know your english

“Tell me, how is the word m..e..t..e pronounced?”

“It’s pronounced like the word ‘meet’. Nowadays, this rather formal word is mostly used in the expression ‘mete out’. It means to punish someone. You...”

“So, are you the one ordering or giving the harsh punishment? Are you...”

“It could be anyone. It could be you or someone else. For example, the students were highly critical of the treatment meted out to the workers.”

“How about this example? Judges are reluctant(unwilling,अनिच्छुक) to mete out harsh sentences against crooked politicians. I think they should.”

“Sounds good. Even today, there are many teachers in our country who believe it’s okay to mete out punishment to little children.”

“I certainly don’t! In fact, I feel that we should .......”

“Please, you need to lighten up. You have a tendency to.....”

“Lighten up? Are you telling me that I have put on weight and that I need to....”

“No, I don’t want you to go on a diet. When you tell someone that he should lighten up, what you’re suggesting is that the individual should learn to relax.”

“You want him to stop taking everything that is being said very seriously.”

“That’s right. The new teacher is very serious in class. She needs to lighten up.”

“Shreya had been tense all morning. But once she heard she’d got the promotion, she lightened up.”

“Revathi lightened up during our trip to Hyderabad. I’ve never...”

“Oh yes, you went to Hyderabad, didn’t you? How was the seminar?”

“It was okay. Nobody had anything new to say. But I did manage to see quite a few places in Hyderabad.”

“Did you go to the Salar Jung Museum? They say it’s great.”

“It is, actually. I wanted to spend at least half a day there. But unfortunately, my boss’ brother-in-law had tagged along with us and he...”

“Tagged along? Does it mean he went along with you?”

“You could say that. When someone tags along with you, he accompanies you even though you haven’t asked him to.”

“In other words, he’s like an uninvited guest. He forces himself on you.”

“Exactly! Whenever Raman took Laxmi to a movie, her brother tagged along with them.”

“That couldn’t have been fun. When I went out with my friends, I made it very clear http://editorialwithvocab.blogspot.in/2016/09/download-monthly-pdf-of-august.htmlto my parents that I didn’t want my younger brother tagging along with us.”

“The puppy tagged along wherever we went. Despite being...”

“Tell me, is there a difference between ‘despite’ and ‘in spite’? I mean is....”

“In terms of meaning, there is not much of a difference. You can use the two words interchangeably in most contexts. Just remember that ‘in spite’ is always followed by ‘of’ and ‘despite’ is not. The children continued to play in spite of/despite the rain.”

“In spite of/Despite his brilliant performance in the league matches, Rahul wasn’t selected for the State team.”

“That’s politics for you. I’ve got to go to the supermarket. I need...”

“Mind if I tag along?”

courtesy:the hindu

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The great GDP fudge

“I am puzzled by the new GDP growth numbers. This is mystifying because these numbers, especially the acceleration, are at odds with other features of the macro economy. Import of goods declined. typically growth booms are accompanied by surges in imports not declines… similarly, real gross capital formation declined”. This was the chief economic advisor (CEA) Arvind Subramanian in an interview to the Business Standard on February 3, 2015. Lest you be fooled into believing that the CEA was being intellectually honest about the state of the current economy, he was actually talking about the revised GDP number for the year 2013-14, when UPA 2 was in power.

After the new GDP series was rolled out under the current government, it revealed that India’s GDP growth in 2013-14 was 6.9 per cent compared to the reported 5 per cent, as per the old methodology. A 6.9 per cent GDP growth in 2013-14 would have meant that India was the second fastest growing large economy in the world, after China. But the CEA expressed bewilderment(mystification,हैरानी) at that number because he said this was in dissonance(dispute,मतभेद) with the actual macro-economic reality. He explained meticulously(clearly,बारीकी से) how other economic parameters such as imports, gross capital formation etc are truer indicators of GDP growth and dismissed the view that India’s GDP could have grown as fast in 2013-14.

Fast forward to September 2016. India’s imports have fallen for 20 straight months. In April 2016, India’s imports touched a six-year low. Exports are still at 2011 levels, down significantly from the 2013 peak. Industrial production which creates real jobs in the economy is actually shrinking(smaller,सिकुड़ना). Gross fixed capital formation has fallen. What does the same CEA have to say this time about the same macro-economic indicators — “It signals improvement in underlying real economy, holds out hope for the corporate sector”.

