Activists need urgent rehab

Activists need urgent rehab

Swapan Dasgupta

Viewers of English-language TV news channels will have noticed the frequency with which a mysterious community called "activists" has begun popping up. On subjects as diverse as education, health, industrialisation and religion, the utterances of politicians, officials, corporates and the man in the street are invariably countered with views of "activists" presumed to have profound expertise on all subjects. There is also an implicit suggestion that the "activists" are detached, selfless and not burdened by the baggage of interest groups. In short, they are a superior and pious voice in the rabble.

It may be unfair to lump "activists" into the umbrella category of NGOs. There are many non-profit organisations that perceive themselves as philanthropic bodies, charities, religious trusts and even social organisations which occasionally dabble in "social work". They raise their own resources, have nothing to do with the Government but hate being clubbed with "activist" NGOs. What distinguishes normal NGOs from "activist" groups is funding, political involvement and what the Americans call attitude. The "activists" tend to be globally funded, politically Left-liberal or worse, and blessed with the conviction that they know best and everyone else is garbage.

At the 1999 Seattle summit of the World Trade Organisation, The Economist estimated some two million NGOs in the world; of these, about a million were in India. The numbers have increased over the past nine years, more so because a growing number of entrepreneurs have discovered business potential in NGOs. To be fair, most activists are not racketeers, though they have an insatiable appetite for publicity, business class travel and endless conferences in exotic places. Activists from the so-called Third World which, tragically, still includes India, have also developed considerable skills in guilt-tripping angst-ridden Western liberals and UN-sponsored bodies into doling out lavish grants. The grants are ostensibly aimed at facilitating "people's empowerment", a euphemism for good salaries, many conferences, media lollipops and sponsorship of agitations that impede national progress.

The activists ostensibly want to "help people help themselves". Some genuinely try to help the informal sector get legal protection and end up getting thrashed by goons. Others, rope in starry-eyed TV reporters from privileged backgrounds and gap-year radical tourists to give legitimacy to movements that seek to prevent steel plants in Orissa and dams in Gujarat.

"Activists" have different priorities but what binds them together is a passionate desire to keep alive the problems that justify their existence. In recent years, for example, activist bodies have been accused of grossly exaggerating the incidence of AIDS in India. The unstated reason: The massive availability of international funds to fight AIDS. In Gujarat, the "activists" have also been accused of keeping riot victims in a state of permanent dislocation because it helps score political points.

In the old days, the "activists" were derided as harmless but over-zealous jholawalas and relegated to the margins of civil society -- despite their bogus claims of actually representing civil society. In recent times, thanks to lavish global patronage, some deft "advocacy" and strategic political interventions against the former NDA regime, the activists have inveigled themselves into the decision-making making process. The inclusion of "activist" icons in the once all-powerful National Advisory Council chaired by Sonia Gandhi was a signal to the UPA Government to accommodate seemingly radical concerns in the development process. The results have been catastrophic.

Take the case of urban planning in Delhi. The sudden collapse of all systems of traffic management in areas outside Lutyens' Delhi is widely blamed on the construction of the High Speed Bus Corridor. Billed as a system favouring cyclists and bus commuters and flaunted as the success story of Bogota (Columbia), it is likely to be a major factor behind the Congress' near-certain electoral defeat in Delhi later this year. Yet, as is now apparent, this hare-brained, regressive scheme was sold as a progressive pro-poor measure by activists who have no stake in the future of India.

The National Rural Employment Guarantee Act was the greatest triumph of the "activists". Now operational in 330 districts at a cost of Rs 12,000 crore, it was supposed to do for the Congress what Operation Barga did for the CPM in rural Bengal: Make it electorally invincible. The interim results point to a monumental disaster and CAG's draft report speaks of a 97% under-performance.

In normal parlance this means unmitigated disaster but "activists", egged on by a mindless section of the political class, now want Rs 30,000 crore from this year's Budget to make this profligate, corrupt and unproductive scheme national. They want a dedicated bureaucracy and membership of a so-called Employment Guarantee Council to run NREGA as a form of parallel Government. They want to turn disaster into calamity. A distraught Government, afraid of admitting its Italian blunder, may well oblige.

