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HIMALAYAN MIRROR
GANGTOK, SATURDAY 28 FEBRUARY 2015
Running late
ENGLISH DAILY PUBLISHED FROM GANGTOK
HIMALAYAN MIRROR
FEBRUARY 28 2015 VOL 9 NO. 167
Sword of Damocles:
Government must
stop defending and
start deleting section
66A of IT Act
Supreme Court is hearing a bunch of petitions
challenging the
constitutional validity of section 66A of the IT
Act, on the ground that it violates our fundamental right to freedom of speech and
expression. When in opposition, BJP members
often made this argument themselves. The party’s
IT cell went as far as to say that the draconian
nature of this clause demonstrates a fascist mindset and seeks to enforce Emergency-like curbs on
free speech in cyberspace. But with BJP ruling,
that position’s been turned on its head. The Centre
has told the court that because the reach and
impact of internet is wider than print and TV,
restrictions on it should be higher.
But it’s precisely because communication
through the internet is now becoming inseparable
from ordinary, everyday, ubiquitous conversation
that government must surrender its draconian
power to check it. Section 66A empowers the law
to put anybody in jail for being offensive or causing annoyance or inconvenience while using IT.
Look around you – how many people would be
incarcerated if this applied to day-to-day conversation? When IT devices perform the same function, these should get the same freedoms as traditional communication.
The apex court is correct in observing that the
term ‘offensive’ is vague and subjective. This
charge could apply to a sweeping set of communication but the law hounds only a select set – which
makes its application necessarily arbitrary and
capricious, like a sword of Damocles hanging
over everyday life. A minister can call minorities
haramzade and there will be no consequences, but
caricaturing a CM gets a cartoonist arrested.
Contrary to the promise of ‘minimum government, maximum governance’, section 66A represents minimum freedom, maximum arbitrariness.
Government must stop defending and start deleting it.
Towards
unfreedom
In what could be a new instalment of “Histories
Mysteries”, Congress vice president Rahul Gandhi
has chosen to take a “sabbatical”. In years to
come, this may be remembered as one of the great
political enigmas — like where did Hitler spend
his last days, what did Marilyn Monroe know, who
was behind the Purulia arms drop, really? There is
plenty of speculation. But if you’re picturing sabbaticals as one long Sunday, spent sunning on a
deck chair, back the truck up.
Yes, it is reported that god created the world in
six days and took to his metaphorical deck chair
on the seventh, giving rise to the sabbath, or the
day of rest. The word “sabbatical” probably draws
its roots from the Hebrew “shabbat (release)” and
the Latin “sabbaticus (to cease)”. And in Mosaic
law, a “sabbatical year” was the seventh year,
when the land was not to be tilled, and debtors and
slaves were to be released. All of this might suggest pina coladas and feudalism.
But the sabbatical was reinvented in the late19th century, when it became a year of absence
granted to researchers. The trend soon spread and
taking a sabbatical seemed to convey a degree of
political chic. “Anonymity is a therapeutic treatment for tired politicians,” said then Singapore
Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew, wintering in
Harvard in 1968. During his month there, Lee is
said to have picked up tips on the “development of
our economy”, security and how new nation states
became a “modernised community”. But if North
Korean leader Kim Jong-un was on a sabbatical
when he disappeared from public view last year,
he probably wasn’t taking a refresher course in
governance.
So will the pina coladas versus governance mystery ever be solved? Time or subsequent events
will tell. In the meantime, Indian politics might
have found its new favourite euphemism — the
sabbatical.
Do the difficult
things while they are
easy and do the great
things while they are
small. A journey of a
thousand miles must
begin with a single
step.
Lao Tzu
-L
By:Nitish Kumar
S
uresh Prabhu , the
railway minister of
India, is a good man
who has been my colleague in the Atal Bihari
Vajpayee cabinet. I congratulate him on presenting his maiden railway
budget. The presentation
of this year’s rail budget
saw a marked departure
from the past. The budget
speech did not inform
Parliament about last
year’s financial performance in detail. In addition, there was no mention of a concrete action
plan, time-bound priorities or targets. The most
important objective for
the Indian Railways
today is to break away
from the incremental
story of the past and
recognise the agenda of
the future. The rail budget missed an ideal
opportunity to lay out the
agenda for the future in a
concrete manner. Instead,
it was a statement of lofty
intent.
