These areas of federal government control include foreign policy, national defence, federal railways and the mint. All other issues education, labour, economic and welfare policies and so on are determined by the governments of the cantons and communes. Each canton has its own parliament and constitution and they differ substantially from one another. The communes, which vary in size from a few hundred to more than a million people, also have their own legislative and executive councils. The cantonal and communal governments are elected by the citizens resident in their areas of jurisdiction. The Swiss constitution may be changed only if an overall majority of the electorate agrees in a referendum and if the electorate of a majority of the cantons agrees, too. The latter is sometimes just a little more difficult because it means that the rather conservative electorate of smaller rural cantons must be convinced as well.
kapil@governancenow.com
21

Governance Files
Jairam bats for Laila
Rules framed for dog breeding and selling are so humane they even prescribe temperature ranges for the animals shelter!
n April 26, our lives changed for ever. Laila, a delectable ball of fawn, knocked at our doors in the custody of two sleazy dog breeders. They had contacted my wife over the internet and had showed up at our home just a few hours later, sure to tempt her into making a doorstep purchase. Instead of a male Boxer she wanted, they had Laila, and two other frightened
O
Rohit Bansal
and tired puppies, dangerously perched on a scooter and packed into a dirty box of plastic. One was a St Bernard, who looked over three months old. So you can imagine how he wasnt exactly small. The other was a cream Labrador, so tiny and so cruelly weaned away that he couldnt open his eyes for the next one hour he was at our home. We doubt if our efforts to give him water and air-conditioning helped him survive the journey back to his hell hole in Narela. As I write this looking at Laila, sleeping without a care, I know she could stay back more because we couldnt have seen all three puppies go back the way theyd been brought. And we still feel very guilty of letting the tiny Labrador go. He couldnt be more than three weeks old and the sleazy vendors had no business playing with his life, carting him around in the heat of Delhi. As may well be expected, they havent reverted with Lailas papers from her kennel club purportedly in Punjab!
I therefore compliment environment and forests minister Jairam Ramesh for piloting an urbane and humane set of Dog Breeding, Marketing and Sales Rules, 2010 [moef.nic.in/downloads/public-information/Draft-Dog-Breeding-Rules-2010.pdf]. I wonder why, save for a piece in The Pioneer, what is perhaps among the most humane pieces of draft legislation in the works, doesnt yet throw up on Google a single news report in a mainstream publication. A similar fate has befallen upon on Jairams Aquarium Fish Breeding Marketing Rules, 2010 [moef.nic.in/downloads/ public-information/Draft-Aquarium-FishBreeding-Rules-2010.pdf]. Lailas relative fortune is apparent from the preamble circulated by the ministry of environment and forests: Breeding, marketing and sale of dogs has come to stay as a high-level commercial venture in India, involving thousands of breeders and pet shops in the multi-crore industry. Parallely, an enormous need has emerged for
will obtain the (annual) licence from the local civic authority and Animal Welfare Board of India (AWBI) in accordance with the provisions of these rules. All the licenced premises/establishments can be inspected by persons (inspectors) authorised by the AWBI. The Kennel Club in India and other registered kennel clubs will have to insist that the breeding kennels are licenced by the local civic authority and AWBI, while they seek puppy registration certificates. The licencing procedure is sensible enough. Only an individual above 18 can apply (one of the two breeders who came to our home was a minor). They may now
lakhs of pups of specific breeds or half breeds from pet owners, most of whom are ignorant of the basics of healthcare and management of dogs. This has resulted in unscrupulous breeders and pet shops selling pups that are poor in breed standards, unhealthy and diseased resulting in heavy mortality or weaklings that are ill-treated. This unethical trade also has high zoonotic potential (transmission of infectious diseases) which is a public health concern. Besides all this there is an immediate need to discipline the process of dog breeding, marketing and sale addressing animal welfare concerns. The objectives of the draft legislation are: (a) to regulate the welfare of dogs kept in breeding premises/establishments; (b) to extend powers of inspection of such premises/establishments; (c) to establish records kept at such premises/establishments; and for connected purposes; and (d) to regulate the sale of dogs and pups. It is envisaged therefore that breeders
I compliment Jairam Ramesh for piloting an urbane and humane set of Dog Breeding, Marketing and Sales Rules, 2010. I wonder why, save for a piece in The Pioneer, what is perhaps among the most humane pieces of draft legislation in the works, doesnt yet throw up on Google a single news report in a mainstream publication. A similar fate has befallen upon on Jairams Aquarium Fish Breeding Marketing Rules, 2010.
have to ensure that the dogs are at all times kept in kennels/ accommodation suitable in all respects of construction, size, number of dogs, exercising facilities, proper temperature, lighting, ventilation and cleanliness. Importantly, no breeder will be allowed to breed more than one kind of dog. Also,
the breeder will be expected to be knowledgeable about reproduction, nutrition, wellness and care, early behavioural development and breeding ethics. As demanded by animal experts, only out breeding (the mating of dogs, which are not at all related to each other) and line breeding (the mating between slightly related dogs) have been allowed. For the vanity oriented, the news is that there will be no tail docking, ear cropping or any kind of mutilating of the puppy. Unlike Lailas owners, if Jairams draft rules get ratified, the buyer will have the right to written details on feedings, dates of inoculations and de-worming of the puppy and the name and address of the licenced veterinarian who has examined the puppy. Prospective buyers will even have to demonstrate their potential to properly take care for the breed, especially if it is a large one; training, grooming, socialising, veterinary expenses, equipments needs, spatial needs and exercise. Euthanasia of animals will have to be accomplished by a method approved by the Veterinary Council of India/AWBI. Unlike Laila who was dumped around in a plastic box, detailed guidelines have been drafted on transportation conditions, housing facilities, flooring, storage and lighting conditions. As a pure example of detailing (and ambition, given our state of governance!), the ambient temperature in the sheltered part of the facility must not fall below 50 degrees Fahrenheit or 10 degrees Celsius for animals not acclimated to lower temperatures, for those breeds that cannot tolerate lower temperatures without stress and discomfort (such as shorthaired breeds) and for sick, aged, young or infirm animals, except as approved by the attending veterinarian. Dry bedding, solid resting boards, or other methods of conserving body heat must be provided when temperatures are below 50 F or 10 C. The ambient temperature must not fall below 45 F or 7.2 C for more than four consecutive hours when animals are present, and must not rise above 85 F or 29.5 C for more than four consecutive hours when animals are present. Phew! Support to these drafts can be signed at http://www.thepetitionsite.com/petition/241/753/237. n
Bansal is CEO and Co-Founder, India Strategy Group, Hammurabi & Solomon Consulting. rohit.bansal@post.harvard.edu