Finally, "activists" have poured into sensitive bodies like the Minorities Commission. Established as a well-meaning talking shop for those who couldn't be accommodated in Parliament, it has become a malignant influence on society. From giving predictable template reports on "attacks on minorities" by a despicable majority, it has moved into tampering with national security. The interference of Minorities Commission activists in the arrest and interrogation of terror suspects in Andhra Pradesh is a warning. If you give them an inch, they will take a mile.

Democratic societies operate on the principle of indulgence. However, when minuscule unaccountable "activists" start holding the nation to ransom on the strength of misplaced certitudes, it is time for correctives. An urgent rehabilitation programme for "activists" is overdue.

Needed, a renewed socialist concern - The Hindu

Needed, a renewed socialist concern

V.R. Krishna Iyer

India needs democracy, development and a distributive strategy to salvage the lives of its have-nots.

Indian Independence is a political phenomenon that has the sovereignty of the people enshrined in the paramountcy of a Socialist Secular Democratic Republic created by the Constitution. Our administration comprises triune instrumentalities that are accountable and transparent. We, the People of India, who are over a billion strong, not you, the multinational corporations, the corrupt mafia, the freebooter billionaires and the imperial controllerate over the state’s r esources, are the final authority, since we are no colony. We are a rich nation albeit with poor people, a marvel of culture and rare talent, never to suffer submissive status and foreign pressure. We are a globally glorious jewel, the Kohinoor, but shine no longer as brave new Bharat. We are great, not under the shadow of another giant of the unipolar world but as a peer partner of a grand quadrilateral alliance of China, Russia, India and the U.S.

This vision was projected at a recent conference. Yes, India is no satellite but the co-author of Panch Sheel (the five principles of peaceful co-existence). Ever for non-alignment, never an international mendicant, our nation was allergic to the Soviet pattern of proletariat dictatorship. We also rejected as anathematic Western mega-industrial capitalism and surely regarded U.S imperialist disregard for other sovereign nations as bete noire. Feudalism was our curse and agrarian backwardness the symbol of a fossilised economy. Swaraj was a struggle against these savage vices as well as British imperialism. Thus, inevitably, compassionate humanism and democratic socialism became our socio-political culture without an alternative.

Globally powerful corporate privatisation of industries may make us a satellite and a banana republic unless we dare to defend our people’s tryst with destiny. But the state must run industries and services of strategic significance for the people’s survival. It should ensure non-exploitation, fair employment and workers’ participation in management, sound marketing facilities with community concern, and price control sans rackets. Cornering of land, real estate terrorism, mafia manoeuvres, business and trade corruption and professional lawlessness must be abolished by state authority. A planned economy and public morality with the common good of society are crying needs today.

We made a tryst with destiny upon awakening to Independence. Operation Swaraj was a wake-up call to abolish oppressive inhumanity and establish economic democracy. In substance, our pledge was not to create a creamy layer of wealthy industrialists, latifundists or toxic technologists, or to invite foreign investments and duty-free imports that will wipe out swadeshi. A socialistic pattern of society has been our dire desideratum. That “cyclonic sadhu,” Swami Vivekananda, declared: “I am a socialist because half a loaf [for the hungry Indian humanity] was better than none.”

Jawaharlal Nehru voiced in the Constituent Assembly the fundamental national proposition when he argued: “We have given the content of democracy in this resolution and not only the content of democracy but the content, if I may say so, of economic democracy. Well, I stand for Socialism. I hope India will stand for Socialism and that India will go towards the constitution of a Socialist State.”

The generation of Professor Harold Lasky; the political peers of Nehru and Subash Bose; Left intellectuals like E.M.S. Namboodiripad; P.C. Joshi, Jayaprakash Narayan, Dr. Ambedkar; and all leading British thinkers such as Bernard Shaw, H.G. Wells, Sydney Webb, belonged to the socialist fraternity. Small wonder, cadres and leaders of the nationalist movement were comrades against imperialism and capitalist ideology. Socialism was strengthened by that phenomenal expounder of dialectical materialism and Communism, Karl Marx.

Swaraj, that epic march for Indian liberation, had a crimson hue and the Constitution that our Founding Fathers forged spelt economic democracy. This tall goal was proclaimed by Nehru, the first Prime Minister, on Independence Day. But what has since found expression is a culpable reminder of our guilty, greedy ‘growth’ ideology that is unapproachable for the larger, weaker masses.

