Rajiv Desai: Command-and-control system failure

If you ever needed evidence that socialist ideology, political populism and the utter lack of governance holds India to ransom, all you have to do is study the electric power crisis currently gripping India. For the past several weeks, the country has reeled from outages that last so long that they have become the norm; the few hours that electricity is available are the unusual occurrence. The gap between supply and demand is thought to be in excess of 15 percent on the average: ranging from zero in the case of Lutyens Delhi, which houses the ruling class, to more than 50 percent in rural areas.

India’s power crisis bears examination because it highlights the sheer inability of the public sector edifice to meet the demands of a rapidly growing economy. 

Let’s start at the source. The predominant fuel used in power generation is coal. The mining of this raw material is in the hands of a government monopoly, Coal India Ltd, widely regarded as inept and corrupt. Faced with rising demand for increased production, the company actually told the coal ministry that it is lowering its production target for 2011-12 by 4 million tonnes. Most analysts beli-eve when March 2012 comes rolling around, the company will report a much bigger shortfall. In the first half of the year, ended September, Coal India’s output fell short by 20 million tonnes. Simulta-neously, the government has been unable to secure assured supplies of natural gas or alternative fuels to mitigate the coal deficit.

Power generation is also largely a government monopoly run by similarly inept and corrupt public sector companies. Despite grandiose plans to increase power generation, the government will achieve only 50 percent of its target of the 20 years ending 2012. According to a Planning Commission official, if the power ministry had succeeded in meeting its targets, coal shortages would have been worse.

One of the risks of coal-driven power generation is environmental pollution. The agency in charge of ensuring this risk is mitigated, is the Union ministry of environment and forests, which in recent years has become a hotbed of populism. In 2009, the ministry announced a ban on all mining in forests and tribal areas. It also opposed hydroele-ctric projects in several parts of the country. Its views on nuclear power are also skeptical, led by fears of accidents.

Beyond that, because power supply is a concurrent subject, state governments are in charge of distribution to citizens. They supply electricity through state electricity boards (SEBs). Again, corrupt and inefficient, these utilities are mostly bankrupt entities. A 2001 Planning Commission report on the performance of these utilities says, “It may be noted that the information provided in the report is not always based on audited reports of the SEBs, as the accounts of many SEBs are audited with a considerable time lag.”

In several cities such as Mumbai and Ahmedabad, where the generation, trans-mission and distribution of power is in the hands of private companies, the cost of electricity is higher but the supply is reliable. I have lived in both cities and thereafter in the US, so my first experience of a power cut was in Delhi. Things improved dramatically in the capital after 1998, when the Sheila Dikshit government privatised power distribution. Just a drastic reduction in the huge (nearly 50 percent) “transmission and distribution” losses (theft) made more power available. 

India’s power conundrum provides a snapshot of the challenges policymakers face as they try to cope with the demands of a new India. The socialist command-and-control system simply does not work. As its hold diminished, businessmen and entrepreneurs have shown that without the dead hand of government bearing down on the economy, they can work wonders. 

But what the noted german social psychologist Erich Fromm called the “freedom from” moment, has passed. The “freedom to” moment of the modern economy calls for bold political leadership such as greater, crony-free privatisation and better-trained, more responsive and transparent government agencies.

Most of all, the burden has to be shared by citizens. This is not an area of focus in public debate. It’s not just politicians and bureaucrats who are responsible for taking India forward; citizens cannot absolve themselves from the responsibility of the “freedom to” opportunity.
Here’s what I mean: on a recent flight, as the plane landed and the seat belt sign went off, I was buffeted by a rush from behind as some passengers dashed for the doorway, hoping to disembark first. There was absolutely no reason to do this because in the end, we were all going in the same bus and we would arrive at the terminal simultaneously.  

