Comment

WORD EARBALLS
THINK
IT OVER
OF THE DAY The number of people lis-
tening to a radio station or There’s a difference between beauty and charm. A beautiful
concert, or visiting an woman is one I notice. A charming woman is one who notices me
online music site John Erskine
HINDUSTAN TIMES, NEW DELHI, WEDNESDAY, JUNE 3, 2009 PAGE 10

Besieged but
belligerent
Bright lights, dim policy
Farm policies hinder the movement of rural Indians to cities. This undermines their progress
The LeT chief ’s release suggests that Pakistan’s
I
T IS politically incorrect to say, but the Indian govern- cities are riddled with rental and tenancy laws that make
instinct is still to first sacrifice India ment is doing much to prop up its farmers. In the long
run, this is going to hurt both — them and the country
finding a house a migraine-maker. Education levels are night-
marish in rural India. Small town municipal governance is

T
HERE IS something both absurd and worrisome in the
court release of Lashkar-e-Tayyeba chief, Hafiz Saeed,
and Pakistani Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani’s accu-
sation that India is not serious about improving cross-
border relations. Islamabad knows well that New Delhi has made
progress on the 26/11 Mumbai attack investigation — a prerequi-
site for the resumption of bilateral dialogue. Clearly a turnaround
in Indo-Pakistani relations seems unlikely in the early stages of
the second Manmohan Singh government.
Gilani’s government will blame the judge, but it is obvious his
officials could have easily found a legal reason to detain Saeed
indefinitely. What needs to be asked is what motivated Pakistan
to take such a blatant and provocative action. The likely answer
lies in the recent offensive in the Swat valley. President Asif Ali
Zardari and Gilani are a political regime under siege. Islamabad
is under unremitting pressure from Washington to take action
against a Taliban movement that has many sympathisers in the
establishment and general public of
Pakistan. Many Pakistanis refuse to
ourtake accept that their domestic terrorism prob-
lem is a consequence of their own gov-
ernment’s decades-long sponsorship. They prefer to blame India
and the lack of a Kashmir settlement or the United States and the
drone attacks along the Afghan-Pakistan border.
In recent months, the Obama administration has upped the mil-
itary ante in Afghanistan and become more strident in its criticism
of Islamabad. Caught between the devil of public resentment and
the deep blue sea of US pressure, Pakistan’s civilian leadership has
decided to appease Islamic radicals and sacrifice relations with
India. It may even hope to re-kindle the idea of Kashmiri interfer-
as a whole.
There is a heartwarming tendency among upper-middle class
Indians to think that anyone who lives outside the city limits
lives in quasi-destitution, is on the verge of suicide, at the mercy
of moneylenders and the monsoon. Therefore, New Delhi is
right to take money from the cities and give farmers loan
waivers, tax exemptions and workfare schemes.
But here’s an iron law of economic development: poli-
cies that keep your people in the field ultimately keep them
in poverty. Policies that help urbanise them make them
wealthy. Except those floating on oil, all developed coun-
tries go through this transition.
As Nobel economist Paul
Krugman once argued, the mira-
cle economies of Southeast Asia
were little more than a repeat of
the West’s farm-to-factory switch
taking place over a very com-
pressed period of time. Ditto the
China story. On the other hand,
India has, on paper, seen its urban-
Wonk’s World isation rate slow down over the
Pramit Pal Chaudhuri years. The more handouts rural
people are given, the less incentive
they have to shift to urban areas.
This means that the economy is growing well below poten-
tial — fields can never be as productive as factories or even
call centres. Worse, it means depriving millions of what
history has shown is the only real escape ladder from the
mass poverty pit.
First, let’s understand that rural India is no monolith.
Almost half of it doesn’t even do agricultural work. The
National Sample Survey bizarrely classifies a man who spends
even one day out of 365 on a field as a farmer. These 300 or so
million people benefit from loan waivers only indirectly.
Second, no amount of government dole will get them out
of poverty, for they are absurdly small. Ninety per cent of
A DIFFICULT TRANSITION
Indian farm holdings are less than two acres and don’t ben-
efit from loan waivers. They are subprime borrowers. Welfare
projects like the NREGA provide a welcome income sup-
plement — but won’t get them out of poverty.
Third, the farmers who get the lion’s share of govern-
mental assistance are far from destitute — they are flat screen-
Ford Endeavour affluent. The 6 per cent who have 10-plus
acres of land have annual household incomes comparable
to middle-class urbanites. And they don’t pay income tax.
So, what’s the best way to get rural Indians off their hand-
kerchief plots of desperation — and also lift the 100 million
landless farm labourers — and help them prosper? Follow
those countries that have ended mass poverty: move them
to towns and cities. Obviously, people can’t be herded from
one to the other. But incentives can be provided and barri-
ers removed to make the move less traumatic. Right now,
what New Delhi does only serves as an incentive to stay on
the farm, sink further into poverty and hope more money
will be doled out. The NREGA, especially after wage rates
were raised by the states, may actually be drawing workers
away from the cities.
India’s barriers to urbanisation are plenty. Most towns and
a joke. Indian cities tend to think their job is to keep rural
migrants away. The World Bank’s latest World Development
Report rightly derides Mumbai’s absurd attempt to limit its
population to 7 million. And rigid labour laws mean that
many of the perfect transition jobs — like making textiles
and garments — have migrated to Bangladesh.
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh likes to say he wants to
replicate the South Korean urbanisation experience of the
1970s. Seoul put together a universal health and education sys-
tem to make the transition easier. However, the Koreans also
made it legally easy to convert farmland to industrial use. And
they had an adrenaline-driven export sector to finance all this.
The first Singh government accomplished less than half its
target in another urbanisation booster: infrastructure.
However, it did a praiseworthy job in two urbanisation pro-
moters: building rural roads and increasing rural telephony.
This is heresy to many, but rural life in India is half-decent
by low-income country standards. Yes, Indian farmers kill them-
selves. But consider the figures: they are about 15 per cent of
the country’s total suicides. Even assuming there are only 300
million Indian farmers, last year’s farmer suicide figure of
16,600 means that the average American is two times more like-
ly to kill himself. The difference between poverty levels in rural
India versus urban India is all of 1.1 percentage points.
No one is claiming rural Indian is a paradise: it is riddled
with caste, stagnation, patriarchy and a crushing lack of choice.
But the continuing policy of helping farmers with bailouts and
dole-payments, something which has been going on now for 60
years, is only slowing rural India’s descent into poverty.
The answer lies in the flickering lights of India’s neglected
towns and cities. The rural-dweller knows this. The last cen-
sus showed that some 50,000 villages have been abandoned.
This urban shift needs to be abetted, not treated as a tragedy
or simply neglected. In fact, a simple measure of whether
an economic policy is good for the rise of India is to ask the
question: Does it boost the shift?
pchaudhuri@hindustantimes.com