Nehru did organise basic institutions and instrumentalities such as the Planning Commission, public sector enterprises, strategic state-managed industries and river projects. Prime Minister Indira Gandhi did more: she nationalised key industries, abolished the privy purses, and set urban land ceiling. By means of an amendment to the Constitution she declared the Republic to be Socialist. This terminological transformation stood the test of time, despite parliamentary and Cabinet changes. Even today, under the Constitution India is a Socialist Republic, and every Member of Parliament and Minister, the President and the Governors, are oath-bound to uphold the Socialist mandate.

A cartoon recently pictured the status of the republic with sardonic veracity. Two hungry Indians hold the peels of a banana but the banana itself has been already eaten by the rich Indian and the alien. If we jettison the nation’s resources to be consumed by capitalists, the people below the poverty line will have to hold the peel. The fruit, euphemistically described as ‘growth’, would have been craftily consumed by corporate capitalists.

The glory of Bharat can be regained only if the democratic socialists of India unite without factions and divisions. They have to win, without discrimination, distributive justice by full and fair use of its resources. They should give a just opportunity for all to share its work, wealth and happiness. The latest technology should be geared to maximise the common people’s economic worth, and the educational facilities, in order that the needs of the underprivileged are met as the state’s first charge, far above the pampered seven-star pleasures of the millionaires. The health, egalite and income of “We the People of India” should desiderate socialist concern.

The patriotic, truly crimson comrades of India, the Communists of plural parties, will you listen to the noble command of Karl Marx as still relevant to India: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.” The pathology of class-caste-creed communalism wrapped in fossil feudal socio-economic thralldom finds its finest pharmacopoeia in a democratic socialist diversity planned with sociologically scientific dialectical materialism, inspired by a moral-spiritual value glory.

Speaking generally, since 1991 the national economy has become noxiously contra-constitutional, anti-people and dollar drug-addicted. Let me cite Shashi Tharoor: “India annually gets richer by $200 billion. India’s foreign resources have exceeded $140 billion. Remember, the country had to mortgage its gold in London because the foreign exchange coffers were dry! In the list of the world’s billionaires, 27 of the world’s richest people are Indian, most of them staying in India. A large portion of the world’s poorest people live in India too and you don’t need to go to Davos to meet them. Our country’s poor live below a poverty line that seems to be drawn just this side of the funeral pyre. 250 million people living in conditions that are a blot on our individual collective consciences is too grave a matter to be lightly dismissed.” (The Elephant, the Tiger, and the Cellphone: Reflections on India in the 21st Century, 2007)

The world is moving fast but the have-not humanity waits. The wake-up call given by President Pratibha Patil is timely to overcome the tragedy and travesty of today’s Bharat. In her Republic Day-eve address she said that the disadvantaged “too should find a place to enjoy the sunshine of the country’s growth and development.” The President added: “Our efforts and our commitment, while pursuing the goal of high growth rates, should be to ensure that all people of our country benefit from it. Our pledge will remain unfulfilled until, as Gandhi had said, ‘we have wiped every tear in every eye’.”

Will Dr. Manmohan Singh assert, as Nehru did, “I am a socialist?” Will Sonia Gandhi, as Indira Gandhi did, swear for nationalism or emphasise the Republic as being Socialist? Will President Pratibha Patil swear by the Gandhian conviction, “I have believed and repeated times without number that India is to be found not in its few cities but in its villages?”

Sky-high concrete jungles, five-star hotels, lunatic traffic, foreign-addicted luxury life, terrorism and sexism, robbery and privatisation everywhere: this corruption has assassinated all that Gandhi, Nehru and Indira represented. There is an anti-Gandhian crypto-terrorist campaign for globalisation and privatisation, which is a force for creative destruction and submission to colonialism. The finest capital of a country is its creative humanity, not lavishment in luxury and star-culture — which is but a negation of swaraj and socialist, secular, democratic constitutional sovereignty.

Indian humanity ought to battle afresh for swaraj.

DO

Be the change you wish to see in the world - Gandhiji

Chennai MRTS and surrounding land-use

This is a case-study of Chennai MRTS system's Chepauk station done in 2001. The purpose of the study was to identify issues that caused under-utilization of the MRTS system. The biggest reasons identified were the land-use pattern around the facility, lack of direct connectivity to the facility and lack of inter-modal transportation facilities. This study epitomizes the current land-use and environmental problems in Chennai, and provides a clue to sustainable development patterns in the city of Chennai.

Changing culture in India...

is this going the right way???