Whither Green Hunt?
Chidambaram faces some home truths
Declaring war is much easier than sustaining it, let alone winning it, as the home minister is finding out in his operation against the Maoists. And it does not help at all if the communication lines are broken thanks to misplaced bravado.
Ajay Singh
emember the brief spat between Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar and union home minister P Chidambaram? The home minister had accused Nitish Kumar of not doing enough to take on the Maoists. His ire had emanated from the Bihar chief ministers disinclination to attend the chief ministers meet called by him in Kolkata. Nitish Kumar had instead dispatched his top officials. To Chidambarams charge, Nitish Kumar had replied with his earthy humour. Do these officials (DGP and home secretary) go on their own without my approval? he asked, and advised Chidambaram to refrain from speaking in public on such issues. Perhaps Chidambaram needed to be reminded about the
risks of employing bravado at a nascent stage of his war on Maoists. His assessment of Maoism as a greater threat than terrorism was certainly in tune with the line of prime minister Manmohan Singh who had been repeating this phrase for quite some time. But Chidambarams utterances were quite misplaced politically. Given the fact that Chidambaram is a profound expert on law, he must have been aware of the hazards of occupying the drivers seat in the anti-Maoist operations which cover eight
Given Chidambarams inclination to snub even senior bureaucrats whose views are uncharitable, there is a tendency to kowtow to the line favoured by the minister.
states. Much against the advice of the security experts that the primary task of the central forces was to assist the state governments, Chidambaram went ahead with aggressive deployment of the Central Reserve Police Force. In Chhattisgarh, this led to two successive massacres of CRPF jawans. Right from the beginning, security experts have been quite wary of the aggressive language used by Chidambaram against Maoists. Chidambarams machoism has rubbed many people the wrong way. So has his overconfidence in the ability of the security forces to deal with a problem as intricate as left-wing extremism. That the operation became known as Green Hunt despite the apparent lack of acknowledgement by the home ministry speaks volumes about the home ministers assessment of the situation. In his successive statements, the home minister expressed his belief that the operation would succeed sooner than later. In West Bengal, he found chief minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee fuming with anger over his flamboyant statement that the buck stops at the chief
ministers table. In the wake of the controversy, the coordination between the centre and the West Bengal government slackened and the interaction between the home minister and the chief minister became increasingly difficult. Insiders in the ministry admit that there is little progress in Bihar as well since neither Nitish Kumar nor Chidambaram wish to talk to each other on the issue. In Uttar Pradesh, where Maoists are developing a safe haven, chief minister Mayawati is inaccessible even to the prime minister. On the other hand, Chidambarams desire to control the operation came in handy for the states ruled by the BJP chief ministers who gleefully allowed him do their dirty work. Particularly in Chhattisgarh, where the state has ceded ground to the Maoists in Dantewada and other districts and abdicated all its responsibility, the aggressive deployment of the CRPF in the socalled liberated zones turned it into a centres war in which the state has been playing a minimal or insignificant role. Similarly, in Madhya Pradesh, where there are strong pockets of Maoist influence, the
operation is seen entirely as an initiative of the centre in which the state is not fully on board. If insiders in the home ministry are to be believed, Chidambaram is hardly on talking terms with the maverick Orissa chief minister Naveen Patnaik who is not in tune with the home ministry. Except for Andhra Pradesh, where the Congress regime has been pursuing an effectively aggressive anti-Maoist operation, Chidambaram seems to be hemmed in from all sides. Was he not given adequate inputs? Insiders in the ministry feel that the minister is neither a patient listener nor does he encourage airing of views by heads of central police organisations (CPOs). Once he makes up his mind, he becomes very rigid in his approach, says one senior IPS officer regularly attending his meetings. Given Chidambarams inclination to snub even senior bureaucrats whose views are uncharitable, there is tendency in the meetings to kowtow to the line favoured by the minister. In a series of meetings, director generals of the CPOs would only perform their roles of concurring to the home ministers views. Security experts feel that gone are the days when the DGs of the CPOs would speak their mind in presence of even the prime minister. The apparent reason for this meek conduct is directly related to the selection of officers with dubious credentials as heads of the CPOs. Some of them are even accused of fudging their dates of birth to prolong their services. Such officers would rarely muster courage to challenge the home ministers view on operational issues, feels an expert. That Chidambaram wields enough clout to ease out non-conformists on the issue of national security was already confirmed by the removal of M K Narayanan as national
security adviser who was quite often at odds with the home ministers world view. Though Chidambaram managed to ensure silence within his ministry, his overbearing conduct has invited public criticism from Congress leaders. Perhaps he was so much overwhelmed by the unbridled adulation of the media which started projecting him as a strongman in North Block which houses the home ministry. Not long ago he was being seen as a prime ministerial candidate should Manmohan Singh call it a day. Herein lies his political miscalculation. A brilliant lawyer that he is, Chidambaram seems oblivious to the history of the Congress party which is quite averse to positioning a strong home minister with an independent streak. In fact, Indira Gandhi initiated the culture of inducting a pliable home minister which continued during the tenures of Rajiv Gandhi and P V Narasimha Rao. Even Manmohan Singh stuck to this tradition till he retained Shivraj Patil as his home minister. But Chidambaram has not only refused to fall in line he has also charted his independent course of declaring war again on Maoists a move that endeared him to the opposition,
particularly the BJP. This apparently irked a section of party leaders that is not so much opposed to the Maoists as the home minister is. For instance, certain former Congress chief ministers are known to be well-disposed towards Maoists in their states and used their coercive power to win elections. Ajit Jogis sympathetic view towards Maoists is out of tune with Chidambarams aggressive strategy. Similarly, it was not without reason that Digvijay Singh found Chidambarams overbearing conduct too much to suffer. And he wrote about his arrogance and snobbery in a wellargued piece which appears to be an apology of the Congress for pursuing an aggressive policy against Maoists. It was in this context that C h i d a m -
baram talked about his limited mandate as home minister. Though his statement clearly betrayed his sense of unease over his party colleagues sniping at him, Chidambaram is yet to come to terms with the reality that his operation against Maoists is leading him to nowhere. After the recent killings of the CRPF jawans, Chidambaram for the first time talked about deploying the CRPF for a limited operational role. This is at variance with his earlier position where he exuded supreme confidence to finish off the menace. Obviously his roar has been effectively purred by consummate actors of the realpolitik who are well aware of the consequences of not taking into account hard realities in any politically ambitious project. n
ajay@governancenow.com
Obviously his roar has effectively been purred by consummate actors of the realpolitik who are well aware of the consequences of not taking account hard realities.
In less than three months of the launch
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Because we know that both governance and the lack of it impact our lives like nothing else can. Because we are dedicated to looking at governance issues closely, critically, and credibly. Because we are doing this with authoritative reportage, not by PR and platitudes. We thank our supporters for welcoming us with open arms and appreciating our brand of journalism. We hope to sustain this great start and take this initiative for good governance to new heights.
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SABGROUP venture
Maya appropriates Rahuls Amethi

ttar Pradesh chief minister Mayawati carved out a new district in the state, named it after a Dalit icon Sahuji Maharaj, and included Rahul Gandhis Lok Sabha constituency in it. The Congress party, which
politics
Jairam staves off Vedanta
mid increasing pressure from the prime ministers office, environment minister Jairam Ramesh set up a four-member committee to settle the rights of tribals and to study the impact on wildlife before it allows Vedanta Alumina to source bauxite from the Niyamgiri hills in the Kalahandi district of Orissa. According to news reports, the move was designed to buy time to convince the PMO on the inadvisability of the project.
has a history of naming and renaming places and institutions after the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty, reacted sharply. Notwithstanding what the UP government does, Amethi was, is and will always remain intrinsically connected to the contributions of the NehruGandhi family, party spokesperson Manish Tewari said in Delhi.
Nitish reaches out to Muslims, Christians

Scheduled Castes. Like Dalit Hindus, Muslim and Christian Dalits too should be accorded SC status. No discrimination should be made on the basis of religion, he said at a conference of Dalit Muslims who make up nearly three-fourths of the 1.35 crore Muslims of the state. Muslims account for 17% of the population of Bihar.
head of the assembly polls this year, Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar continued to distance himself from the politics of BJP, his alliance partner. Kumar demanded inclusion of Dalit Muslims and Christians in the list of
Trivedi blames Babus
Khurshid bats for women

n a season of demands for reservation, corporate affairs minister Salman Khurshid came up with perhaps the least politically beneficial one when he wondered why there couldnt be 33% reservation for women in chartered accountancy. If there can be 33 percent representation for women in parliament, why not something like that in the chartered accountancy profession too? Khurshid asked, at the Chartered Accountants Day celebrations. The Hindu Business Line newspaper reported that 15-20 percent of the 1.61 lakh CAs in India were women.
ired of the red-tapism in his ministry, minister of state for health Dinesh Trivedi spoke out in public that the bureaucracy is too slow. He said on July 1 that the bureaucrats do not understand technology and do not come up with new ideas. Trivedi, along with the Knowledge Commission, proposed to launch a web portal which would make the working of the health ministry transparent. He sent a concept note for the same and apparently the ministry could not release money for it. Trivedi wanted Rs 106 crore to be released now and Rs 25 crore after five years for maintenance of the portal. Health secretary K Sujatha Rao, however, trashed his comments saying Indian bureaucracy was the most scrutinised in the world.
valley
of woes
Conceived in conflict
If their mothers (above) came into conflict in 1989, an entire generation of Kashmir's teenagers was born into and brought up on strife. Making a difference to their lives is as much a governance challenge as it is a political one

Valley Of Woes
David Devadas
overning Kashmir could be compared with sweeping leaves in the thorny undergrowth in a forest of Chinars during an autumn storm, while watching out for neighbours driving by with tipper trucks full of decaying leaves that they want to empty at the edge
of the forest. More often than not over the past 45 years, governance in Kashmir has been held hostage to politics and politics in turn to the geopolitical questions that hang over the place. That is not the only problem. The extraordinarily diverse peoples and aspirations across the state are a policy-makers nightmare. So is the challenging terrain. And, complicating matters further, implementation is mired in corruption, duplicity and a widespread unwillingness to take responsibility. On the other hand, governance tends to be judged through the prism of insurgency. The absence of violence and the presence of tourists in very limited areas (Pehalgam, Gulmarg, Sonamarg and a small part of Srinagar) is readily accepted as a measure of good governance. As long as this feel-good miasma remains in place, large amounts of money are dispatched to the state. In addition, vast amounts are funnelled there as 'secret funds.' As counter-insurgency measures, such disbursements are counter-productive. They fuel insurgency. The array of politicians, officers, security personnel, informers, media persons, NGOs and secessionist activists who receive such funds develop a vested interest in the continuation of unsettled conditions and therefore the secret funds. Flows of secret funds vitiate governance in two other ways. One, they create extra-constitutional linkages between the funding agencies (whether these be central forces, intelligence agencies or ministries) and various sorts of activists in the state. Access to the centre turns these into channels of disinformation and politicking, which often tends to undermine the state government. Rivalries between different ministries, agencies and forces at the centre (each of which separately disburses secret funds) only add to the confusion. Two, secret funds oil the wheels of corruption, nepotism and inefficiency in the state government, while little effort is made to build a stable economy that might provide productive, satisfying employment. No effective systems of accountability are put in place. Nor are citizens of the state adequately empowered through institutions such as panchayats, urban bodies or the right to information. Since central laws need to be separately adopted in this state, each of these three instruments of empowerment is weaker in the state than across the rest of the
country. Nor is protection provided to citizens against misuse of power, which is often cruel, vindictive and/or for politically partisan reasons. As long as there are no reports of violence and tourists are seen in those tiny slivers of the state, opinion leaders across the country and nave sections of the union government remain blissfully unaware of the frustration, anger and despair that many citizens in the Valley feel. For, special powers the Disturbed Area Act, Public Safety Act, Armed Forces Special Powers Act and, for a while, the Prevention of Terrorist Activities Act are often misused to target innocent citizens. Since most of the abuse is by those who disburse secret funds, and many of those in a position to highlight and oppose these abuses are recipients of those funds, the everyday traumas of ordinary Kashmiris remain unknown to most Indians. The result is that, unless there is civil unrest, even key central officers charged with dealing with Kashmir remain oblivious to incidents that enrage Kashmiris. For example, a second year student of Amar Singh College (one of the Valleys best) was killed by CRPF in 2006. The boy had had the temerity to tell a party of the CRPF, which was checking identities on the bus on which he was returning home from college, that identities on that bus had just been checked five minutes earlier. He was dragged off, beaten up and shot in cold blood at Dalgate in the touristy part of Srinagar. When students protested the next day, the CRPF beat them up inside the college and even assaulted the woman principal. No militant connection involving that boy was established. Kashmir seethed over the incident for days, but it remained unreported across most of India. The sad fact is that New Delhi reacts only when public anger spills onto the streets in demonstrations with confusion followed by brute repression. The current civil unrest among Kashmiris mainly teenaged or post-teen males is only tangentially related with the India-Pakistan dispute, UN resolutions, electoral rigging until the 1980s or even the militancy that erupted in 1989. It is primarily the expression of this generations anger against the humiliations and violence they have suffered at the hands of security forces throughout their short lives and what they have heard about worse torture and rape (in the 1990s) before they became conscious of it. The

