Bottom to the Peak

I salute another Indian brain who breathed his last in Concord, Massachusetts, USA on Wednesday, November 9, 2011 after achieveing Nobel Prize in 1968 for his role in deciphering the genetic code along with two others. He was Har Gobind Khorana who rose from a childhood of poverty in India to become a world-famous bio-chemist in his times. He died at the age of 89 while his life-partner Esther Elizabeth Sibler predeceased him ten years ago "who in fact brought a consistent sense of purpose into my life at a time when, after six years' absence from the country of birth, I felt out of place everywhere and at home nowhere". Dr Khorana became an American citizen in 1966. He joined the MIT faculty in 1970 and retired in 2007 as a professor emeritus.

A genius finds a place in history invariably whether in homeland or abroad depending on his contributions to the society he belongs to or to the humanity as a whole. Let his soul rest in peace.

Unworthy World?

For Berlusconi, the powerful Italian politician as prime minister, perhaps only next to Mussolini in recent decades, his defeat or loss of majority on the floor of Parliament the other day was such an unbearable reality that he wrote on a piece of paper calling those 8 members otherewise loyal to him till then as 'traitors' who voted against him.

The world over including the famous Roman Empire, there have been traitors in our midst who take the opposite position in times of grave and adverse situation to the master or the friend in command till then and inflict injuries. The best example was that of Brutas stabbing his master Julius Caesar.

DIFFERENT STROKES for DIFFERENT FOLKS

Look at the plea of V.S.Sunder on "Kings of the Road"

"The prize for exclusivity easily goes to the roadways authorities. I shall substantiate the foregoing claim with evidence from one of the model roads in Chennai, since I am familiar with Chennai; and I am sure that the resident of Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore, ..., can easily identify the analogous models in her city. Consider what used to be a lazy one-lane road called 'Old Mahabalipuram Road' and is now a four-lane toll road, re-christened 'Rajiv Gandhi Salai' and often referred proudly to as the IT highway of Chennai, owing to its being liberally dotted with blue glass fronted eyesores housing offices of IT giants such as Infosys, Cognizant, Satyam. No stone has been left unturned to ensure that the BMWs and Hondas - not to mention the poor relatives churned out by Hyundai and Maruti - can zip through a distance of some 20 kilometres in half an hour. But this 'great progress' has come with a price tag.

"Consider the following illustration of what I mean:

The stretch at the north end of this road (the end closest to the city) has a 3 foot-high road divider for a continuous stretch of about 3 km. The only way to cross this road is at one of three foot-bridges, each of which involves negotiating about 45 steps, or to take your life in your hands, dash across the two halves of the road and hurdle the road divider mid-way (which option is taken by many people with a death-wish) in between occasional lulls in a traffic averaging 70-80 kmph (in an allegedly 40 kmph zone). At a busy 'Tidal Park' traffic signal, arguably one of the more crowded intersections of the city, there is no pedestrian crossing, and many roads can be crossed only if you can join a human sea coming out of the train station at the crossing and simply walk across even as another sea of cars and motor-cycles is honking-away and trying to cross the intersection when they do have a green signal! God help you if you are mobility challenged (as I am), and are not as fortunate as I am to have a car to take you zipping along for anything between 0 and 3 km, pull a U-turn, and zip along for another 3 km in the opposite direction before you can get of this 'avenue of the gods'! What should we do in order to have an inclusive society which recognises the rights of everybody to exist?" (TOI Saturday, October 8, 2011).

Such an unimaginative planning and execution for the sake of a facility to be in place!! Nobody down the line enjoys any common sense and accountability?

God help this nation!

Grand celebration of unsung Indian heroes

Hats off to T.O.I !!

It was a Sunday evening and a national holiday (October 2, 2011) to boot - and they could have all preferred to be somewhere else. But these V.I.Ps turned up because they believed in the cause that the Times Social Impact Awards sought to espouse and champion. They made it a very special occasion where Page 1 seamlessly blended with Page 3 and every other page in a newspaper.

It was a celebration of real tasks performed by India's real heroes and they - India's A-list leaders from every colour of the political spectrum from PM Manmohan Singh to L. K Advani to Sitaram Yechury, top corporate bosses (Kumar Mangalam Birla, Shashi Ruia), activists-academics (Sunita Narain, Madhu Kishwar) and artists (Dolly Thakore, Prasoon Joshi) - all came to the Taj Palace Hotel. Their presence at Durbar Hall underlined India Shining's commitment to India Invisible - a reaffirmation of the idea of India itself.

Two events of the evening will stay forever embossed in the memory, said renowned Magsaysay Award-winning social activist Ela Bhatt. "I really appreciate the concept of linking the beneficiary with the winner. It was a great gesture to make the beneficiaries give away the awards. It sort of completes the cycle," said the founder of SEWA.(TOI, Tuesday,October 14, 2011)

I have nothing to add except to again and again admire the timely and thoughtful action of the Times of India group for having acted differently.