Come one, come all

ence among some American hearts and minds. For the time being,
India can afford to take a broader view of things. It was always
Racism exists in all societies. Given
doubtful if Pakistan would ever put the Lashkar chief behind bars. this, why single out Australians?
On the other hand, the US ‘Afpak’ campaign is largely in concord

False impressions
with Indian interests. New Delhi should accept that the latter’s con-
tinuation will come packaged with a rhetorical rollback of the for- The government is hellbent on diluting project clearance procedures
mer. But tolerance cannot be the policy if Saeed’s release is a pre-
cursor to renewed terrorist violence against India. Islamabad being Kanchi Kohli and Manju Menon be distributed in advance and a public hearing be held
unhelpful about terrorism is an old story. But given its present prob-
only if issues of dispute are apparent in information col- V.S. Sharma

I
T IS no longer a surprise when the process of envi- lected through these. It has also been recommended that
lems, Pakistan turning a new leaf would have been a welcome sign
if it was starting to realise that its own national survival lay in
ronment and forest clearance of development proj- agencies like the state industrial development boards
ects is referred to as a ‘bottleneck’. It seems to be a (SIDBs) be allowed to conduct hearings, which have so
perpetual refrain of the project developers racing to mark far only been done by pollution control boards. This rec-
I N THE last 12 months, more than 70 Indian students
have been assaulted in Australia. Though the Australian
police insists that these attacks were not racially-motivat-
turning away from the likes of Saeed and the Lashkar.
their newly-acquired territories with chimney stacks and ommendation, if realised, will systematically bring the ed, Indian students and the government have disagreed
turbines Government of India (GoI) playing the referee. practice of public hearings, the only open space in an oth- with this view.
Only this game is increasingly without any rules. erwise bureaucratic formality, to an end. Allowing SIDBs Thanks to the focus on the issue in the Indian media, an