Valley Of Woes
(Above) Kashmiri demonstrators set up road blockades after police stopped a funeral procession in Srinagar on July 6 even as policemen stand gaurd (Right). (Previous page) Kashmiri women wail as the body of 20-yearold Asrar Mushtaq Dar is taken for burial in Srinagar on July 7. Dar's killing sparked protests in the city, leaving 45 people including seven policemen injured. anger of this generation has been building since at least 2007; it first erupted in agitations against the transfer of land to the Amarnath shrine board in 2008. There are three key markers of this generation. One, they have grown up amid the violence of the past two decades, largely immune to intimidation through the threat of violence. Two, they do not respect the established secessionist leadership. Three, many of them have absorbed through the net, SMSs and MMSs the narrative of a global conspiracy against Muslims. They believe Muslims are deliberately repressed in Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan, Chechnya and Kashmir. It is a tragic error to view this anger as instigated by Pakistan or terrorist organisations, and to represent it as such in public statements. For, while such allegations rarely fool the international media, they fuel anger among Kashmiris. More dangerous, such statements could become self-fulfilling prophecies, leading some of
The current civil unrest among Kashmiris mainly teenaged or post-teen males is only tangentially related with the India-Pakistan dispute, UN resolutions, electoral rigging until the 1980s or even the militancy that erupted in 1989. It is primarily the expression of this generations anger against the humiliations and violence they have suffered at the hands of security forces throughout their short lives and what they have heard about worse torture and rape (in the 1990s) before they became conscious of it.
the angry Kashmiri youth to take up arms. In situations like last months, central ministers and bureaucrats need to make some hard choices. They can either pander to public opinion across India and the world by trying to blame organisations such as Lashkar-e-Toiba, or they can respond with sensitivity to deaths of nine-year olds and teenagers, many of whom had never thrown a stone. One of them was going for tuition, the nine-year old had reportedly gone out to bring home his mentally unstable older brother, and the three boys who were killed in Anantnag on June 30 are reported to have been taken from their homes and shot in cold blood. One must keep in mind that most Kashmiris see even the deaths of those who were in stone-pelting mobs through the prism of these innocents deaths and of the murder of three impoverished boys from a remote hamlet near Rafiabad, which sparked the vicious cycle of stonesbullets-stones-bullets-stones... According to credible reports, the three boys were taken to an army camp on the assurance that they would be given work and were then killed and buried. Until their bodies were exhumed, the army advertised it as a successful encounter with militants. The apparent motive was for officers of that army unit to claim cash bonuses plus perhaps get medals and promotions.
What Omar
needs to learn
o govern Kashmir is so easily to get stuck between the devil and the deep blue sea. Even in the less electronic time after he first came to power in 1982, Farooq Abdullah took only about a year to become the whipping boy of the national establishment. Then, the trigger was not a volley of stones but tomatoes pelted during an India-West Indies cricket test in Srinagar. A yearand-a-half ago, Omar Abdullah was held up vacuously as some sort of knight in white shining armour, but has overnight become the butt of censure. The irony in both cases is that their people began to revile them as Indian agents around the same time as the Indian establishment scorned them. It is true that Omar has proved unequal to the sensitive handling that the often over-emotional, hyperbolic Kashmiri nature requires. He could have taken a leaf out of Peoples Democratic Party president Mehbooba Muftis book, and visited Shopian last summer. She also tried to visit the families of some of the boys killed this year. Although she was turned away by one family, her attempt sent out a salutary signal to the Kashmiri people. And Mani Shankar Aiyar earned adulatory reactions in the Kashmiri public for speaking sympathetically on national television. There was even a front page editorial in his praise, and a poem was dedicated to him. One might explain Omars inability to show that kind of empathy with the plea that he is straight-forward a no-nonsense administrator. However, he has also failed to convince the people that he is dynamically engaged in development. That is a sad commentary on the sort of media management his advisors have engaged in. Getting his picture published on the front page of Srinagars leading English daily is no substitute for reaching out with courage and openness at times of distress, as in Shopian last summer. The media, those advisors should have realised, is as fickle as the public mood.
Inquiries are under way, but there was enough immediate evidence of foul play to remove two army officers from their posts. Another incident that contributed to this perception of deliberate intent to kill Kashmiris was the killing of a 70-year-old beggar in another remote part of north Kashmir. The army unit there initially described it as the killing of the oldest militant to date. Other such incidents in the past have together sharpened common Kashmiris perception that all the recent deaths are a spree of killings deliberately unleashed by India against the Kashmiri people. Many Kashmiris employ the term genocide. As proof of ill-intent, they compare the more restrained responses of security forces against violent mobs elsewhere in the country, as during the Telengana agitation. Some Kashmiris also contrast the condemnation of Kashmiri stone-pelting, particularly by the `national media, with the outrage that was manifest against state repression of agitations elsewhere, for example, the agitation against land acquisition in West Bengal. These killings have dovetailed with continuing suspicion among
many Kashmiris that investigations into the deaths of two women in Shopian last year were cover-ups. More generally, they are linked in the public mind with the widespread rumours of corruption of various kinds among some of the forces. All this generates angry demands for demilitarisation, and the repeal of such draconian laws as the Armed Forces Special Powers Act. Governments, both in the state and at the centre, have proved unequal in response. It would appear that they are equipped only to disburse monies, preferably slush funds, and to dispatch more troops both of which responses only pour fuel on the fire. A more effective response would involve zero tolerance of human rights abuses, calibrated deployment of forces, sensitive responses, careful monitoring of security, development and expenditure, and an end to secret funds. A battle for hearts and minds must be the crux of any exercise to build lasting peace between the people of the Valley and those in other parts of India. n
Devadas is a veteran political commentator based in Srinagar.
Why we are fuming

If you want to know why a Kashmiri teenager has taken to stone-pelting, you can start by learning the stories they heard in their childhood, stories of how the security forces targeted them even before they were born. A normal teenager's account of a day in his life.
valley
of woes
Shakeeb Arsalan
here's no denying the fact that traumatic experiences and darn tight conditions in a turmoil stricken, virtual war zone have hit the Kashmiris hard. Especially children and inevitably so. Psychologically, the scenario leaves an indelible mark on a teenager and he becomes acquainted with things he need not be; things far beyond his age. On a normal day, before leaving for school, it is habitual for him to ask his dad (quite inadvertently), Is there a strike today? A regular feature of his daily routine is the list of grueling incidents he hears about on local news channels, the radio or elsewhere. Curfew, protests, custodial killings. Ask any tender-aged kid in the valley and he will fully explain to you the meaning of each term. His days are marred by gory tales. Corny as it may sound, but at an age when he is supposed to be playing with friends
without caring for the conditions around, he has to deal with terms like those mentioned above. Curfews in the daytime and sheer horror at night is his quota. To an outsider, he might come across as a detached, unaffected observer of the state of affairs who is more interested in going out with friends and having fun. But, his psyche is deeply affected, though he doesnt show it. And when it comes to incidents such as the ones that have happened over the past couple of years, he shows his dissent. And his way of showing it is: pick up a stone and hurl it with all your might. What else can he do? A recent incident: a group of boys was playing cricket in a playfield. The law enforcers arrived and started beating them ruthlessly. The videos of the incident were circulated throughout the place. Anger piled up inside the meek and tender hearts. You cant blame them for that. An outsider cannot imagine the humiliation felt when a burly, ridiculous looking man whacks you. I have felt that
humiliation. One morning, I leave my house to buy some commodities. As always, I take a short route to the market. On arriving there, a deserted scene greets me. A grocers belongings spilled on the road. I am about to turn back, when a jawaan grabs my collar and lashes at me with his gun butt. What I want to ask is, what reactions do the authorities expect from the fuming teenager. The best (and it would be safe to say the only ) way he knows: pick up a stone and hurl it at the tormentor with all his might. Though thats not what I did. I havent had a first-hand experience of the times when the fervor for azaadi was at its peak the late 1980s, early 1990s. But, tales of those times form our bedtime stories wherein the young martyrs are the heroes and the villains quite obviously are you-know-who. Growing up in the valley, I have had a few experiences and heard of several such heinous crimes against humanity.
A teenager grows up nurturing a sense of being cheated of his right and destiny. Call it political catharsis, emotional purgation or economic disempowerment; the youth of our strife-torn valley is filled with dissent. How does the socalled representative of the masses expect a man to react when he learns that the guy who used to accompany him to the mosque everyday was mercilessly killed? And whats worse, the poor martyr is labeled as a miscreant, an anti-social element. Ridiculous. The subjugation that follows only adds to the fumes which look for vents via a preferred route: protest. The law enforcers always try to choke up the voices of the youth and hence the only ways they can find to give vent to their sufferings remain sloganeering, stonepelting and the not-so-famous and yet popular Ragda Ragda. My mother often tells me a story. A pregnant woman went to submit her maternity leave application to the school authorities. On her way back,