Mismanagement cost TNEB dear

C.A.G says "Utility Failed To Add Capacity As Per Requirement: 5 Projects Missed Deadline"

The Comptroller and Auditor General of India has pulled up the Tamil Nadu Electricity Board for gross mismanagement, resulting in losses running into several hundred crores. The audit report for 2009-2010, which was tabled in the assembly the other day, pointed out that as against a required capacity addition of 3,977 MW between 2005 and 2010, the state added a meager 290 MW. Five projects missed their time schedule during the period owing to improper project management. It resulted in a cost over-run of Rs 392.37 crore. Projects that failed to meet the deadlines include Bhavani Kattalai barrages II and III, which missed the target due to delay in award of work and delay in execution. The up-gradation of Sholayar and Periyar power houses, which were included in the National Electricity Plan for completion in 2006-2009, were not included in the state plan and were not taken up for implementation.

What a wretched system prevalent in the government? The people concerned never seemed to be serious and sincere in their work during this period. What forced them to remain inactive in taking decisions and executing them? This certainly needs to be probed so that such delay and indifference in work doesn't get replicated again and again putting the people to lot of hardships in future.

PAC attacks CAG

In an unusually sharp attack on the CAG, some Public Accounts Committee (PAC) members recently alleged that the auditor's reports were based on "fraud" and "untruth" and must be revised. According to the minutes of the eighth and ninth sittings of the PAC held on October 10, 2011 some members launched an unprecedented attack on the government auditor saying its reports were "politically motivated". The meeting was also attended by CAG Vinod Rai. Some members pointed out that Joshi "had already clarified that it would not be appropriate to draw inferences merely on the basis of some news reports" and agreed to have a future interaction with Rai and R P Singh, the former director-general who oversaw the 2G audit and who had expressed his reservations initially about assessing 2G losses

What a guess in a mess! Who is to arrive at the truth or atleast nearer to the truth? Won't it be a fun in Indian democracy if someone tomorrow proves that it was all a fallacy to calculate the loss as Rs 1,76,000 crore and the entire media hype on this was only a drama of the first order wherein a few culprits were alone tortured and not all the actors who took part in it?

God help us all!

Getting to know the abc of CAG- (The Hindu, October 25, 2011)

"Many of the criticisms of the CAG are based on ignorance, misperception and elementary error, and it seems necessary to put matters in the right perspective."

By Ramaswamy R. Iyer

I quite agree with the reasoning made by the writer in regard to the role of CAG.

"Should the CAG question policy decisions? The answer that immediately suggests itself would be "No", but consider the following hypothetical cases: (i) the financial implications of a policy were not gone into at all before the decision was made; (ii) the assessment of financial implications was quite clearly wrong; (iii) the numbers were correct but the reasoning behind the decision was specious or fallacious; or (iv) the financial implications in fact turn out to be far higher than the assessment on which the decision was made. In such cases, would it not in fact be the CAG's duty as the instrument of accountability, to comment on such a policy?

Further, if the CAG is bound by his (or her) oath of office to uphold the Constitution, can he (she) refrain from commenting on something that prima facie seems unconstitutional? If the government were to formulate a scheme or policy that selectively confers benefits from public funds on an individual or group to the exclusion of others on no stated grounds, or on grounds which seem questionable, would it not be the CAG's duty to point this out?

If the above understanding is correct, then the various activities that the CAG has been undertaking, such as propriety audit, performance evaluations, and so on, are clearly well within his ambit, as different modalities of ensuring accountability. Moreover, there are two other groounds for this understanding; century-old traditions, and international consensus.

Internationally, there are Auditors General, Comptrollers General, Audit Commissions, and other forms of what are known as Supreme Audit Institutions (SAIs) not only in democratic countries, but even in authoritarian systems. In India, the CAG is the SAI. There are professional organisations such as the International Association of Supreme Audit Institutions (INTOSAI) and the Asian counterpart (ASOSAI) in which the Indian SAI plays an important part, and is held in high esteem. The relevant point in the present context is that the Indian CAG has not stretched the audit function beyond the functions performed by other SAIs.

Finally, we come to the question of publicity. The CAG's reports have suffered from too little and not too much publicity. One of the major weaknesses of the Indian system is that very few of the CAG's reports are widely known, and that not all of them get discussed in Parliament. Some years ago, press conferences began to be held after the Audit Reports were placed before Parliament, and that practice continues. This is not a new departure introduced by the present CAG. If the CAG is to become more effective as an institution for the enforcement of accountability, it is necessary that Audit Reports be more widely known and discussed. The people have a right to know their contents. If, as a result of the CWG and the 2G controversies, the CAG and his reports are now better known than before, that is a very good development. If the present CAG manages to enhance the effectiveness of this constitutional institution, the country would owe a debt of gratitude to him.