In cloud cuckooland
Switzerland’s economy has finally dipped
into recession. Welcome to the club
Precautionary clauses are called hurdles and impacts on to conduct hearings will also bias the outcome of such
the poor and the environment are collateral casualties.
The latest in the offing is the November 10, 2008, re-
hearings, if held, in favour of industry.
Another problematic recommendation is the stan-
port of the Finance Ministry’s ‘Expert Group to Exam- dardisation of the Terms of Reference (ToR) for “repeti-
impression has been created among the people back home
that the Australian authorities are not doing much to curb
such attacks. But this is not true: Australian leaders have
already convened a meeting with foreign students and have
ine the Scheme of Statutory Clearances for Industrial tive projects”. The ToRs were added to the scoping stage
and Infrastructure Projects in India’, a document so that the basic requirements of an Environmental
tried to find out more about the nature of these crimes and
the administrations of different universities. They have
marked ‘secret’ but now secretly open as its recommen- Impact Assessment can be developed based on project-
dations are about to be realised by specific and site-related parameters.
also demanded quick action against the criminals. A senior
police official has been sent to India to

N
O SURPRISES but our ‘club’ of miseries actually run-
neth over. After being ‘recession buddies’ for a while, we
were all getting slightly bored with each other’s falling
GDP charts. But not anymore: we now have a brand new mem-
ber in the hallowed league of shrinking economies. Switzerland
is officially in recession. But, there is only one difference: if we
are neck-deep in an economic morass, Switzerland is just about
dipping its toe into it. With results for the last quarter in, the
country’s economy took its fastest tum-
ble in 15 years with a teeny dip of 0.8 per
thepundit cent in GDP. Yes, 0.8 per cent!
But if you are thinking that this small-
ish dip has dampened their spirits, we are glad to report (and just
in case you think we are jealous, we are not) that while lesser mor-
tals like us worry about holding on to our jobs and think twice
about splurging, Swiss consumers have actually increased their
spending by an marginal increase of 0.1 per cent.
While we editorial writers were getting tied up in knots try-
ing to understand the billions that add up to make this fraction,
our in-house statistician is completely unmoved. The reason:
this small statistical change, says a number cruncher, is a sta-
tistical error margin. So why did they leak this news out? You
know, it must be that desperate itch to be a part of the majority
club. Welcome Switzerland!
the newly-elected government. The To recommend that all projects with assure prospective students about
document reveals that the expert similar technology be issued a stan-
It is unfair to their safety in the country.
group was carved out of the Prime dard ToR shows the understanding paint all The problem is that Indian students
Minister’s promise to find ways to of impact assessment procedures Australians as in Australia stay in rundown suburbs
speed up clearances to develop- merely as a common inventory of and in over-crowded apartments to
ment projects at the 54th meeting of items that need to be collected for a
racists. There save money. Unfortunately, these are
the National Development Council decision to be made. It is akin to col- are enough laws also the places that are home to drug
in December 2007. lecting and submitting all required in the country addicts and unemployed people.
The Secretary of the Department documents to obtain a passport or
that safeguard In the current context, if racism is
of Economic Affairs chaired this running a common set of diagnos- being defined as unequal treatment of
committee which comprised repre- tic tests irrespective of which part the interests of ‘others’, then I am afraid I must say
sentatives from the CII, Ficci and of the body is suffering from an ail- foreign students that ‘white Australians’ are not all
Assocham. Strangely, the represen- ment. With each new project of sim- racists. On the basis of the above defi-
tative of the CII is also the present
RED TAPE? WHAT RED TAPE?
ilar or varied kind that is added to
head of WWF-India, a leading nature conservation or- an area, the ToR is likely to change as the physical land-
nition, even if we ignore the treatment meted out to
‘Dalits’ and Muslim-Hindu riots in India, I would say south
ganisation. The Infrastructure Leasing and Financial scape and the socio-cultural parameters have been altered. Indians suffer discrimination in north India and vice-
Services and Infrastructure Development Finance Finally, but most significant, is the recommendation versa. The same is true for people from Bihar and UP look-
Company and the India Infrastructure Finance Compa- for deemed clearance, that is of clearance obtained auto- ing for work in Mumbai.
ny Ltd, a few officials from the Department of Indus- matically if the Ministry of Environment and Forest fails But I do not mean to convey an impression that there is
trial Policy and Planning and the Planning Commis- to complete the clearance process within an identified no racism in Australia. But there are anti-discrimination
sion also found seats as experts on this committee. time period. With a ministry that is crumbling under the laws here that have proven to be effective in punishing the
The recommendations of the expert group and the weight of a huge number of pending project files, this perpetrators.
Ministry’s new proposal made through a draft notifica- clause will offer the shortest route for undeserving proj- There are some precautions that Indian students can take
tion in January 2009, two months after the expert group ects to dodge the scanner. to protect themselves like avoiding fly-by-night operators
finalised its report, are cause for grave concern to social To make speed of clearances central to the review of and search on the Internet about the university and the
justice and environmental groups. Qualitative impact impact assessment and clearance procedures is as good place. Indian students already in Australia must also make
assessment procedures have been reduced already to as not having these procedures at all. A qualitative process an effort to reach out to the local population. They must also
meaningless ‘green’ approvals since they are said to cause such as this cannot deliver good decisions if time is short. not hesitate to report any incidents of abuse. Further, they
‘time and cost overruns’. must form a body to represent their interests.
In order to prevent what it calls “roving hearings”, the Kanchi Kohli and Manju Menon are members
group has recommended that standard questionnaires of Kalpavriksh Environmental Action Group V.S. Sharma is based in Australia