Valley Of Woes
she learnt that her town was gripped by the devil curfew. So, she and a group of people including some women decided to take a short route. On their way, a group of jawaans intercepted them. They were asked to line up and the jawaans started beating them. They hit one of the women but just then a high-ranking officer arrived and told them to go before something bad happened. The pregnant woman in this incident is, by sheer coincidence, my mother and the baby sprouting tiny legs and hands in her womb is writing this. When I hear my mom narrating this, what do you expect me to feel? The very thought of the episode sends shivers down my spine and, honestly, angers me to an unimaginable extent. There are hundreds of untold tales of sorrow that can melt even the hardest heart. Now that Im a teen, it's a daily routine to wake up every day to get ready in time for the college and very often going back to sleep again
You are having dinner with your family when suddenly the mosque loudspeakers are turned on with announcements like 10 boys have been detained by security forces in the adjoining locality. Please come out of your homes. To hell with dinner. These are our friends. Lets go out.
because curfew was declared in the dead of the night. Now that Im a teen, the voices of my mother imploring me to stay indoors whenever khaki-clad brigades are on the prowl on streets are a regular feature. The aunt who lives next door has to keep shouting her lungs out to keep her 16-year old from joining the furious mobs. Particularly the time for prayers is jitters time for my mother. She sees me off at the door and waits till I come back from the mosque, praying under each breath that I return unscathed. How many mothers in the largest democracy (ahem) in the world have to undergo that sort of frustration? The guys who live along the lane on the other side of the streets wreak havoc every day. Very often in the day, they try to target the important-looking fellas (jawaans) roaming about (God! Everybody is an IGP here) from over rooftops. And very frequently, their stones find the window panes of our house in particular (dont know why) and other houses in general. You are having dinner with your family when suddenly the mosque loudspeakers are turned on with announcements like 10 boys have been detained by security forces in the adjoining locality. Please come out of your homes. To hell with the dinner. These are our friends. Lets go out. And the night passes in suspense and anxiety. The very thought of spending a night in jail is harassing enough. Plus, the hound dog nature of those who detain our brothers is the topping on the cake. The punishment inflicted there rattles the very being of the victim. I can never forget the condition my friend was in when he was let off three days after detention. The lanes remind me of Auschwitz. The camps of the exposed barracks that held back men, women and children
alike and the centres wherein millions were incarcerated and gassed. Switch on the TV, set your eyes on any news channel; you will hear Four people killed in clashes between security forces and stone-pelters in Srinagar. That dampens the heart. That sure does. And what irks us more are the statements issued by the government. Controlling mobfury", "self defence", "maximum restraint. Heartrending tales ignite the urge to carry this to the end. The recent killings in Anantnag are classic examples of the dastardly crimes committed against us. What harm could a 15-year old cause? This is nothing but cold-blooded murder. The youth of Kashmir is fed up of the probes, the investigations that are ordered but never carried out. The fake encounters to win accolades. The high handedness of the troopers. Why arent they held responsible for the crimes they commit? And what we want to know is: where to go for the answers? For those sections of society who believe that there is no issue, no dispute worth the name, all we ask is whether they have ever felt the pain we live with every day. The life of the average Kashmiri youth is marred with horrors. Labeled as an anti-social element for protesting whats inhumane, for speaking out against suppression. What do we call the freedom fighters of India then? But what they dont realise is that this kind of crackdown will never silence the youth of Kashmir. This has gone too far. There is no alternative route to peace. What the youth of the state want to say is; We are the future of the society and we will decide its destiny. The hope of the Kashmir of my dreams stands and stands tall. n
Arsalan is an engineering student in Kashmir. arsalanshakeeb.007@gmail.com
Love and longing in Kashmir

A first-time visitor is struck as much by the natural beauty of the region and the pathos of its geopolitical circumstances as by the palpable yearning among the Kashmiris to belong
almost as many tourists arriving into the valley as the locals clashing with the police and this time we did pack our bags to finally board the flight to Srinagar. On day one, after checking into the hotel in Rajbagh, we headed for the Dal Lake. Aboard a shikara, violence seemed a far cry from the hubbub of the holidaymakers all around. When we stopped for snacks at an eating joint on the lake, the shikarawalla passed the time by talking to his fellow shikarawallas who were also waiting for their passengers. While we were enjoying our snacks, the shikarawalla suddenly came to us and said, "Dont throw anything into the lake. We showed him the extra bag that we were carrying to collect our waste. "Janab, batana padta hai (My duty is to caution), he told my father, "Hum safai nahin rakhenge to log kaise aayenge? (How will tourists come if we dont maintain cleanliness?)" The next morning we left the hotel at 7 am for Gulmarg, 55 km from Srinagar. It was not long before the cab screeched to a halt as a group of youth had blocked the road to protest the killing of a young boy in Sopore where an encounter had taken place the previous day. They are waiting for the police, Shabeer, the cab driver, said, They will start pelting stones once the police arrive. When the police didnt arrive even after 20 minutes, the youth suddenly relented and let us pass. Along the way the roads were clean and we periodically came across hoardings that read No Polythene Zone. We reached Gulmarg within an hour and a half and once there we hired ponies to reach the glacier, 7 km away. The ponywalla showed us the locations where several films of yesteryears, like Bobby and Kashmir Ki Kali, had been shot. Is this any
photo: jasleen kaur
Jasleen Kaur
ach time we tried to finalise our first family holiday in Kashmir, fresh violence would disrupt our plans. This summer, too, the news seemed ominous enough. Just when we had dared to hope all over again, the Central Reserve Police Force killed a 17-year-old civilian, Tufail Ahmad Mattoo. The valley erupted and our holiday in paradise on earth seemed set for another deferral. Mattoo turned out to be a friends cousin, making the impersonal spate of violence seem much closer. But hope triumphed over fear as pictures showed
While we were enjoying our snacks, the shikarawalla suddenly came to us and said, "Dont throw anything into the lake... How will tourists come if we dont maintain cleanliness?"
"We keep telling each other...if we live here we'll die a futile death."
valley