In a poorly disguised attempt at face-saving, the CEA has waxed eloquent(fluent,सुवक्ता) about how most commentators have misinterpreted the latest GDP numbers showing 7.1 per cent growth, driven almost entirely by government spending (IE, September 8). He says “Nearly all commentary has focused on decline in constant price GVA and GDP. But real story lies in nominal magnitudes”. This is the first time that we are being asked to judge the economy’s health by nominal GDP and not real GDP, that is GDP adjusted for inflation. In a hair-splitting effort, he argues we should focus on nominal growth, then argues that the nominal growth should not be assumed to be solely due to increase in prices but also an increase in quantity but does not explain if that was the case, then why not just use real growth directly.

Instead, he makes a convoluted(complex,जटिल) point about corporate revenues growing faster than interest costs which could boost the currently anemic(weak,कमज़ोर) credit growth, going forward. He then lays out a string of conditions — if monsoons boost agriculture growth, if falling exports have bottomed out, if the construction sector can perk up due to “reforms” — then we can be cautiously optimistic about GDP growth.

Technical mumbo-jumbo and caveats(warning,चेतावनी) aside, he essentially surmises(guess,अनुमान) that we should be ecstatic(happy,खुश) that nominal GDP growth is now in double digits. One really had to scrape the bottom of the barrel if one had to go back to the basics of nominal and real GDP growth and take solace(relief,सांत्वना) in a nominal double-digit growth, albeit with cute quotes about “nominal being real” and “real being nominal”, this time.

All this hiding behind economic theory misses the simple point — using exactly the same yardstick that the same CEA applied in passing judgment about India’s 2013-14 GDP growth calculated under the same methodology. India’s current state of the economy is in utter(absolute,निरा) disarray(disorder,अव्यवस्था). While we all endorse the Bernard Shaw quip that “if all economists were laid end to end, they would never reach a conclusion”, this one is about the same economist in the same position reading the same set of numbers but taking two diametrically opposite views. If the CEA had a well-argued position on his reservations about India’s 2013-14 GDP growth, then how can he be optimistic about the state of the current economy using exactly the same macro-economic parameters?

We have been repeatedly witness to this dangerous trait of the current government and its inhabitants becoming delusional with their own rhetoric(oratory,वाक्पटुता). We saw that with the government’s claim of savings of Rs 15,000 crore in the LPG subsidy scheme due to Aadhaar based Direct Benefits Transfer (DBT), which, again, the CEA endorsed healthily through similar articles in the English press. It turned out, as the CAG pointed out last month, that a meagre Rs 1,764 crore (approximately 10 per cent) of the subsidy savings was due to DBT and the remaining 90 per cent of the savings was due to the fall in global oil prices. The government and its CEA were simplydisingenuous(dishonest,बेईमान)and resorted to such misleading claims to falsely justify their decision to table the Aadhaar bill as a money bill and pummel it through Parliament. The current claims of the CEA about the health of the economy are similarly misleading.

I have known Arvind Subramanian to be a fine and fearless economist for almost three decades. I have myself tried in the past to lure(entice,लुभाना)him back but the timing was not ripe for him. He has never been an apologist for anything dubious(doubtful,संदिग्थ). My piece of unsolicited(unasked,अनचाही) advice to him: Spin is a powerful tool in both cricket and politics but not in economics. Leave it to those who have made a brilliant career out of it — such as his senior minister.

courtesy:indian express

click here for official link

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An uneasy buzz

“That which bends up” is what the word “Chikungunya” means in Kimakonde, an African language. It’s quite an apt word considering the effect this infection has on those affected by it!

Chikungunya is a fever spread by a virus that is transmitted by the female mosquito. Female mosquitoes need proteins from mammalian blood for their eggs to develop, which is why they bite humans. Certain viruses like the dengue and chikungunya viruses collectively called arboviruses (ARthropod BOrne viruses) make use of this requirement of the mosquitoes to ensure their own survival. These viruses were originally present only in the forest areas infecting primarily monkey species. Humans were just incidental hosts. But now due to the impact of industrialisation and loss of forest cover, these viruses have made humans as their permanent hosts. The virus cannot spread from one human to another but can spread only by mosquitoes which get infected while biting an infected individual, thereafter transmitting the virus by biting an uninfected individual.

