Land Acquisition: Two Standing Committees, Pole Postures

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In forty-four months, the standing committees of Parliament which examined the land acquisition bills have done an about turn on the issue of the state securing land for privately-owned and operated infrastructure. The previous Lok Sabha's standing committee on rural development scrutinized an amendment bill to the land acquisition act of 1984 and gave a report in October 2008. The bill had proposed that for private projects with substantial public benefits, including infrastructure, seventy per cent of land should be bought on the basis of negotiations and the state could step in for acquiring the rest. This was considered necessary to ensure contiguity of plots and to prevent holdouts, that is, a minority of land owners putting a project at risk by not parting with land, or seeking an exorbitant price. Landowners were to be compensated for such expropriation at one and a half times the highest....

Politicians use Ambedkar cartoon as ploy to denigrate accountability-seekers

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The Ambedkar cartoon controversy is not only an attempt by the votaries of Dalit politics to keep their icons beyond scrutiny, but also a ploy by politicians, including those in office at the centre to denigrate those that are trying to hold it accountable, though there is also genuine concern among some lawmakers about the possibility to caricatures in textbooks breeding cynicism in youth about democratic politics. An analysis of the debates in the Lok Sabha that took place on the May 11 and 14 shows that while the immediate provocation was the 1949 cartoon by Shankar Pillay in the Class XI political science textbook, most of the speakers were concerned about the less than flattering portrayal of politicians and the effect this would have on impressionable minds. That cartoon shows BR Ambedkar flogging the snail he is riding, and Jawaharlal Nehru, whip in hand, goading Ambedkar to get....

Time to pension off the professional agitators

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The right to information, the right to work, the right to education, the right to food and now the right to pension. Watching Sagarika Ghose's Face the Nation debate on the latest demand, it was clear that hoping to satisfy our civil society groups is like trying to catch up with the horizon: the closer you get, the farther it recedes. The NGOs are getting increasingly audacious in their demands. They want the monthly pension to be Rs 2,000. This is ten times the amount that the Central government pays. They want the age limit lowered to 55 years at a time when one would expect people to work longer because of increased life expectancy. It should be universal, not selective and it should be a right, an obligation on the state, not an optional entitlement, they say. The tab: Rs 2 lakh crore or two per cent....

Aamir's Satyamev Jayate is indictment of TV journalism and call for renewal

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Just when you thought that the news media was dissipating itself in the purposeless eddies of irrelevance, trying to keep people excited without engaging them here comes Aamir Khan with an exquisite piece of journalism. Satyamev Jayate is a television program which is ambitious in scope, thorough in research, unrelenting in questioning, singular in focus, simple in presentation and yet searing in its indictment - of much of journalism as it is currently practiced, of the medical profession, of the keepers of law, the deliverers of justice and the political leadership. Khan has shown that there is not dearth of issues, only of imagination and that the television rating points game can be played without social regression or dumbing down. Who would have thought that an issue like female foeticide could be the stuff of prime time television and keep the country riveted? Khan is dramatic without being....

Relax, Bofors was not all loot-and-scoot

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If one were to take a purely transaction-oriented approach to the Bofors deal, one will wonder what the fuss is all about. Even Sten Lindstrom, the Swedish police office who blew the Rs 64 crore payoff cover-up, says the 155 mm field gun was good. The howitzers proved their worth during the Kargil war with their shoot and scoot capability. Chitra Subramaniam-Duella, the journalist who investigated the story, says the price that India paid - $1.3 billion - for the 415 guns was competitive. India was not sold a lemon. Our soldiers did not come to harm. National security was not compromised. Should we worry about the payoff? That depends on how you view it. If you call it a bribe you will get agitated. The presumption then is that the payoff was an imposition on the Indian taxpayer and if it were not paid we would have got....

Keep the burqa, remove the veil

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My first reaction on reading the news that St Aloysius College in Mangalore had restricted the use of burqa was that it was unnecessarily provocative. I had studied in the college many moons ago. It has a reputation for discipline but I do not recall the Jesuits who ran it as punctilious sticklers for rules. We thought they were broad minded unlike the prissy principal of the all-girls St Agnes College who was mean enough to adjourn classes earlier than usual one afternoon so that few would greet the customary victory procession that we took out after the student union election. But that diabolic game failed as St Agnes girls lined up the street rather than go home early! Some of our teachers were academically accomplished. Our principal, a priest, was a well-known botanist, and engaged in research, which greatly elevated him in our eyes. The Tamil accountancy teacher was....

A vote for BJP's non-performance in Delhi's municipal elections

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The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) can claim that its victory in the Delhi municipal elections is an endorsement of its performance but as a person who takes a keen interest in the city's civic affairs, I see it more a comment on the Congress Party which has grown so fat and lazy that it could not capitalise on the BJP's poor performance and inspire voters with an agenda of change. Among the metropolitan municipal corporations, Delhi's is perhaps the most dysfunctional. The budgets of the Central and state governments are available for public scrutiny. Not the budget of the Delhi municipal corporation - you will not find it on its website, so opaque is its functioning. In the major cities of the world, as basic a task as garbage collection happens like clockwork. In Delhi, it is an activity fraught with constant anxiety for the citizen. About ten....

Why the God-damned NGOs should continue to crow at Koodankulam

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It would be a euphemism to say that I hate non-governmental organisations. They are generally anti-development, self-righteous, obdurate, ill-liberal, conspiratorial, secretive and even plain deceptive: professing to champion the cause of the people while being in the pay of special interest groups. They usually have a problem for every solution. So it is good that Tamil Nadu government has cracked down on the busy bodies opposing the nuclear stations at Koodankulam. A country with India's energy needs cannot depend on fossil fuel alone. Even the Church groups have fallen silent. The priests should never have meddled in the first place. If there were concerns about safety, the lay leadership of parishioners around the plant should have raised them. The Church should strictly keep out of the business of the state. The Central government has shown spine and sent some troublemakers packing. That is a change from....

A Tamil news channel walks alone and wins

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Tamil Nadu's latest offering, PuthiyaThalaimurai ('new generation') topped the charts within a few weeks of launch and has sustained the lead in a television news landscape nurtured with political funds and populated by channels tilting towards one political party or the other. News director S Srinivasan attributed viewer approval of the Chennai-based channel to a mix of professionalism and independent reportage which has enabled it to upstage Sun News, the dominant incumbent, in audience share despite lacking its advertising heft and distribution clout. Luck also played a role as the newly elected AIADMK government revived the state-owned Arasu cable TV network after the Assembly elections and provided the channel with a platform to reach rural households. Srinivasan, or Srini as he likes to be called, was speaking at an event, 'Where's the Party?' organized in New Delhi on Thursday, 22 March by the Foundation for Media Professionals, an organization devoted....

Why not Delhi-Mumbai in 5 hours by train?

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Indians are big losers because the Indian Railways lack drive, ambition and imagination. How? Delhi and Mumbai (1,380 km) are about as distant as Beijing and Shanghai (1,320 km). On 30th June last year, China Rail inaugurated a high-speed service which compressed travel time between the two cities to just five hours. A second-class seat on the train costs Rs 4,400 (CNY 550) and a first class seat Rs 7,500 (CNY 935). Airlines charge Rs 6,500 for the Delhi-Mumbai route. There is little advantage in flying if flight time of two hours, an equal amount of reporting time and the time spent on arriving at the airport and reaching the destination at the other end are added (because airports tend to be out of the city). Super fast trains would knock the stuffing out of air carriers. They could easily capture most of the 64,000 weekly air seats. The Center....