Valley Of Woes
Touseef Mehraj
few years have passed but I will never forget that morning. A neighbour, a boy in his early 20s, had stepped out of woes of his home to buy a newspaper. I had gone along with him. I still recall how the calm of the morning was suddenly shattered as the Central Reserve Police Force jawans arrived on the spot and stones started flying in their direction. My neighbour had neither a stone to hurl at the jawans nor any intention of doing so. Little did he know when he stepped out that he would himself become the news that morning. He just collapsed into a heap when the CRPF jawans opened fire. I know it was just another casualty, an everyday happening in the valley, but I still recoil when I think about it, which I do day after day even if I try not to. I am not the only one who lives in such a state of constant terror. Everybody I know, all my friends, shares this state of mind and would like nothing more than to escape this situation. We are simply unable to think beyond gunfire and blasts. Yahan rahenge to fuzool mein maare jaayenge (Unless we escape, we will just end up dying a futile death), we keep telling each other. But I know not all of us can escape. How can the daily wage earner escape when he does not have even enough to eat? The politicians who call a bandh every other day are not concerned about him. The chief minister who keeps provoking violent protests whenever innocent people are gunned down doesnt care about him. The entire administration is to blame for this state of affairs. All politicians are to blame. Whoever comes to power does not want to tell the truth to New Delhi. This probably affects their chances of making money. So even as we suffer some people do want this state of affairs to continue. The Congress government had good intentions and it did want to get some development work done. But it was dependent on Muftis party and just look how things have worsened ever since the PDP showed its true separatist colours. Now we have a chief minister who actually went on a picnic with his family to Pahalgam during the ongoing crisis. Then there is the opposition which only fuels the raging fire. Opposing the government is all right but not if you provoke people into commiting suicide by clashing with the security forces. The forces also need to exercise restraint and try to distinguish between ordinary people and the terrorists. All of us, all youngsters just want to escape this ceaseless cycle of misery. We want to study so that we are able to go to a more secure place and lead a life free of violence and strife. But with all this violence, we cant even study properly. Schools and colleges remain shut half the time and even when they open nobody knows how long they will stay open. The shadow of the gun always looms large over our daily lives. So most of us cannot escape even if we want to. We just feel trapped with all escape routes blocked.
Mehraj is a first-year student of a degree course in mass communications in Srinagar. touseefraina@gmail.com
less beautiful than Europe? the ponywalla asked us, and then added as if to answer an unspoken question, "But the film industry will return only if it is assured that Kashmir is safe again. This turned out to be a shared concern among the residents. Almost every Kashmiri we met asked us, Aapko hamara shehar kaisa laga (How did you like our city)? Yahan koi takleef to nahin hui (Did you encounter any inconvenience here)? and implored us to tell our friends back home to visit the valley. Some hope on this count springs from the fact that at least some Kashmiris have started returning home. The Mirza brothers, who run a cloth shop near Dal Lake, for example, shifted their business to Delhi 18 years ago but then returned a few years ago. If you had come here six years ago, you would have found a jungle here, said the elder Mirza, packing the clothes that we had bought in a bag made of a biodegradable material. Aap bataiye kaisa laga aapko hamara shehar (Tell me how you liked our city)? Dilli ja kar logon se kahiyega ki yahan zaroor aayein (When you return to Delhi, do ask people to come here). Asked why private vehicles had to be parked outside the main tourist spot in Gulmarg, the ponywalla said in fluent English, Because of global warming, there is less snow here. Private vehicles have been banned to control pollution. He explained that he had studied until Class 12. Many of us have been forced to give up studies and take up whatever work we can find, he said, But there aren't many avenues for work. The next day, at the entrance to Pahalgam, 90 km from Srinagar, we were again greeted by the familiar hoarding that said, "No Polythene Zone." A state under siege had managed to fix at least one
problem, I concluded when a vendor selling woolen caps in Pahalgam offered the by-now familiar bag made up of biodegradable material. Journalistic curiosity eventually got the better of me and back in Srinagar I found out that it had been just a year since the polythene ban became effective. A group of six friends had returned to the valley after completing their education in 2006. Khurram Wani, 25, who did his Bachelors in Business Administration from England, says he and his friends were appalled to find out that Kashmiris took little care to preserve the natural beauty of the region. "People said they wanted freedom, but what use would that be without a Dal Lake?" Wani asks, "We wanted to make the people realise that it is we who have to save it." Wani and his five friends formed a group called Green Dream and launched an awareness campaign to make the state polythene-free. We went to schools and colleges and asked students to join in, he recounts, We specially went to the downtown area which has a huge market and where use of plastic was rampant. We even went to mosques as we wanted to enlist the support of all sides. As awareness grew, hundreds of students came together on the streets of Srinagar in March 2009 to press for an effective ban. "We took our campaign to the then municipal commissioner," says Wani, "He assured us that the ban would be implemented successfully very soon and he kept his word. Salman Sagar, the then mayor, played an important role in implementing the ban on polythene bags. By June 2009, the campaign had been fully implemented and the tourist spots Gulmarg, Pahalgam and Sonamarg had been truly made no polythene zones. This campaign got complete

Valley Of Woes
A state under siege had managed to solve at least one problem, I concluded when a vendor selling woolen caps in Pahalgam offered a bag made of biodegradable material.
support of the people at large, says Sagar. The Green Dream team played a critical role in this respect. We discussed various alternatives to polythene and today many shopkeepers and the vendors use bags made up of biodegradable materials or paper, says Wani, The ban is still not 100 percent but we will achieve that soon. We have just started. We will involve more youngsters to ensure that the entire state becomes polythene free. Our campaign will be like the Chinar tree, which grows slowly but will be strong enough to stand the wind. Inshallah (God willing)! As I pack my bags to return home, I realise I have learnt more about the valley and its people in five days than in years of consuming television coverage. I have found a palpable will to live and be loved among the residents. Though I can only carry with me fragments that scarcely scratch the surface of the desperately tourist-friendly facade and even begin to understand the trials of daily life, I know I will treasure this first real connect with Kashmir forever. n
jasleen@governancenow.com
"It all started with the denial of democracy"

valley
of woes
Farooq Ahmad Ganaie
Nearly 20 of our brothers and sisters have been killed in police and CRPF firing over the past one year during street protests in various parts of Kashmir. Why are we Kashmiri youth taking to streets despite knowing that our stones are no match to the bullets of the so-called security forces? The present stone-pelting agitation has to be seen in the backdrop of the events that have taken place in the past 25 years, which have denied the people of Kashmir, especially the youth, an opportunity to express their choice in a democratic manner. Though I was only 13 years old when the state assembly elections were held in 1987, these polls are considered to be the worst ever in the history of the state; they were rigged to the extent that winners were declared losers in a matter of minutes. Syed Salahuddin, the Hizbul Mujahideen supremo, is a victim of that electoral rigging as he was one of those candidates who were leading the polls by a handsome margin, but were declared losers by a similar margin. With the promise of plebiscite made by first prime minister Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru in the United Nations unfulfilled and the electoral outcomes getting rigged, the youth of Kashmir picked up the guns obviously with support from across the Line of Control. Despite introduction of gun in the valley in 1989, peaceful protests remained the most common form of expression for the next three to four months before the then governor Jagmohan decided to impose indefinite curfew. The sentiment for azaadi kept getting stronger each passing day as oppression across the valley reached its peak. Women were raped, innocents were shot dead in fake encounters, and hundreds were killed during peaceful protests. Massacres took place at Gawkadal, Hawal, Bijbhera, Sopore and many other parts of the valley in the early 1990s. I wanted to be a part of the armed struggle but was denied a chance by village elders due to my tender age. They told me that it would be some years before I would get an opportunity to join the armed struggle, but that chance never
came as the situation in the valley changed. The creation of the counter-insurgent force Ikhwan comprising the surrendered militants let loose a reign of terror in Kashmir. In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks on the United States, the resistance leaders changed tack as there were few takers for an armed struggle. New Delhi was successful in convincing the global community that violence in Kashmir was Pakistan-sponsored terrorism and there was little local support for it. Keeping the popular sentiment in mind, the leaders, who at various times headed one militant organisation or the other like JKLF chairman Mohammad Yasin Malik and Zaffar Akbar Bhat of Hizbul Mujahideen decided to launch a peaceful agitation to press for their demand for resolution of the Kashmir issue as per the wishes and aspirations of the people. The government of India, however, reacted to the new strategy in the same way as it did to the eruption of militancy in the state in 1990. Resistance leaders were jailed and a large number of youth arrested. They were booked under the Public Safety Act, which provides for detention of a person without trial for two years. Street protests happen all over the world, but do you get to see people being shot in the head and heart during such protests? What generally prompts protests in other parts of the world such as lack of basic amenities like water, electricity, roads, schools and hospitals are non-issues for people of Kashmir. The valley erupts only when innocents and I count stone throwers among them are killed or the honour of our sisters is attacked. I do not think any civilised person will turn a blind eye to such acts committed by those who are supposedly here to protect us. The officials and ministers in the government of India blame Lashkar-e-Toiba and Pakistan for the stone-pelting. They claim that the youth get paid Rs 500 for throwing stones and have no belief in the cause. All I can say is that they only insult their soldiers who get killed in action. Are they dying for the monthly salary and pension they get or they have a commitment to protecting the interests of their country?
Farooq Ahmad Ganaie, 36, participated in the street protests in Kashmir in the early 1990s. (As told to Mohammad Inayat Jehangir.)
World Bank opens to public scrutiny
performance
Gujarat wins UN Public Service Award
he State Wide Attention on Grievances with Application of Technology (SWAGAT) programme of Gujarat has won the 2010 United Nations Public Service Award (UNPSA). The award instituted in the category Improving Transparency, Accountability and Responsiveness in Public Service by the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs felicitate innovations in governance and public administration. The SWAGAT enables direct communication between the citizens and the chief minister. The fourth Thursday of every month is identified as a SWAGAT day when senior most officials attend to the grievances of the common man in presence of the chief minister.
he World Bank has decided to throw open its files for public scrutiny. The information will now be made available free of cost within 20 days of submission of an application. The move will spell a paradigm shift in the working of the bank which has put in place several disclosure policies since 1985. The banks public information centre will implement the project in
over 100 countries where the bank functions. There is, however, a list of things that can not be disclosed. The most significant one of this is banks correspondence with the government. Others include personal emails of staff, internal debates on a project before being finalised, proceedings of investigations into corruption and internal financials of the bank.
Commonwealth Express flagged off

ailway minister Mamata Banerjee flagged off the Commonwealth Express, a special exhibition train, to spread awareness about sports and information technology. The train, which started from the Safdarjung railway station in New Delhi, consists of 11 coaches out of which five have been allocated to
the Railway Sports Promotion Board and the rest to the Department of Information Technology (DIT). The train is scheduled to stop at 50 locations across India before returning to Delhi on October 2, a day before the Commonwealth Games start. DIT is showcasing the IT Story of India through six coaches.
No transparency in selection of information commissioners

n RTI query with the Department of Personnel & Training (DoPT) has revealed that the applications it has received for the post of information commissioners (ICs) do not make it to the selection committee-comprising of the prime minister, leader of the opposition and a cabinet minister. This, despite the fact that majority of the names received by the DoPT are duly recommended by the chief ministers, cabinet ministers
and MPs. The names for selection are put before a selection committee through an agenda note prepared by the DoPT. As many as 15 candidates had applied for the post of ICs in 2005, however, none of these names found mention in the agenda note which was presented to the selection committee. Though the RTI Act mentions about the selection committee but there are no guidelines about the procedures for shortlisting of names by the screening committee.