My conclusion is that the men and women who sought to push their way up front were so focused on their personal agendas as to totally disregard their civic sense. It’s the same for the traffic on the roads, though the consequences are far more dangerous. This extends to paying taxes, avoiding bribes, evading building codes, littering, urinating in public and all the “me-first, devil-take-the-hindmost” attitudes that make it so hard to be a citizen in India, and transform public spaces into disagreeable environments.

(An edited version of this post will appear in http://www.educationworld.in, November 4, 2011.)

Capital Letter

European Odyssey: Paris Journal

http://blogs.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/capital-letter/entry/european-odyssey-paris-journal

C’est si bon…

It grows and envelopes you, this city. You feel like you belong here. You understand, mostly, the language. Give me a month here and I will speak the language fluently. Whenever I come here, I feel the language on the tip of my tongue but somehow can never get myself to speaking it. One way is to talk in English the way my friend Cedric Labourdette taught me. I have learned to do the inflections and the expressions so my English is French enough that people can understand.

We must to continue. We came in the old Orly airport and take some taxi to Rue de Fondary, where lives our friend, the family Labourdette, in the 15th, close to metro station, Emile Zola. Though our ticket-plane said it would arrive at five pm, the flight was late and it took forever to get our baggage. We reach in time for dinner.

“Not so late, like in India,” says Cedric as I suggest an aperitif; the flight was a nightmare and the traffic on the Peripherique was bad. “I don’t really care,” I told Cedric, “You must to give me some wine.”

Cedric is the only French person I know who does not drink wine. He points me to the bar and says, “I must to watch Dominique Strauss Kahn interview on TV.” DSK admits he had consensual sex with his accuser. “Much difference from Indian TV, n’est ce pas?” Cedric was referring to Claire Chazal, the businesslike anchor, who did the interview. He has spent a lot of time in India since 2001; he knows that Indian television journalism is infantile.

We sit in his garden and savor his Dad’s Beaujolais from the “Cru” village of Morgon, made from the famed Gamay grapes of the region.

That is how starts our Paris trip. We are old Paris hands. The joy of walking and hassle-free public transport is a bigger highlight for me than the Eiffel Tower or the Louvre or Montmartre. We walked everywhere, nipping into neighborhoods, darting into churches, sitting by the Seine, listening to church bells heralding the eventide Angelus.

Braving tourist hordes, we wended our way into Notre Dame Cathedral to hear the mass and the soaring “Kyrie.” We walked around Le Marais, the old aristocratic quarter on the Right Bank, marvelling at the renewal that kept the grace of the old and infused it with the excitement of the new.

Paris seems to me to be beyond liveability; it is about an innate sense of lifestyle. From mere shop attendants to artists and writers and intellectuals and politicians and executives and businessmen, they casually exude a “je ne sais quoi” sensibility that is difficult to explain. Old and young, men and women and children, good-looking or not, they make a statement with their personality. 

The scarf is a classic example. From elaborate wraps to a casual throw-it-around- your-neck insouciance, Parisians walk the street as though they are walking the ramp at a fashion show. Except that they appear not to be dressed by a fashion designer; it’s just the fiendishly stylish way they wear their clothes. The overall impression is not of narcissism but of immense self-esteem drawn from good food, good wine, good clothes and a cradle-to-grave social security blanket.

But we were not in Paris as mere tourists. Cedric and his folks are our extended family. Whenever we go in Paris, his brothers must to come and say hello and various nephews and nieces and family friends. It is a warm and wonderful feeling that I treasure. That is why Paris is so special.

We visited Cedric’s grandmother, a regal woman in her nineties, perfectly coiffed and attired, with great social skills. Sitting in the drawing room of her majestic apartment that offers vistas of the Eiffel Tower, Michelin Faure talks to us about Algeria, where she was born. There was in her conversation, even nearly 50 years after Algeria won its independence from France, a sense of betrayal that Charles de Gaulle called the election in which the Algerians voted for independence. She was part of a million-strong community, the “pied noir,” evacuated to France following the election.

