The December Flames & Smoky Future

The fire tragedy at AMRI Hospital at Kolkata on 9th Dec is a grim reminder of how casually our organizations take the issue of fire safety. In India, human lives have little worth and only a crisis or a big tragedy initiates serious thinking on issues that matter. Upahaar happened about 10 years ago. No lessons learnt. Small and medium industrial units in India continue to have fire accidents most of which go unnoticed by the public even if workers die and firemen lay down their lives in the line of service in battling such fire incidents. There are innumerable industrial units in areas such as Udyog Nagar, Ashok Nagar, Mayapuri (in Delhi) and Bhiwandi, Navi Mumbai, Byculla, Vasai, Taloja, Khairani Road, Kurla, Tarapur etc (in Mumbai) where disasters are waiting to happen. Crowded with inventories and equipments, cramped with flammable materials, and designed with inherent flaws and poor egress characteristics, these units can easily convert themselves in infernos if 'right' conditions are triggered. Instead of talking 'big' and debating mega projects and mega manufacturing zones, the government must reform the existing laws and regulations on fire safety and implement them with an iron hand. The errant organizations should be severly and exemplarily punished. You freeze bank accounts of firms that do not pay tax but let off them if they do not meet minimum standards of fire safety or operate without NOC for fire safety. Why don't we have 'compliance officer' for regulations that affect lives of workers and school children and hospital patients? Only economic laws are to be 'complied'? Heavens do not fall if service tax dues are not paid but worlds of many innocent human beings get distroyed if a fire engulfs an office or hospital building. Alas! Fire safety is not a political issue in India. There are no Supreme Court appointed tribunals or SITs to deal with issues of fire safety. You need not have an IOC oil depot or BPCL refinery for a fire catastrophe to happen. An AMRI basement is enough to ravage innocent lives. You went there to live longer..........

Right to Information: A Frankenstein's Monster?

RTI is a radical piece of legislation and a widely used one by the general public. It is a powerful tool to gain access to information from public bodies. The genuine activism and concern over public issues and redress of genuine grievance of the citizen should ideally form the motive for invoking rights under RTI Act. But unfortunately this is not happening in respect of all RTI applications that land in government departments or public bodies day in and day out. Moreover, RTI is also applicable to PSUs which are primarily commercial enterprises and have to take care of issues such as cost, productivity, competitiveness, profit etc. There are also matters which relate to performance apprisals of employees and commercial information such as business stastistics. Decision making in government and public sector is already slow and ineffective and tools such as RTI make the matters worse. An unchecked RTI is not a boon but a bane. Here are a few suggestions:

1) Take the PSUs out of RTI purview: There are industry level regulators, watchdogs, ombudsmen that can do the job of redressing grievances of customers and other parties. Time and resources in a commercial enterprise are important elements in achieving profitability and competitiveness and we cannot expect PSU employees to spend time attending RTI applications.
2) Dilute the RTI substantially in respect of federal level organizations such as a central ministry. The watered down version of RTI Act should empower only respected media organizations (short listed based on readership/viewership data) to seek access to information under RTI and not any Tom, Dick and Harry. There are wheeler-dealers and agents who are out to destabilize government of the day by dropping in an RTI query.
3) In respect of local and state level bodies, empower all citizens to seek access to information. The citizens should primarily concern themselves with basic public services delivered by such local/regional bodies and therefore rights under RTI should be restricted to such grievances only rather than any fancy debate between two ministries of the central government on any abstract policy matter.
4) Cap the number of applications an applicant can make during one year (proxies may be used to bypass such rule but still there should be some bar on total no. of applications made)

Ek Lau

The gory bomb blasts in Mumbai last evening is a grim reminder of our vulnerability and the intractable nature of the problem of terrorism. The hostile neighbourhood, coupled with internal security deficiencies and larger blue prints of international terrorism victimise India time and again. The challenge has been staring in our collective national face since long but little we have been able to do so far to make ourselves safe. Terrorism is a household word in the cities like Delhi and Mumbai. Terrorism is not an alien concept relevant only to the people of troubled areas of Kashmir and North East. Terrorism has come to take roots right in our backyards: The markets which we throng and the places of worship we visit. The railway stations and suburban trains. The offices and shops, where we need to go everyday to feed our families and make both ends meet. The restaurants and hospitals. The list goes on. Lives continue to be snuffed out brutally. No body is called to account. Conspiracy theories are afloat and statements about what could not be done and what will be done are dished out. Soundbytes swirl around and experts make impassioned case on airwaves for not tolerating such acts of terror anymore. And Mumbai, with its special kind of vulnerability to such attacks, keeps humming the tune...Ek Lau Is Tarah Kyun Boozi Mere Maula....