I say this from personal
experience. While presenting the rail budget for
2001-02, I had stated that
the railways “needs to
develop a market-oriented and customer-friendly
outlook”. The focus was
to make the Indian
Railways people-friendly
through better management, safety standards,
upkeep, innovations and
response rate. A special
railways safety fund of
Rs 17,000 crore was created. This fund played a
major role in upgrading
and improving structures
such as overhead bridges,
thereby significantly raising safety levels. In 2002,
the Indian Railways
began producing Rail
Neer to meet the need for
clean drinking water.
Freight rates and passenger fares were ratio-
By :Akhileshwar
Sahay
S
ome budgets are
called “dream budgets”. Some make
you dream. But this first
full-year railway budget
of the Narendra Modi
government simply puts
the “bleeding railways
back on track”. All credit
goes to Railway Minister
Suresh Prabhakar Prabhu
for not swaying to the
populist agenda, for
bringing sanity back to
this annual exercise and
for bringing the longneglected “railway customer” back on centrestage.
The following bold acts
make this budget special.
One, by not introducing
new trains and not
announcing new projects,
Prabhu has taken the first
baby-step towards reversing the past missteps of
his
predecessors.
Mushrooming announcements of hundreds of new
trains in annual rail budgets have choked the network, without commensurate benefit to passengers, and a plethora of
past unviable projects on
populist considerations
have saddled the Indian
Railways (IR) with a
throw-forward of more
than Rs 5 lakh crore
worth of non-executable
projects. His next step
should be to discontinue
trains that are not patronised and abolish projects
that are not needed, which
have not crossed the starting line for decades.
Two, in the past one-anda-half decades of anchoring of the rail budget on
visual media and commenting on it in print, this
EDITORIAL
nalised. The catering system was transferred to the
Indian Railway Catering
and Tourism Corporation
and transformed. For the
first time, a policy to
involve the private sector
to increase the efficiency
of the freight system was
action plan is necessary.
This is where the rail
budget for 2015-16 does
not
show
adequate
promise.
It depends far too much
on debt from multilateral
and bilateral agencies and
the participation of pri-
get less funds than
before. When I was rail
minister, we had developed and successfully
implemented a participatory model under which
the Indian Railways
made partial contribution
to specific projects pro-
connectivity in the country increasing? The
answers to such questions
not only construct the
narrative of the Indian
Railways but also of life
in India.
The roadmap of investments and infrastructure
adopted. The year 2002
was dedicated to the rail
traveller and declared the
“passenger
amenities
year”, while 2003 was the
“customer satisfaction
year”. Innovative and
customer-friendly measures to improve the ticketing system were incorporated in the next year’s
rail budget. During my
time as rail minister, an
Anti Collision Devicebased system was also
introduced to enhance
safety. Since 2001, the
Indian Railways has
shown a remarkable turnaround, without raising
passenger fares, by
improving the operating
ratio. So more than positive intent, a well-defined
vate players. In the past,
these attempts have not
proved to be scalable.
Investors often prefer
developed states over
poor ones. So, a plan that
banks on outside lenders
and investors could tilt
the scale against poor and
backward states, where
investors do not have
exposure. Further, the
model of partnerships
with the states is also not
clear and rests on unsubstantiated assumptions.
One such assumption is
that the states have
gained
significant
resources from the 14th
Finance
Commission
award. I can state with
much
disappointment
that Bihar, for one, might
posed by the states, in
accordance with their
sectoral priority. This led
to the successful completion of several projects
across the country.
The Indian Railways is a
living narrative of how
India works. So, this narrative must tell the story
of the nation. The plot of
this story is contained in
some simple questions.
Do trains run on time? Is
it safe to travel by train,
especially for women?
Are stations and trains
hygienic? Do they have
access to clean drinking
water? Do people respect
and value public property? Is the railways adequately responding to the
passenger load? Is overall
for the railways must
account for these fundamental questions. In
addition, it has to be
futuristic. India is a
young nation where people are constantly on the
move for education,
employment and other
purposes. And they
demand uninhibited digital connctivity, alongside
fundamental guarantees
of timeliness, safety,
hygiene and accountability. These aspects also
play a critical role in
strengthening the professional and business environment in the country.
So what does the rail
budget offer on these
fronts? At best, a sketchy
outline without a con-
member of the commentariat finds it refreshing to
see a budget with a fiveyear vision, with four
thought-through goals,
five cogent guiding principles and 11 thrust areas
of action. The challenge
through
insufficient
“internal accruals, gross
budgetary support and
market
borrowing
through the IRFC (Indian
Railway
Finance
Corporation Ltd) and
non-starter PPPs”, Prabhu
endemic
corruption,
departmental silos, and
silos within silos have
haemorrhaged the railways for a long time.
Indeed, the first committee in independent India
to investigate corruption,
fast and decisive action.