The same day, we went to dinner at the apartment of Dominique Charnay. A well-known Tahiti-born French journalist, Dominique has just authored a widely acclaimed book called “Cher Monsieur Queneau.” The book reprises letters from aspiring authors to the renowned French novelist and poet Raymond Queneau. To hear Dominique talk about it, the book sounds hilarious. In addition, he showed us letters from the American essayist and playwright, Arthur Miller, to his (Dominique’s) mother, who had sculpted a bust of the playwright.

Another evening, we met Jean-Claude Barbier for dinner at an old Paris restaurant. I had met him on my last trip and enjoyed an evening talking about politics, economics, sociology and international affairs. An academic, who believes the European Union is doomed, Jean-Claude blames the crisis on weak leaders and ruthless financiers. He has a special interest in China and visits often; here too he paints a gloomy picture, saying the rise of China signals the death of aesthetics. Apparently, he is miffed at the hordes of Chinese tourists, who descend on Paris and show no affinity for the great cultural offerings of the City of Light.

Like all good things, our carefree and interesting time in Paris ended all too soon. I always feel a tinge of regret leaving this exquisitely stylish and intoxicating city.  As we head to the airport, I think to myself: we will always come back to visit with our extended family. And that eases the withdrawal symptoms.

So we bid “a bientot” rather “au revoir” and melted into the mass of migratory people that flits incessantly between airports in a frenzied pace from day to day.

This appeared on Capital Letter, The Times of India Blogs on October 18, 2011.

Capital Letter

European Odyssey: Barcelona Journal

http://blogs.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/capital-letter/entry/european-odyssey-barcelona-journal

How many streets must a tourist walk…

Wrong shoes. Bad mistake. Barcelona knocked the stuffing out of my back. We walked and walked and walked and walked. Mostly in celebration of the freedom to walk the streets, which you can’t do in Delhi. BCN is a wonderful city, as we all know. A bit like Paris. Indeed the French were early settlers. Nice buildings, great cafes, superb metro, the buzzing waterfront, museums, surprisingly nice beer, awesome food and drink Sangria till the sunrise. 

Thought of the word “anomie” in trying to describe a tourist’s jaunt through this comely city. All the other times I’ve been here, it’s been on a mission: a junket, a conference, and several meetings. This was the first time I came here at a loose end. A quick search of the web told me my first instinct about the word was right. Wikipedia says that “in common parlance,” the word anomie is “thought to mean something like ‘at loose ends.’” 

And you don’t get much more common than a tourist, tramping the streets of this city of creative geniuses including Picasso, Miro, Dali and Gaudi. So anomie is the word.  Gilded somewhat from the Wikipedia definition, I extended it to mean “footloose and fancy free.” 

From our apartment in the upscale Eixample district, we walked everywhere or took the Metro. We went to the Cuitat Vella (Old City) and meandered through the byzantine streets of Barri Gothic (the Roman Quarter), spilling onto the tourist-infested Las Ramblas to the Paral-lel metro station and up the funicular to the Miro museum atop Montjuic hill. We wandered the narrow street of La Ribera to the Musee Picasso. Just north of Eixample past the Sagrada Familia, Gaudi’s famous church into trendy Gracia and beyond that into Placa de l’Angel, considered home to the finest of the numerous urban renewal projects the city is famous for.

But how much can you walk? With my bad shoes and my spasmodic back, I was often reduced to debilitation. Had to sit and down a beer, eat some tapas. So how much tapas can you eat? How much Sangria can you drink? Judging from my own record, a lot. It became sort of addictive; every hour my back would act up and I had to sit. A beer or glass of wine, grilled meat and all was well again. Back to the trudge. This worked the first day; after that my traveling companions, my wife and my New York daughter, got wise to it. And so I had to walk hours before relief. 