EVERY PICTURE TELLS A STORY letters@hindustantimes.com Hindustan Times House, 18-20, K.G. Marg, New Delhi-110011 Phone: 91-011-66561234

No smoke without fire governance, the bargaining of the DMK,

THE PICTURE: South Korean President Lee Myung-bak (left)
offers a dish to Surin Pitsuwan, Secretary-General of the
Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), during a lunch-
eon after the ASEAN-South Korea Special Summit at Seogwipo,
South Korea. (PHOTO: REUTERS)
THE STORY: South Korea and the 10-member ASEAN signed an
agreement to boost investment, which they said completed their
broader free trade pact. With all that buttering up, the dish looks
really delectable.
CARRYING PICTORIAL warnings on all
tobacco products is judicious and bound
to scare away some of the chronic smok-
ers. Realising the incalculable harm be-
ing done to national health due to this
malady, all efforts should be made to
keep the populace away from the scourge
of nicotine. In this age of the media
blitzkrieg, it will go a long way if smok-
ing is strictly banned on the big and
small screens. Smoking is not gender-
specific and reports have established
that the number of boys and girls who
smoke is nearly same. Those students
who smoke are also more likely to use
other drugs and engage in other anti-so-
cial activities.
AMRIT SETHI, via email
United against racism
THIS IS in response to the incidents in
Australia. I feel that foreign students in
any country are considered assets for
they are a major source of income for the
country. It should be the responsibility of
the host country to ensure the safety of
its guests. But the response from the Aus-
tralian government leaves much to be de-
sired. The fact that the Federation of In-
Yesterday’s jihadis, today’s terrorists
SHERRY REHMAN in An unsettling problem (May
29) makes a passionate case in favour of the
internally-displaced persons from the Taliban-
infested areas of Pakistan. It is the proponents of
the same pan-Islamic mindset that chased away
Kashmiri Pandits from the Valley who are
ravaging Pakistan now. It’s ironic that the
‘jihadists’ nurtured to inflict a ‘thousand cuts’ on
India are now wreaking havoc on their mentor. It
was not too long ago that Sherry Rehman chose to
describe Kasmiri jihadis as freedom fighters
following Zardari’s remark denouncing them as
terrorists.
CHANGING IDENTITIES LALIT AMBARDAR, Delhi
dian Students of Australia has hit the constitutionally a secular country and, in
streets in Melbourne shows the detri- fact, swearing-in in the name of God
mental effect of these attacks on Indian should not be made mandatory at any of-
students in Australia. It is high time that ficial event. But, those who file PILs in
we show solidarity with them and send the apex court in this regard should stop
out the message that no such incident wasting the court’s valuable time.
will be tolerated in future. PRIYALAL ADHIKARI, via email
ASHNA BAHL, via email
Rise above petty problems
Don’t take His name in vain
APROPOS OF the editorial Beyond the
NO ONE should be allowed to take excep- first 100 days (Our take, June 1), though
tion to ministers who have not taken the the electoral verdict underlined conti-
oath of office in the name of God. India is nuity and stability rooted in focused
and the rigid stance of Mamata
Banerjee, along with a lack of princi-
pled clarity on government formation
suggest that the government is yet to
resolve the dichotomy between its ambi-
tious campaign pledges and the conflict
of personal and party interests. One
hopes that the UPA can avoid the quick-
sands of political compulsions and man-
age to remove structural rigidities in
the economy for the growth and devel-
opment of the nation.
VED GULIANI, Hisar
Bowing to the wishes of allies
WHEN L.K. Advani called Manmohan
Singh a weak Prime Minister,
Congressmen got angry. But, now the
PM has bowed to pressure from the
DMK, despite knowing that the DMK
state gover nment depends on the
Congress for support. A. Raja has been
inducted into the Cabinet though the
PM had initially refused to accomodate
any tainted minister. In the light of this
U-tur n on the Cong ress’ decision,
Manmohan Singh, Sonia Gandhi and
Rahul Gandhi owe an explanation to the
people of India.
OM PARKASH DHINGRA, via email