From the ground up...

http://www.sustainableworldarchitecture.com/

Enterprise v. Employment

Wal-Mart has certainly faced many darts for eating away mom and pop stores in small town America. The open capitalistic market led to the creation of a scale of business that enabled true 'economics of scale', and the result is that Wal-Mart has been able to sustain its profitability even while consistently providing goods at low prices to the market. From the consumer's perspective, it has been a dream come true, though it has come at the cost of the neighbor's business. Come to think of it, the neighbor would never have been able to provide the variety of goods and services at the same rate to be competitive with Wal-Mart. Is this economics of scale creating a pseudo socialism, or is it capitalism at its best?

Even though Wal-Mart may have cannibalized the mom and pop stores, what it has done to small town America is something that a neighborhood store can never provide. That is access to the national money market. By using profit sharing strategies for their employees, the company has provided opportunities for the employees to retire in greater wealth than they would if they had owned their own store. This access to a nationwide profit stream not only benefits the employees, it ensures that money reaches the small towns and enables economic development at the grass root levels.

The other positive aspect of this phenomenon is that goods no longer have to be pigeon-holed into specific markets based on geographic limitations, and true demand and supply logistics can balance the production economics of any product. In a way, it eases the burden on the environment and ecological imbalance in certain areas. The applicability of the concept is huge in terms of a developing country's grass roots market.

The imbalance in economic development between the rural and urban areas in developing countries is too apparent, causing a natural beeline towards the high pressure areas. While the biggest economic opportunities are concentrated in the urban areas, the rural areas resort to agriculture and small scale industries to make ends meet. The wealth generated from these products are low due to the vernacular market conditions, while the urban areas create products that have national or international markets, and hence have higher profit potential.

The centralized procurement system of Wal-Mart combined with the marketing potential created by a brand name opens out the market for locally produced goods to areas way beyond the geographical constraints of the local market. This strategy has multiple advantages as far as the small town producers are concerned - mitigates risks at the grass root level, increases profit potential and provides growth opportunities - thereby enabling sustainable development in the area.

Not only this, it also provides employment opportunities in spades in traditionally weak employment zones. And, with the wealth creation opportunities provided by profit sharing, this is a career path that can help sustain a substantial livelihood in non-urban areas in developing countries, hitherto unheard of. Majority of any developing country's population is still rural, and this majority still depends on agriculture and small scale cottage industries to provide a livelihood, with very little to no employment opportunities that can provide a comparable lifestyle to that available in a city. Moreover, urban jobs require a certain level of education which is still inaccessible to many rural areas. Migration to cities which seems a natural way out leads to unemployment issues, and the frustrated and dejected unemployed people resort to crime or are subject to abject poverty, detestable life in slums and lack of spirit in participating in the democratic process.

The biggest thing in common to most problems faced at the grass root level in a developing country is access to opportunity for development. It is not easily available, and the governments can only do so much as far as providing opportunities are concerned, due to the traditional paucity of funds and larger than manageable population to provide for. Political inertia and corruption may be cited as bigger reasons for this imbroglio. Whatever the reasons, the result is that a large majority of the population has to resort to self-employment to find a means of livelihood. Self-employment brings with it its own perils, and an extremely constrained market adds to the risks of operating a business.

This is where the dichotomy of enterprise v. employment springs up in the path of creating sustainable development. In an economy where enterprise is chosen for wealth creation and employment is chosen for sustained livelihood, a majority of the population that are not risk takers, or are not in a position to take a risk can thrive. In the developing countries where employment opportunities are low, however, the scenario is such that enterprise is seen as a means of survival while employment is seen as a means of sustained livelihood and small wealth creation. This distortion brings economic tensions and economic imbalance to the fore and hinders the progress of the development process.

Also, by increasing cash flow through traditionally poor communities, new markets and new consumers are being created, and in a capitalistic market, the higher the number of consumers, the higher the profit potential. Thus, by decentralizing economic opportunity away from the urban centers, nations can create an open market conducive to profitable businesses as well. Also, by enabling opportunities for social and cultural emancipation for the majority of the population, it creates an upbeat democracy that believes in the democratic process and creates stronger governments chosen for the right reasons.

Wal-Mart may not be everyone's favorite store, but the potential the concept creates for sustainable development in developing countries is huge. By providing opportunities for the right mix of enterprise v. employment through a demand-supply process rather than a political process, it is capitalism at its very best providing for social, cultural and economic development at the grass roots.