At times, my daughter, clever young woman, would back my complaint of deathly pain and sit down and have a beer with me. It was all very democratic. Sometimes two-to-one against me; sometimes in my favor. Sat in more cafes, I did, than even in Paris. Ate more, drank more, walked more. The only time we didn’t sit in a café and chose instead to look at a map to find a recommended restaurant, we stood under a tree at the entrance to a park right beside the Miro museum on the Montjuic hill, a tourist trap in the southeast part of the city. We were all three of us, sprayed with what appeared to be bird poop. 

As we reeled from the violation, a woman ran out from the park and said, “Come, water to clean.” Gratefully, we followed her. But there was no water. A man appeared with tissues to help us clean the crap; another man appeared from the bushes with a bottle of water. “Such nice people,” my wife said. And asked where they were from. “Portugal,” the woman replied.

But the poop spill was substantive, so we hopped a cab to go back to the apartment to get cleaned up. “Obrigado,” said my Goan wife in farewell to the threesome. But clearly they had no idea what it meant.

In the apartment, I discovered I had been pick-pocketed. Fast forward to when we recounted this to our friends. “Chechens,” they said. Despite my sheer despair at losing all my credit and debit cards, money, driver’s license and what have you, I could not help marveling at the slickness with which the threesome had diddled us.

As if that was not enough, thanks to my research on my phone, we chose a Basque restaurant for dinner. The street number suggested it was close to our apartment, so we walked. For miles, back to the center of town. It turned out to be an expensive retro restaurant. It was good as we ate the food and drank the Rose Merlot. But as my wife said in a conversation much later, after we were back in Delhi, “I don’t remember the food I ate.” 

Between the loss of my wallet and the fine dining experience, I could not help but feel the jabs of tetanus-shot disapproval from my wife and my daughter. Later, on the flight to Paris, as our plane bucked like a startled filly in a thunderstorm, I thought to tell my wife she should consider forgiveness. But she was fast asleep as I, the original white-knuckle flier, contemplated a fiery death, convinced the plane would crash, crippled by lightning and high winds.

Hasta la vista, Barcelona!

This appeared on Capital Letter, The Times of India Blogs on October 11, 2011.

India Journal

Bangladesh and Our Foreign Policy Elitism

http://blogs.wsj.com/indiarealtime/2011/09/15/india-journal-bangladesh-and-our-foreign-policy-elitism/

 

When Prime Minister Manmohan Singh announced he would visit Bangladesh, there were great expectations. It appeared as though ties between the two nations were finally on the right track, backed by diplomatic and political goodwill. Many believed that during his visit, the Prime Minister would make a “game changing” policy shift in the matter of the international border, trade and especially shared river waters.

Such issues have crimped relations between the neighbors. Mr. Singh’s visit was to herald a new dawn. His timing was impeccable. Bangladesh’s Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina is much more India-friendly than the previous regime. Her father, Mujibur Rahman, the leader who challenged and triumphed over Pakistan, could not have done so without massive Indian support. It seemed as though as the ducks were lined up and Indo-Bangladesh ties were headed north.

However, one of the Congress party’s major allies, the Trinamul Congress led by Mamata Bannerjee, chief minister of West Bengal, pulled out from Mr. Singh’s delegation at the last minute. Her pique apparently was over the amount of water the government proposed to divert from the Teesta River, which also runs through her state, to Bangladesh.

The mercurial Ms. Bannerjee was concerned that her Communist political rivals could make the deal into a political controversy and cause her to lose the support of the farmers in the northern parts of the state.

Ms. Bannerjee’s decision caused heartburn in the Ministry of External Affairs. In foreign policy circles, many termed the chief minister’s behavior unwarranted, obstructionist and downright petty.

The tendency of the foreign affairs establishment to disparage local political sensibilities stems from a belief that foreign policy is a highbrow pursuit best handled by the Oxbridge lot. The corollary is that they would allow no moffusil (local) interests to get in the way of Delhi’s international relations agenda.