Healthy Practices
Attaching wheels to healthcare

Working under public-private partnership mode, GVK-EMRIs ambulance service is seeking to redefine response to medical emergencies in Tamil Nadu.
Sonal Matharu
t SAF Games Village in Koyambedu on the outskirts of Chennai, it takes just a phone call for the three men in charge of a 108 ambulance to swing into action. They put on their lab coats and within seconds drive out into the blazing afternoon sun. R Kannaiyan, the pilot or the ambulance driver, turns on the emergency siren and, on the directions of one of the two EMTs (emergency medicine
photos: sonal matharu
technici-ans, assistants on board), snakes through the narrow roads towards Valuvar Street, Arumbakkam, a residential area minutes away. The pilot pulls the ambulance over outside an apartment building where an elderly man is waving at them. As Chakravarti and M Durai, the two EMTs, enquire about the patients condition, Kannaiyan pulls the wheelchair out of the ambulance. With the wheelchair, masks, two pairs of gloves, and a pouch containing small gadgets to check the patients vitals, the EMTs climb up the stairs to the second floor of the building. Their patient is Vasundhara, a 64-year-old woman who is lying unconscious on a bed in a poky little living room. The sound of her heavy breathing is getting louder as Chakravarti checks her pupils and tries to talk to her.
Vasundhara, who has been running a fever for three days due to urinary tract infection, is carefully harnessed into the wheelchair, carried downstairs, and transferred onto a collapsible stretcher inside the ambulance where she is accompanied by her daughter-in-law. On the way, Chakravarti and Durai put the oxygen mask on Vasundhara, record her blood pressure, pulse rate, temperature, and check the oxygen level in her body. It takes the ambulance a few minutes to reach New Hope hospital, where Vasundhara is admitted to the intensive care unit (her temperature has climbed to 106 degrees). Chakravarti and Durai fill in the pre-hospital care record and get it signed from the doctor; as the ambulance travels back to its station in Koyambedu, Durai calls his head office to submit the details of the case.
The three men belong to the medical emergency wing of GVKEmergency Management Research Institute (GVK-EMRI), which manages over 385 ambulances in public-private partnership (PPP) mode across all 32 districts of Tamil Nadu. Best known by its toll-free phone number of 108, the service primarily responds to requests for ambulances, but also gets fire stations and police alerted if necessary. All this is done free of charge for 24 hours a day, seven days a week. GVK-EMRI employs over 2,200 people and receives about 1,500 calls a day in the state. Due to high demand for the services the state plans to acquire another 160 ambulances by the end of the year, to reach a total of 545. The funding for the project, which primarily comes from the state government, has grown substantially. For 2010-11, the project

Healthy Practices
received a total funding of Rs 79 crore, up from Rs 55.13 crore in the previous year and Rs 29.9 crore in 2008-09. The service handled 3,74,934 medical emergencies and managed to save more than 20,000 lives in Tamil Nadu from September 2008 to March 2010, claims Srivatsan Raghavan, chief operating officer, GVK-EMRI, Tamil Nadu. GVK-EMRI has so far mapped over 3,500 hospitals, including 1,500 private and 327 government hospitals, in order to make faster decisions about where to take a patient. Raghavan says the knowledge and experience of the pilots and EMTs about the quality of service provided by various hospitals also come in handy in making a choice of hospitals. Sometimes the patients attendants want us to take the ambulance to a far-off hospital. We refuse because speed is of the essence, says Durai, 23, who has been working with EMRI for a year, First-aid provided in the first hour after the accident, called the golden hour, can save many lives. Sometimes, the cost of treatment also influences a hospitals decision to admit or not admit a patient. It takes more time to get patients admitted in a private hospital than in a government hospital, says Durai, If the patient is unknown, or say, a beggar, it may even take hours. Private hospitals do not treat patients unless they know someone will take their responsibility. Raghavan says hospitals that refuse to admit patients are blacklisted. All requests for help on 108 are received at EMRIs call centres where the operators have to fill up a form, in target time of 90 seconds, with details such as the nature and location of the emergency, phone number and some landmark. The details are transferred to the dispatch centre where an official calls the nearest ambulance and, if necessary, gets the caller in conference with an EMT. At times, though, it gets difficult for the call centre to dispatch ambulances as
the callers fail to provide sufficient information. On asking verifying questions, the callers get angry and panic, says Raghavan, explaining that the idea is not to harrass the callers but to speed up assistance to those in distress. In critical cases, the EMTs call up the doctors empanelled by EMRI for advice and directions. While the government procures Swaraj Mazda and Tata vehicles for Rs10- 13 lakh apiece as well as equipment (oxygen mask, IV, needle destroyer, pressure bandage, suction apparatus etc.) and medicines, GVK provides information technology and manpower. EMRI traces its history to Andhra Pradesh. In 2004, Satyam Computer Services, the company that subsequently became the victim of a major fraud, started an ambulance
service with a fleet of about 20 vehicles in some areas of Andhra Pradesh, as part of its corporate social responsibility. The state government later provided 50 percent of funding to expand the service to 300-400 ambulances deployed across the state. In September 2008, Tamil Nadu government emulated its Andhra Pradesh counterpart in getting Satyam to handle a similar project under the World Bank-funded Tamil Nadu Health Systems Project. The GVK group replaced Satyam after the latter went bust. The government procured 187 ambulances and entrusted NGOs with the service. However, the NGOs failed to perform and the government then turned to the GVK group. Currently, GVK-EMRI manages more than 2,700 ambulances across 10 states, including Karnataka, Goa, Gujarat, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Assam and Meghalaya.
Looking ahead
GVK-EMRI has so far mapped over 3,500 hospitals, including 1,500 private and 327 government hospitals, in order to make faster decisions about where to take a patient. EMTs also use their experience of hospitals in making the choice.
Raghavan says that the service has benefited Tamil Nadus urban as well as rural and tribal areas. While urban areas account for a large number of road accidents (27 percent), rural areas see a lot of poisoning cases, often due to snake bites (4 percent). Since 2008, pregnancy cases have accounted for 27 percent of the total number of cases dealt with by EMRI both in rural and urban Tamil Nadu, with 1,424 deliveries conducted inside the ambulances. The demand for the service has increased with growing awareness, but EMRI call centres still receive a lot of frivolous calls, says Raghavan. The project is aiming to meet the international standard that prescribes one ambulance for a population of one lakh, which would require a total of 645 ambulances for the state, he adds. GVK-EMRI shows that in providing access to healthcare, a lot of effort needs to be made outside hospitals. n
sonal@governancenow.com
Doctor, heal thy council

CALLING ATTENTION: Sacked MCI boss Ketan Desai may manage to go scot-free again, but its high time we brought integrity back to medical profession
Harsh Vardhan
hatever happened in the Medical Council of India (MCI) in the last 20 years, particularly since Dr Ketan Desai became its president, is definitely not good practice. MCI has a great responsibility of maintaining the standards of medical education and be a watchdog over the functioning of the doctors. It has to ensure that doctors maintain dignity and integrity while serving people. And if someone is not working as per norms, MCI should take disciplinary action. It has to assess and monitor the quality of medical education by assuring that colleges have the right facilities. But MCI has miserably failed in fulfilling its responsibilities towards the medical profession, towards the upcoming generation of medical profession and of course towards people. I feel Desais arrest came quite late. We all know he was
caught earlier too but unfortunately the law in this country is such that he managed to be freed. Not only that, he also managed to come back and acquire the same position, a position of power and money making. He might have used money or power to make the comeback. This time too, I am not sure how much the CBI or the court will succeed in charging him. Looking at past examples, it seems people facing corruption charges always succeed in managing the system and go scot-free. Even if MCI was not corrupt in itself, it was definitely a silent spectator to whatever was happening in the field of medical education; so it will have to share the blame equally. Today an average medical practitioner does not have much faith in the medical associations as they are all fighting among themselves. They are fighting court cases against one another and there is hardly anything that they do for the betterment of the medical profession or for its dignity. MCI has been, by an ordinance, scrapped and a group of eight enlightened doctors have been asked to frame a new Act. The MCI Act was very old and it needed a revision. We hope
these eight doctors will not just revise it but will also try to learn from the past mistakes and form a better council. Unfortunately, in the last few years the MCI and Indian Medical Association (IMA) have been linked with each other. The policies of IMA have been governed by the MCI people because somehow the top people in the medical association need help from the MCI. And Desai was just manipulating all this. He was managing the whole show single-handedly. He used to nominate the IMA presidents. As far as the governing of medical colleges is concerned there are two aspects. All medical colleges are not 100 percent equipped. I dont think that lack of facilities will make a significant difference in the quality of education but ideally whatever is required should have been there. And the Council is supposed to check that everything is available, there is an adequate number of staff, nurses and the infrastructure. If anything is lacking it definitely means that things have been compromised and standards have not been taken care of but not to the extent that we say doctors who are graduating are not qualified enough.
And the other aspect is that we already have a dearth of doctors in the country. There is a shortage of some 10 lakh doctors. So I dont see this as a major issue that there was one teacher less or one nurse less. What I consider as a major issue is that someone who was supposed to fulfill his duty and enjoy the respect of the medical profession did not do that. He manipulated things to fill the pockets of some people. My objection is basically on this point. In the last one or two decades, we have seen that there is a mad rush to become the member of the medical council or state medical council. It is because these bodies have been politicised, not just from the point of view of the political parties but even by the activities in the medical associations. There is a need to segregate them. Also, the mechanism to select members of medical councils, at the state and national levels, needs drastic reforms. There is a need for reform at every stage in forming and running medical councils. n As told to Jasleen Kaur
Harsh Vardhan, a practising doctor, is a Delhi MLA and represents Krishna Nagar.