The time has come for the
opaque and unwieldy
Railway Board to become
nimble and shed many of
the functions it has
usurped over time but
which do not, rightfully,
before Prabhu now is to
ensure that these are
translated into concrete
action, with measurable
results and time-bound
execution.
Three, by significantly
enhancing budgetary provisions for increasing the
capacity of the network,
in place of announcing
more unviable projects,
and by significantly
improving
passenger
amenities, with much
greater focus and outlay
on enhancing safety,
including the elimination
of level crossings (notorious killer spots), Prabhu
has set his priorities right.
Four, by breaking away
from the traditional
mould of financing railway plan expenditure
has unleashed the power
of innovative financing,
including partnering with
beneficiary states, PSUs,
major customers, multilateral and bilateral institutions, annuity, funding
from other sources and
reliance on equity. The
railways’ need of plan
funds is exponential, and
all sources put together
will not suffice. It is in
this context that the new
financing cell in the
Railway Board is a positive step. But the key will
be to put the right people,
including
external
resources, in the saddle to
fight the devil of finances.
Five, over-centralisation,
opaqueness and extensive
delay in decision-making,
systemic inefficiencies,
headed by J.B. Kripalani,
was set up in the 1950s to
reduce the high rent-seeking in IR. Six decades
have gone by and not
much has changed. This
puts in perspective the
focus in the budget on a
new paradigm of governance, extensive management reforms and transparency across all levels.
Recent decentralisation of
works and stores tenders
to general managers is a
welcome first step and is,
indeed, pathbreaking. But
a lot more is needed. The
task before Prabhu is
unenviable. Entrenched
vested interests can successfully torpedo his
reform process essentials
unless this intent is
doggedly pursued with
belong to it.
Six, the railways accounting system is not in sync
with the needs of a commercial organisation. The
institution today is unable
to know the true cost of
the various services being
provided by it. In the past,
there have been many
false hopes of an accounting reform. But the
renewed focus on bringing best practices to
accounting that fit into the
organisational requirement is a welcome step.
The caveat is that the
astute chartered accountant in Prabhu will need to
take this critical reform to
its logical end at the earliest.
Seven, the boldest measure in the budget is to
Chugging ahead
crete plan. Let us take the
case of timeliness. How
does the budget address
this issue? Informing
passengers about train
schedules and delays
through SMS alerts and
apps is a welcome step
but it does not replace the
need for trains to run on
time. As for connectivity,
the budget speaks about
last
mile
projects.
However, it does not
commit to the timebound completion of the
various such projects that
have been pending for a
long time — including
many critical ones in
Bihar. Also, in the spirit
of fairness, savings from
reduced fuel costs should
have been passed on to
consumers.
The railways must leverage the comparative
advantages of the states
while developing a longterm roadmap. For example, Bihar is the greatest
contributor to the workforce and is likely to
remain so. The state is
also poised to lead the
second
Green
Revolution. However,
the investment approach
outlined in the rail budget does not adequately
incorporate ways to build
on these advantages. For
instance, it would be a
good idea to develop new
education- and trainingrelated institutions in
states that have a large
workforce and low institutional presence.
Summing up, the rail
budget is incomplete. It
is a proposal of intent at a
time when the people of
India are eagerly awaiting action, not merely a
statement of purpose.
The ability to transform
intent into concrete
action is what the nation
wants — and what the
NDA government has not
delivered.
(Courtesy : Indian
Express)
break away from the
internecine departmental
war and give a massive
push to railway electrification. It is common
knowledge that the country depends on costly fossil fuels (and the present
lull in diesel prices should
be considered a lull
before the storm). But few
are aware that 35 per cent
of the electrified traction
of the IR carries nearly
two-thirds of freight traffic and nearly half of passenger traffic at an annual
traction cost of around Rs
10,000 crore, while to
carry the remaining onethird of freight and half of
passenger services on
diesel traction, the IR
spends nearly Rs 22,00025,000 crore annually on
POL (petroleum, oils and
lubricants). This push for
electrification has not
come not a minute to
soon, and will bring substantial financial savings
to the institution, duly
accounting for the project
execution cost.
There are several other
small and big factoids and
fine points that make this
the best railway budget in
the last decade and a half.
But there are two words
of caution for Prabhu —
often, “best” becomes the
enemy of “good” and
“green shoots” often turn
into “brown manure”.
And the empire he sits
upon is notorious for suffering from the “implementation bug”. For the
next 365 days, 24×7, the
rail minister will need to
pursue minute details of
the big picture of his
dream budget to make
sure that the “dream does
not die young”.
(Courtesy
:
Indian
Express)