So, how does chikungunya virus spread and act on the body? Once a mosquito bites, the virus spreads through the epidermal cells of the skin and reaches the inside of the body through the blood stream. The virus primarily targets muscle, joint and skin fibroblasts where the maximum damage occurs. This is the reason why patients experience intense joint pain and swelling along with rashes and acute(intense,तीक्ष्ण) fever. Apart from the tissues, a person’s immunity-mediated response is another important factor that dictates the severity of the disease. This explains why immune-compromised individuals such as very young children and elderly persons are more severely affected by this virus. This is also the reason why individuals with other underlying health complications such as like diabetes and cardiovascular diseases experience have more drastic effects due to the infection. It has to be emphasised at this point thatwhile chikungunya results in extreme morbidity(illness,रुग्णता) and a prolonged(long,लम्बा) phase of physical disability, it is not a fatal disease.

Patient management

A primary concern with respect to chikungunya treatment is effective diagnosis. At present there are no virus-specific detection methods and we have to resort to employing antibody-specific testing which delays diagnosis by a great extent. A study conducted by our group and our collaborators at Nair Hospital in Mumbai showed that almost 10 per cent of dengue patients were co-infected with the chikungunya virus but they were not even treated for the disease. This is a big blow to patient management and disease management. While we were able to detect these co-infections because we employed reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) to detect both the viruses, this is not practical in a hospital setting with a huge patient load and the lack of trained personnel. One may argue that dengue is more dangerous than chikungunya due to the complications of dengue as opposed to the non-fatal condition of chikungunya. But one must remember that patient management is quite different for both these infections and has several implications on disease prevention.

The vector plays an extremely important role in the spread of the chikungunya virus. When chikungunya struck in 2005, the reason it was such a huge pandemic was because the virus had mutatedtransform,रूपांतरित) its outside coat protein by a single amino acid that allowed it to replicate faster in another species of Aedes. This allowed the vector to transmit the virus more effectively. In the 2010 outbreak, virus strains sampled from different parts of the country were found to contain mutations on precisely(clearly,स्पस्थ्तया) three sites on their genomes. Sequencing the genome of the virus associated with the current outbreak in North India may reveal new information as to why the outbreak has been so explosive this time. Has the virus mutated again to become more virulent(poisonous,विषैला)?

Control the key

Whatever be the nature of the virus, the only effective method to control this hugely debilitating(weak,दुर्बल) infection is intense vector control and public health awareness programmes. The Mosquitoes serve as reservoirs for these viruses where the viruses survive in low amounts until they can infect a population. Having said this, we are talking of multiple issues here — the number of mosquitoes in nature at a given point in time and the amount of chikungunya virus within these mosquitoes. We recently conducted a survey where we addressed both these issues. We observed that the Aedes mosquitoes were present in small numbers even during the dry season and the viruses were present in these mosquitoes through generations. A single heavy shower was enough for the mosquito population to explode and along with it the virus populations within the mosquitoes. Every time it is a disaster waiting to happen. When the mosquito and the virus population reach a critical number, it results in outbreaks. Therefore, the only way to prevent this by is curbing(control,नियंत्रण) the mosquito population before the monsoon starts.

We face multiple issues with respect to chikungunya disease control in our country. A lack of sensitive virus-specific diagnostic tools, an absence of drugs/vaccine, poor vector control measures and public awareness contribute tremendously in escalating the problem. It is no surprise then that India is considered as the hub for chikungunya spread across the globe.

 courtesy:the hindu

click here for official link

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Forced out by a funds squeeze

It isn’t the fever and chikungunya symptoms that perturb(anxious,चिंतित) Ompal Singh so much. Resting in his one-room flat in a nondescript colony in Mandoli, north-east Delhi, the 50-year-old agonises(worry,व्याकुल) more about his persistent(continuous,निरंतर) cough and weight loss. He has lost seven kilograms in just two months and his immunity levels are dropping — alarming given his condition.

Meanwhile, his wife, Anita Kumari (48), has become addicted to painkillers. She cannot straighten her back or stretch her arms. She knows it is the big lump on her back causing all the pain and doctors have advised her surgery. But the doctors keep referring her to other hospitals, she says.