A Pat on the Back

The glitches-free CWG in Delhi and the positive mood which now prevails makes one wonder if the woes of the Games preparations were real or imagined. There were indeed problems and mess was far from being an imagined one. Several city projects are still unfinished. Planning was certainly not inspiring confidence amongst us. Corruption charges are yet to proved 'wrong'. May be the media overdrive made our authorities get their act together and finally pull off a successful and memorable CWG. Or they were ready but the bad press in the run up to the Games was a mere PR or marketing communication disaster which now pundits have to analyze and learn their lessons from. The truth lies somewhere in between. May be we were ready on some counts but were measuring badly on others. There are questions and there will be answers. For a while, India (not only Delhi) can bask in the glory of medals our sportspersons have bagged in the competitions. The last ditch efforts paid off and we again emerged as good crisis managers and damage controllers, if not good planners and administrators. Now, see overleaf for a list of Olympic aspirations and keep debating on if we can....!!!!

Mantriji

He walks past you with a half smile on face and with mobile phone slightly pressed to the ear. He enters the lift and looks at you as if to say 'Hello' to you. He is one of all of us travelling in the lift, hurrying to reach office in a morning hour. No 'khadi' kurtas or Nehru jackets. No Gandhi topi. No assistants or sidekicks. No secretaries or gun-wielding commandos in attendance. His car does not blare loud noice of siren. He holds the rank and status of a Cabinet Minister of India, the world's largest democracy. He need not force down your neck any ideology. He does not need to be a rabble rouser. He does not care what he should do to win any election or woo voters. He is Nandan Nilekani.

He is in lift today. Tomorrow, you may well find him climbing up the stairs to reach his third floor office in New Delhi. Is this a coming of age for India? May be. Let's pray, it is indeed..!

ALL IZ WELL ?

2nd October (birth anniversary of the Mahatma) had a calming influence on the anxious city which was god send considering that the following day the much-maligned Games were to be inaugurated with fanfare. The Games, the preparations of which will go down in history as a case study in poor management and misgovernance, have begun finally. It is generally observed and felt that India does well in crisis like situation. The rains vanished in Delhi and things started looking up under the moderate October sun. Hate them or love them, the Games were there to be there at any cost. Management pundits may call this 'effectiveness': getting things done. Do not ask how and at what cost. Do not ask how efficiently the tax payers' monenies were spent. Do not ask how many hours our labourers could sleep in a day. Do not ask how may abuses rolled down the tongues of our embarrased and worried officials and ministers to get the Village cleaned up. The 'effectiveness' means that you were ready on the evening of October 3 to welcome the world and diffuse the feeling amongst the citizens of Delhi that ALL IZ WELL.

I recall having read something about the handling of Mumbai floods being rated higher than the handling of Hurricane Katrina in 2005. We don't have planners in India, we have crisis managers, fire fighters and damage controllers. Smoke does billow out but it's not a conflagration that you run into eventually.

TAILPIECE

Delhi 2010 are supposed to be 'green games'. I do not know how and why. An event of this scale is bound to guzzle much more fuel and energy than activities of the normal times, no matter how nicely you dress up your city with jute sculptures. Being green can't be just a fad or PR statement.

Delhi's very own "1984"

Delhi is living in typical Orwellian times. CWG is staring in the face and the organizers still not instil any confidence in public and players. The Central Government has entered the scene lately to save face. An individual is brutally subjugated to the whims of the ruling class who was hell bent in organizing the Games in the city (and never took stock of the ground realities until it was too late). People have either empty foot overbridges with escalators (which nobody is using) or demolished subways which are not yet done up. Pedestrians and commuters are having nightmarish experience every day. Construction debris are spawning dengue and malaria and nobody seems to be enjoying monsoon in Delhi nowadays. Traffic is a mega chaos. And at the helm are the people whose ability to run even day to day governance is questionable, let alone organization of such a mega sports event as CWG.

Next time, you want to have Games in any city of India, please conduct referendum on the issue. So, we don't start barking up the tree which turns out to be a wrong one. The Games is anti-Aam Adami except, of course, some 'New Deal' effect on employment generated by building stadia and demolishing and rebuilding roads, bridges and pavements.