At last we have got a CAG now who means business and plays an active role.

ARSENIC POISONING GANGA BELT

Over thousands of years, arsenic has been washing down from the Himalayas with the Ganga water as sediment. It remained within permissible limits and did no harm till around the 1970s. But due to deaths in the Gangetic belt caused mainly by the unhygienic pattern of water consumption and poor sanitary conditions, the government and UNICEF sank millions of tubewells. For a few years, the overall health of people no doubt improved. Unfortunately another problem set in. Indiscriminate pumping out of ground water, not only for domestic use but also for farming, saw the water table going down very fast. This in turn increased arsenic in the ground water. The result: Locals got exposed to high levels of arsenic. "In places where there is large scale withdrawal, ground water gets aerated and the arsenic compounds present in the water get degraded by the oxygen. Arsenic also has an affinity for iron, so arsenic-laced water will usually have a yellow tinge due to the presence of iron," Prof Dipankar Chakraborty, Director at the School of Environment Studies at Jadavpur University says after carrying out extensive work in the arsenic-affected parts of UP, Bihar and Bangladesh.

Man proposes, God disposes? What to do? Let the scientists find a solution to this unexpected disease and disorder in the belt.

Economy Slips for Want of Leadership?

As rightly deplored by Abheek Barman in his article in Times of India on Sunday, October 30, 2011,it isn't interest rates but absence of political leadership that is stalling growth in India at the moment. He has very interestingly referred to a dinner party attended by the bankers at a Delhi restaurant on Monday night, a group of bankers asked themselves whether RBI governor Duvvuri Subbharan would raise interest or hold rates the next morning. "The 4-2 majority was in favour of a hold. Next day rates were hiked for the 13th time in a row. Several banks and brokerages criticized the move. After all, 12 rounds of hikes hadn't tamed inflation". At MF Global, economist Anjali Verma argued, "If the RBI's objective is to stimulate growth, it becomes unclear how a repo rate hike, along with the decontrol of banks' savings rates would achieve this goal." But obviously the Bank's primary interest now is to tame inflation. And by Thursday, when food inflation numbers came in at 11% plus, ripples of worry spread out across the political system. "Higher or lower growth worries business leaders and economists. High inflation eats away at everyone's income. Prices have to cool well before elections start," said a senior Congress politician.

Dr Manmohan Singh is confronted with more and more nerve-breaking issues on daily basis like in the case of graft allegations swallowing ministers one by one in his government. "His ability to over-rule cabinet colleagues, as he did in 2010 when pushing through subsidy cuts, has weakened. And the perception that Singh stood by as his cabinet colleagues captured policy-making has definitely hurt him," writes Dubey. He further indicates that three options are being discussed: First, status quo with Singh as PM and the government muddling through second, a new PM with A K Antony or long-shot Meira Kumar as candidates, and finally, to get Rahul Gandhi into the top job.

His analysis seems to be correct and the way the Indian leadership is received and respected in international circles also points to this reality. The sooner this issue is tackled by the party and the government the better would be for this country and the economy.

Desi companies paying lesser bribes?

When it comes to companies bribing public officials when doing business overseas, India's score with 7.5 points is 19th, while China (6.5 points) and Russia (6.1 points) fared the worst at the 27th and 28th positions in ranking respectively. In this year's list, the Netherlands and Switzerland have been ranked together on top with 8.8 points each - indicating that companies from these countries were the least likely to pay a bribe while doing business abroad.. "Bribing public officials when doing business abroad is a regular occurrence," Transparency International admits.

It seems bribery is an essential ingredient of overseas business in most of the countries!

Modern Face of Illegal Insider Trading

The fallen (Galleon Group) hedge fund billionaire Raj Rajatatnam received the longest prison sentence on record (11-year term) along with a fine of $ 10 million for insider trading on Thursday (October 13, 2011), a watershed moment in the US federal government's aggressive two-year campaign to root out the illegal exchange of confidential information on Wall Street. This case will be the wake-up call for all those who want to pursue profit through corrupt means.

In keeping with the federal sentencing guidelines passed in 1987 the judgments these days are quite severe in awarding prison terms for white-collar criminals.

A similar trend in Indian democracy is preferred in the case of those civil servants who work for the self-interest of the top politicians by mortgaging their consciousness and the public interest day-in and day-out. The problem would be how to collect evidence and prosecute those individuals with long-term sentences befitting the quantum of illegal sums cornered by such persons while in office. It is possible only when the higher judiciary gains courage and concludes criminal cases in the least time-frame.