Games And Us
Delhi, dug up & ready

Every inch of the citys roads has been dug up. Delhi has indeed opened its heart out for the Commonwealth Games!
Bettina Snyder
have been coming to Delhi for the past five years, sometimes staying just a month, sometimes six or longer, in winter or summer. Each time I come back I am astonished by new developments and changes in the city. But aside from the more prominent improvements such as the Metro, more malls and what have you, I notice that certain sidewalks are replaced at regular intervals especially around India Gate and nearby major avenues. This must be a well-liked pastime. Certainly
good business for concrete companies. Even in my East Delhi neighborhood, roads are never in a state of peace. As a frequent walker, I find Delhi rather nightmarish for pedestrians and my husband often laughs at me for stumbling so much: Look down! he would yell. But currently stumbling is all one can do. Delhiites are faced with the mother of all street works. The Commonwealth Games made it possible. For the improvement of the city, every nook and cranny seems to be turned upside down. Not only stadiums and sport venues, major roads and
new flyovers are rising up all around us (though looking far from ready to accomodate the expected onslaught of sportspeople and spectators). No, it seems the entire city of Delhi has been dug up. Khan Market, Saket, South Ex and the entire Connaught Place consist of nothing but rubble, sandpiles, heaps of bricks, gaping holes in the ground and traffic detours. Certainly we all appreciate the beauty makeover of CP and Janpath, but is it necessary to do it in small increments, just enough so there would always be enough construction to make it impossible to go
where you want to go? Just when you thought you had figured out a certain path to your destination, next time you tried taking the same route you were in for a surprise. Trying to walk into the inner circle of CP pardon me, Rajiv Chowk is nothing compared to a hiking trip in the Himalayas. Dont forget to pack patience, time and bring a whistle too. That is not all residents of Indias capital have to deal with prior to the big sports event. We have an unpredictable force of nature to reckon with: monsoon time is here. Last year I came on the 14th of August and the rains had just begun, and in buckets they came down. Forget cats and dogs, cows and bulls would have described it better. This year the experts were keeping pushing the arrival date back a bit further every week, allowing for more work to be completed merely in dust, not standing in mud. Because, fellow citizens, one thing is certain: those sand piles we now begrudgingly climb will turn into evil mud slides washing along the whole length of the street, getting into more than just our sandals, worse they will fill the gaping construction holes when they still need to be open, they will make a nasty path of slime, unconquerable for some of us, and make the city stink to high heavens. Cable and pipe workers might get stuck from their waists down, beautifully frozen in time like the statues on Corronation Grounds. We will hastily run by them waving, busy to save our own mud pasted selves. Major throughways which the monsoon turns into public pools will this year become bogs and swamps. After the BP fiasco in the Gulf of Mexico, this year there might be new wildlife in Delhi: mud turtles, mud snails and mud worms! Or the whole city might be renamed Hog Town: Swine would come from near and far frolicking and lolloping in mud. If people were really daring, they could become events unto themselves and start mudwrestling contests. Especially popular among men when women are the contestants. But I doubt Delhi is ready for that much fun. Mudwrestling in saris could cause Hindu riots. Seriously speaking, public transportation, power support and much other needed necessities will most likely become much worse if not impossible to provide with mud all around. Driving through water is one thing, driving through mud another story. When CWG officials visited Delhi last year to inspect progress on the constructions, they were not amused, the blame buckets were passed around. However, timely completion of all projects
photos: bettina snyder
Scenes from a variety of construction activities going on in Delhi in recent months. Is Delhi preparing for the Commonwealth Games or an obstacle race?
Cable and pipe workers might get stuck from their waists down, beautifully frozen in time like the statues on Corronation Grounds. We will hastily run by them waving, busy to save our own mud pasted selfs. Major throughways which the monsoon turns into public pools will this year become bogs and swamps.
was promised (what else could be done). Looking at Delhi three months before the Games begin, we are not so sure. Dont we see clearly that better late than never may not work for this city and these Games? Now we can only ask the rain gods for a lightly trickling monsoon and hope our oppressed streets will have closed their gaps by October 3. But before then: happy mudslinging. There might even be free stone throwing or marble plate hauling events near India Gate. Be on the lookout! Oh, here is the rain now. n
Snyder is a German-American amateur writer splitting her time between Delhi and Berlin.

Games And Us
Crawling contest
Sarthak Ray
n Aurobindo Marg of South Delhi, speedbreakers are redundant. If your bikes speedometer reads 20 kmph (you have a car, you cant compete), you have probably won the crawling contest. Stretches of the road are undergoing a major makeover, much to the agony of the traffic. Ever since the beautification drive started in Delhi, yellow barricades are the new red-light. You can stand leisurely for five minutes, and almost all makes and models of cars that people drive in India are there for display. You can see the mild tremors on the bonnets of these cars as they pause after the crawl. Chaos-demons dance to the cacophony of blaring horns, engine hums and angry shouts. It may not be bumper-to-bumper all the time, but if the actual signal turns red, everyone seems like he/ she left his/her civil self at home. The time is around noon. I wish I had not got my bike out. Could have taken the auto, says a boy on a bike. How many times have you asked a biker a question few metres away from a signal which has just turned green and have actually recieved an answer? Just as this reporter is about to take a picture, the bike guy crawls a bit further ahead and a cars tinted windows reflect the reporters image holding up the camera, looking silly. Meanwhile, four men, within the confines of the barricade, chip away at the concrete median deemed unseemly for a city hosting a world sporting event. Blocks larger than the ones martyred in the beautification drive sit precariously on the fringes of the median. Irony is that concrete is replacing concrete-with-character. n
sarthak@governancenow.com
photos: sarthak ray
Leaving no turn unstoned

Neha Sethi
photos: neha sethi
arents of kids studying in the Dayanand Model School on Mandir Marg in central Delhi worry not only about the traffic outside the school gate. They also have another worry now. The mounds of rubble, concrete and mud just outside the school gate have become the latest cause of the bruises that many kids are flaunting. The presence of rubble and concrete is a proof that the government is trying to make the city look beautiful (or so they think). The government now has a valid reason to replace all the white sidewalk concrete blocks with pink ones and the yellow and black ones with white ones and the pink ones with ones which are more pink than the previous ones were. They even have a name for the reason: the Commonwealth Games. The government is leaving no stone unturned (literally) on Mandir Marg in preparation for the Games. Be it the middle median that divides the road into two, or the sidewalk block and even the pavement blocks that pedestrians walk on. All of them, without any discrimination, have been removed and are waiting to be replaced by new ones. But the concrete blocks just have one complaint: many of them dont think that their replacements are any better looking than they are. Michael Fennell, the CWG Federation chief, should be looking at the way the citys sidewalks are preparing themselves for the Games, instead of bothering about stadiums. Silly boy! Maybe Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit should send him a picture of the pink sidewalk concrete blocks. n
neha@governancenow.com

e-Governance
INTERVIEW
S a r avanan V
Few states have progressed to delivering e-services