Similar thinking pushed Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi into a misadventure in Sri Lanka. Between 1987 and 1990, Delhi sent an Orwellian-named “Indian Peace Keeping Force” to fight the Tamil Tigers, who had fought a long and violent war in pursuit of Eelam, an independent state in northern Sri Lanka.

Faced with an unexpectedly fierce guerrilla challenge from the militants, the IPKF eventually withdrew. At that time too, local politicians in Tamil Nadu had advised against supporting the Sri Lanka government.

The elitist mindset that led to India’s misadventure in Sri Lanka and the subsequent assassination of Rajiv Gandhi survives two decades later. It is evident from the reaction to Ms. Bannerjee’s intervention in the river waters issue.

Neither Ms. Bannerjee’s recalcitrance nor the protest of the Dravidian parties in Tamil Nadu against the IPKF had merit. Dravidian parties support for the Tigers never did get much political traction; Ms. Bannerjee, as always, has very narrow political concerns.

The issue, however, is not about the limited perspective of state politicians. It is about the inability or unwillingness of the Indian foreign policy establishment to take into account domestic sensitivities before they decide what they are going to do.

In 1955, the story goes, Jawaharlal Nehru conceded to China the United Nations Security Council seat offered to India. With his fabled vision and ideals, Nehru realized quickly that India, with high levels of poverty and illiteracy as pressing domestic concerns, was in no shape to take on global responsibility.

Even after 56 years, the Internet chatteratti rant and rave about Nehru’s decision, arguing that his naïveté cost India a place in the UNSC.

Nehru was right. The British government of India was a powerful force, whose writ ran from Afghanistan to Burma. The newly independent government that inherited the colonial mantle faced insurgencies in Kashmir and the northeast as well as the perils of poverty, disease and illiteracy. In addition, while the wealthy colonial government of India played a huge role in the British Empire, the newly independent entity was poor and powerless in the international arena.

Many in India and those who live abroad wrongly believe Nehru lost India a Security Council seat because of his arrogant idealism. The more important issue is that any concern for India’s standing in the world, and its relationships with other countries, has to take into consideration domestic realities.

This is especially true today. With the Indian economy on a roll and the ever-increasing ambit of Indian trade and commerce, the demands on diplomacy have become ever more complex. Diplomats are called upon to explain not just the evident disparities in Indian society and widely reported allegations of corruption but to use their skills to run interference for the growing number of Indian companies doing business around the world.

As they do so, Ms. Bannerjee’s much reviled opposition to the river water deal with Bangladesh is worth keeping in mind. It is an affirmation of what Henry Kissinger said in his seminal book, “Domestic Structure and Foreign Policy”: domestic politics cannot be “taken as given.” The Bannerjee dissent is a sure sign that Indian foreign policy has to descend from its elitist heights and deal with local politics.

This appeared on India Real Time, The Wall Street Journal on September 15, 2011

The Politics of Destabilization

Failed Protests Targeted Reformist Government

The “India against Corruption” campaign focused somewhat obsessively on corruption in high places. Accordingly, politicians and bureaucrats were labelled corrupt. As such, they have to be brought under the purview of an ombudsman; a body whose powers have to be decided by civil society activists, justices of the various high courts, eminent citizens and whoever else Hazare and his cohorts feel should be included.

The campaign attracted members who work in the modern Indian economy and are among the most obvious beneficiaries of economic reform. Bright and educated, they nevertheless overlooked Hazare’s unconstitutional political demand to override Parliament’s law-making powers, preferring to focus on the larger, more romantic objective of fighting corruption. These are men and women, incensed by reports of corruption and hungry to hitch their wagon to a messiah; much like the programming code they write or use at work to provide quick and effective solutions to problems; never mind that they are complex such as rural poverty, urban squalor, entrenched corruption, inflation, economic growth and poor infrastructure. The messiah will deliver!