Ramco Systems, part of the $800 million Ramco group, is a Chennai-headquartered Ramco global provider of IT services, serving over 1,00,000 IN e-GOV users operating out of nine countries. Ramco has delivered enterprise software and services since 1989 and has designed and implemented solutions for municipalities, corporations, and public sector units worldwide. It has executed several egovernance projects in India, Asia Pacific, the Middle East and Africa. Saravanan V, general manager (project & delivery: e-Gov) at Ramco Systems, spoke about the company's e-governance initiatives in an interview with Samir Sachdeva: use of IT for wider sectoral applications with policy emphasis on reaching out to rural areas and taking in greater inputs from NGOs and the private sector. While the emphasis has been primarily on automation and computerisation, India has seen significant progress in connectivity, networking, setting up systems for processing information and delivering services. At a micro level, this has ranged from IT automation in individual departments, electronic file handling, access to entitlements and public grievance systems and service delivery for high-volume transactions such as payment of bills and tax dues, to meeting poverty alleviation goals through the promotion of entrepreneurial models and provision of market information. of governance is perceived to have improved. Although, in reducing corruption the outcome is mixed, various impact assessment studies have indicated that citizens have perceived significant reduction in corruption in service delivery.
Which parameters, according to you, lead to successful e-governance?
How do you see the journey of e-governance in India?
e-governance originated in India during the 1970s with a focus on in-house government applications in the areas of defence, economic monitoring, planning and deployment of ICT, to manage data-intensive functions. The efforts of the National Informatics Centre (NIC) to connect all district headquarters during the 1980s were a watershed. From the early 1990s, e-governance has seen the
How has this progress in e-governance impacted the lives of people?
The thrust has varied across initiatives, with some focusing on enabling the citizen-state interface for various government services and others focusing on bettering livelihood. Through the various e-governance initiatives, quality of service delivery and quality
Although policies may have lofty goals, much seems to have happened only in automation and computerisation. Almost all states and union territories have a web presence. However, few have progressed to delivering e-services. Despite these trends, it must be said that five years ago IT was the handmaiden of a few states like Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka; today most seem to have jumped on to the bandwagon. Through the lens of good governance, the touchstones to assess the various initiatives in e-governance have to essentially come from expectations of good governance. In that sense, the success of e-governance is not about technological marvels; rather, it is about whether good governance has been attained through technology. If we were to render the touchstones operational, it would encompass the dent that
IT interventions have made, not only on the goals of efficiency and effectiveness, but also on the equity, transparency, accountability, participation, responsiveness, strategic vision, and the rule of law. In this regard, several e-governance projects have delivered significant value.
What are Ramcos plans and offerings in the government domain?
The specialists in the government domain are based at Ramcos global e-governance competency centre at Chennai. They conceptualise and collaborate with government customers and co-create and implement the solutions. These could be specific point solutions or comprehensive ERP class solutions across various government domains. Ramco has been partnering with various organisations and consortiums to participate in delivering world-class e-government initiatives, and this endeavour will be strengthened in the next two years with a focus on the emerging markets.
Ramco VirtualWorks as the platform to provide the IT solution needed for the prestigious projectInstant Money Order (IMO). The pilot implementation of IMO was carried out in 30 post offices and rolled out in more than 1,000 post offices. Ramco developed and deployed the application using its solutions delivery platform Ramco VirtualWorks. The IMO solution is centrally deployed and can be accessed from various locations using a web browser. Ramcos solution comes built-in with multi-level security.
Tell us about the project Ramco did for UN Relief and Works Agency?
How big is your e-governance practice?
Through the lens of good governance, the touchstones to assess the various initiatives in e-gov have to essentially come from expectations of good governance. In that sense, the success of e-gov is not about technological marvels; rather, it is about whether good governance has been attained through technology.
The e-governance practice at Ramco is handled by a 150-member team, comprising domain specialists and consultants with several decades of experience in conceptualising and implementing solutions in the government space. The practice team is currently involved in co-creating a comprehensive revenue management solution for a large customer. This team has also rolled out solutions which address complex business requirements in the areas of revenue receipting, property rates management, revenue billing for water reticulation, procurement, inventory, financial management and business analytics.
UNRWA required a comprehensive ERP solution to manage their processes. Ramco had designed and implemented a comprehensive solution addressing UNRWAs unique requirement. After implementing of Ramcos solution, UNRWA derived significant benefits in the efficient management of budget, grants and funds, centralised control over procurement, reduction in sourcing cycle times and costs, compliances with procurement processes and guidelines, transparency in their processes, and complete control over the inventory.
Ramco has assisted SingHealth of Singapore. What was the solution delivered to SingHealth?
What role did Ramco play for India Post?
The Department of Posts (DoP) wished to provide a value-added IT-enabled instant money order service at selective post offices, where customers could transfer money to the receiver immediately. In this space, DoP is facing competition from banks and the courier industry. In order to sustain the leadership in courier/mail/parcel and fund transfer processes and increase its presence and customer base, DoP had to implement innovation to serve the customers. To address these business needs, the NIC chose
SingHealth is the eastern cluster of public healthcare institutions in Singapore. Its members include three hospitals, five national specialty centres and a network of primary healthcare clinics. Each year, SingHealth institutions attend to over three million patients. Their A&E departments handle about 3,50,000 cases and they perform over 1,70,000 surgeries annually through a team of 12,000 professionals. SingHealth wished to implement a comprehensive IT solution covering HRIS, information unification and more. Ramcos implementation involved rolling out the solution in eight locations, each with diverse specialisations, covering 4,000 employees involving in the areas of personnel administration, payroll, benefits and claims, time management, employee development, employee self service, and interface with high-end ERP backbone. n
samir@governancenow.com

Last Word
ashish asthana
On the whole Prime Minister, we are fully prepared to host the best Games ever
Commonwealth Games, stop reading the papers, sir. Im here to give you the real picture and the real picture, sir, is not that bad. Photoshop allows us to make every picture a pretty picture. Yes, Jawaharlal Nehru stadium, the main venue of the games, is not fully ready. Yes, Talkatora stadium is the only venue that is fully ready. Yes, we have given up hope that Connaught Place, our tourist showpiece, will be ready at all. But sir, theres a whole lot of stuff that is ready and raring to go. Take, for instance, Gali no. 4, Kali Bari, near Mandir Marg (my constituency, sir). This road has been paved and street-scaped fully. Similarly every unused corner of every pavement in the back lanes of Lodhi Colony, Sundar Nagar, Hauz Khas, GK, Mehrauli, Pragati Maidan and other areas has been redone with red sandstone. Sir, these pavements are looking so beautiful that we can stop feeling sorry for Delhis pavement-dwellers. And yet they say these Games do nothing for the aam admi! Of course sir, when we organise a Games of this size, there will be some hiccups here and there. As I said earlier some big projects are behind schedule and nobody is more worried about this than I am. Thats why sir, I have commissioned my entire Cabinet to personally monitor all the Games projects. My Finance and Education ministers will monitor all projects in East Delhi; my Health minister will oversee projects in South Delhi; Welfare minister in North Delhi. And, sir, guess what I have asked my PWD minister to monitor: All the projects of the PWD ministry! (The prime minister nods in acknowledgement of Sheilas mastery in work allotment.) As for me, sir, I will be handling Suresh Kalmadi and his tantrums. You know, sir, thats a 24x7 assignment. Sir, every minor detail has been planned. We have decided to build 250 ultra-modern toilet complexes. The toilets will be on the ground floor and on top will be coffee houses and shops to help the toilet complexes self-sustain. We want to call them Coffee Upon Convenience centres. Some names like Take It or Leak It and Fill-or-Spill also came up for discussion but I thought
B V Rao
elhi chief minister Sheila Dikshit met prime minister Manmohan Singh on July 1 to update him on the citys preparations for the Commonwealth Games. There was not much in the papers on what exactly she told the Prime Minister. Sheila didnt give much away either, telling The Hindu: I updated the Prime Minister about the preparations for the Commonwealth Games. So to bring you the minute details of what transpired at the meeting we had to find this fly on the wall, which was not easy considering that Race Course is a no-fly zone. But we managed, so here goes: Sir, (thats Sheila Dikshit talking), if you are reading the papers daily and worrying about our preparations for the
they were rather crude. Sir, at every sports venue we are putting up condom vending machines. Apart from spreading the message of safe-sex and fighting AIDS, this will ensure people dont pay much attention to the quality of the sporting events which we all know is no great shakes, no matter what Kalmadi keeps promising. Sir, everything is on course. We are confident that we can complete all the pending works just before the Games. At worst, we will complete them just after the Games. Big deal, sir. We all know this is less about the Games and more about Delhi. I know, sir, people are making a lot of noise about the expenditure on the Games. Some are saying the Games will cost Delhi Rs 10,000 crore. A brand new global city in just Rs 10,000 crore, ha! Sometimes I wantto tell these ignoramuses the real cost of the Gamesexcept that I have no idea either. (The Prime Minister gestures as if to say, me neither.) In short and on the whole, Prime Minister, we are fully prepared to host the best Games ever. n
bvrao@governancenow.com

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Narmada saga: Costs keep rising, lives are ruined and few have benefited p.

Home secretary G K Pillai speaks on Maoists, terrorism and security p.08

July 16-31, 2010 | Vol. 01 Issue 12 | Rs 30

Losing Kashmirs GenNext

photo i m agi ng: as his h as t hana

08 Interview with home secretary G K Pillai

22 Jairam bats for Laila

16 A dam is filled, the dream is unfulfilled

12 Government itself is a hurdle in tackling Naxalism

24 Chidambaram faces some home truths

38 Attaching wheels to healthcare

42 Delhi, dug up & ready

The burden is all ours, Mr Pawar

GovernanceNow | July 16-31, 2010

Halls of Shame Bhopal and elsewhere

Governance lessons from Nithari

6 GovernanceNow | July 16-31, 2010

Tharoor relives Twitter glory for a while

HCL founder donates Rs 580 crore

Raju has little appetite to attend court

HC steps in to assist George

people politics policy performance

INTERVIEW Gopal Krishna Pillai

Do you link them somewhere to the RSS or VHP?

Yes, he was helpful.

Were you able to get helpful information?

GovernanceNow | July 16-31, 2010

p h otos: Sweta ranjan

So, you are in favour of the draft CBI legislation?

You mean to say such attacks are part of the game?

How do we stop the ferocious

people politics policy performance

It is not just the home ministrys function. It will take

Why was the suggestion to use the army turned down?

10 GovernanceNow | July 16-31, 2010

people politics policy performance

But minister, minister, why were you carrying so much cash?

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INTERVIEW RAM DAYAL MUNDA

Government itself is a hurdle in tackling Naxalism

How did this first meeting go?

12 GovernanceNow | July 16-31, 2010

p h oto : t RI ThESH NAN DAN

NAC makes right moves

Rights for the mentally ill

Onus on the tourists!

Maharashtras big step towards e-Gov

A dam is filled, the dream is unfulfilled

16 GovernanceNow | July 16-31, 2010

photo courtsey narmada.org

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Narmada Canal Network: Tracking mileposts

Narmada Saga: why both Kisanbhai and Devilal are unhappy

The second half of the 1980s: Devilal got eviction notice.

18 GovernanceNow | July 16-31, 2010

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Narmada canal network: pathetic progress

Increased allocation for domestic and industrial use

Continued disregard for accountability

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India should move towards direct democracy

20 GovernanceNow | July 16-31, 2010

Direct democracy in action

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