Now the drama has ended, the question we must put to Hazare and his supporters is this: isn’t the bribe giver as culpable as the taker? Shouldn’t bribe givers also be brought under the ombudsman? In that case, private sector business and individual citizens will need to be included. Thus the agency would be given powers to haul up citizens, executives, boards of directors, owners. Such a sweeping empowerment holds in its own constitution the possibility of abuse.

Creating a super agency that can be abused or run amok is hardly an effective way to investigate and penalize corruption. If you look at recent allegations of corruption in the allocation of mobile spectrum, in infrastructure development, in mining…you will find these are sectors which are still under government control. To deal with this, the government introduced several bills in Parliament. Of the ones that got passed into law, there is the hugely successful example of financial sector regulation. The rest have been stalled because of the paralysis caused by the Opposition’s questionable tactics of stalling proceedings in Parliament.

As the Prime Minister said, these “second stage” reforms need political consensus. These have to do with land acquisition, environmental protection, financial regulation, education, judicial changes and a series of other difficult tasks in sectors like mining where vested interests hold sway and power, where the entire state-run system is bankrupt.

Hazare's handlers demanded their version of the “Lokpal” bill be adopted by a certain date. This was clearly not in the government’s power to promise because the bill must go before a parliamentary committee. The demand militated against compromise, leave alone consensus. It was divisive and corrosive and seemed to target a duly- elected government. In doing that, the Hazare protest revealed its ultimate goal: to destabilize the UPA government. The agenda seemed to be: create an anarchic situation that the government is unable to control it without resort to force and is thus forced to agree to mid-term elections.

What started out as a political demand to carve for themselves a role in drafting an anti-corruption bill appeared to have grown in scope. Clearly buoyed by incessant and uncritical media coverage that attracted crowds, Hazare's supporters raised the ante: derail the government.

Meanwhile, after initial missteps, the government managed to put a strategy in place to deal with the protest. Aware there was a sizable, perhaps dominant, segment of the population that wanted nothing to do with the Hazare campaign, the government moved to rally support. More and more voices spoke out, on television, in print and online, against the strong-arm nature of the agitation and its “with us or against us” stance. Anyone who challenged, as a respected television anchor did, the demands raised by the agitators, was branded as “pro corruption.”

Faced with adulatory fans in designer T-shirts and Gandhi caps, Hazare’s rhetoric became more self-congratulatory, more truculent and even abusive. He has called the Prime Minister names; the people at his rally used foul language to abuse UPA chairperson Sonia Gandhi, fuelling renewed suspicion that the RSS may be behind the protest. The crowds also attracted gaggles of hoodlums and petty criminals, resulting in instances of sexual harassment and theft.

Also people started looking into the antecedents of this new messiah. On Facebook, a post quoted from an article on Hazare that appeared in a Reader’s Digest 1986 edition. Among a host of petty dictatorial pronouncements, he banned the sale and use of tobacco and liquor. Those brewers and sellers who did not voluntarily accept the ban found their places of business ransacked. When some three people were caught drinking, Hazare lashed them to pillars in the local temple and flogged them personally with his army belt.

Many were embarrassed by his low-level comments about the Prime Minister, whom he called a ‘liar.” It is this lack of restraint that he and his aides demonstrated that people began to find disturbing. Hitler and Mussolini used the same tactics to discredit the political process in Germany and Italy. His methods came to be seen as Goebbelsian: pitch it as a fight against corruption when it really is an assault on the Constitution; pitch it as apolitical when it is truly a campaign to dislodge the government.

Hazare's managers became so besotted with media driven popularity that they could not see they were losing ground. The Parliament bailed them out by passing a resolution that allowed them to claim victory. In the end, India's constitutional democracy proved mature and resilient. Completely outmaneuvered, Hazare and his horde will return to the dark spaces from whence they emerged.

Not being much of a chip-on-the-shoulder patriot, on this occasion I want to shout from the rooftops: Jai Hind!

###