Both Mr. Singh and Ms. Kumari tested HIV positive in 2006 — after she contracted(reduce,संकुचित) the virus during a premature delivery-linked blood transfusion — but it is now that they have started feeling its pinch. Especially with their jobs snatched away. “Our diet is not the same and even treatment is suffering,” rues Mr. Singh.

Disclosure and discrimination(unfair treatment,भेदभाव)

In 2008, when the National AIDS Control Organisation (NACO) launched the Prevention of Parent-to-Child Transmission Programme (PPCT), the husband-wife duo enlisted with an NGO as outreach workers for the HIV awareness initiative along with 13 others. Their job was to help HIV-positive pregnant women with their medication and monitor newborn babies. “We have seen discrimination in hospitals against HIV-positive women from such close quarters. Doctors would refuse to carry out C-section, nurses hurl abuses even while the woman is crying in pain,” says Ms. Kumari. “Our role was to help such women.”

However, in December last year, the scheme was abruptly(suddenly,अचानक) ended citing(mentioning,उल्लेखित) lack of funds, rendering(give,देना) the outreach workers jobless. This, when all 15 workers are themselves HIV-positive and on antiretroviral therapy. In order to effectively carry out their roles as outreach workers, these individuals were asked to disclose their condition to the community and their families at the risk of social marginalisation. With people around them knowing about their HIV status, these workers are now not only struggling to get alternative employment but have had to move house. “Earlier, we were staying in different colonies in east Delhi. But with no money and neighbours boycotting us, eight of us are now living in the same locality to help each other,” says Rajesh Kumari, another outreach worker, who has been working as a maid for the past three months.

In the lurch

The outreach workers have tried it all to have their voices heard — from writing letters to the Health Ministry to protesting at Jantar Mantar. The PPCT scheme was halted in Delhi, Himachal Pradesh and Punjab at the same time but Punjab restarted the scheme in June. “When Punjab can, why can’t Delhi and Himachal Pradesh,” asks Anjali Singh, showing a dossier of letters written to Ministers, officials and protest clippings.

“Budget cuts started in 2013 under the UPA (United Progressive Alliance) regime; the NDA (National Democratic Alliance) government may end it completely in their term. Whatever was achieved in all these years is being undone,” says Ganesh Acharya of Mumbai AIDS Forum.

On August 16, these workers met Delhi Commission for Women chief Swati Maliwal for help. The commission subsequently(after,बाद में) wrote to the Delhi State AIDS Control Society (DSACS) and was informed that the latter had no NACO funding to support these persons. “This forced me to write to Health Minister J.P Nadda about the issue,” says Ms. Maliwal. Mr. Nadda replied stating that he will personally look into the matter.

“He should do something, or else give us permission to kill ourselves,” says Kanhaiya Kumar, one of the affected. It’s fingers crossed for the group of 15, for now.

courtesy:the hindu

click here for official link

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For power to reach all, it will need a multi-pronged strategy, collaboration between Centre and states

That the government of India’s recent initiatives in the power sector have started bearing fruit is undeniable(unquestioned,निर्विवाद). It is for this reason that the ministry of power and renewable energy (RE) has been graded as one of the most performing ministries at the Centre.

With the increasing availability of power in the country resulting in a fall in prices and the gradual easing of transmission constraints, it is clear that the milestone of 24×7 supply to all parts of the country is around the corner. The big question, however, is to ensure supply of power, even if it is not 24×7, to all and here, the objective of “power for all” set by policymakers comes under scrutiny(examine,जाँच).

Both Central and state governments have recently been applauding their rural electrification programme. As per government of India estimates, out of 5,87,464 villages in the country, only 18,542 were not electrified at the beginning 2015-16. Of these 14,813 were to be electrified through the grid while 3,639 were to be electrified off-grid through RE sources. Till March 2016, 6,479 villages have already been electrified and the rest are to be electrified by December.

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In the states, this figure stands between 95 to 100 per cent with the exceptions of Manipur and Arunachal Pradesh. States like Gujarat, Haryana, Kerala, Maharashtra, Punjab and Tamil Nadu are already claiming 100 per cent electrification. Even states like Bihar, UP and Rajasthan claim to be touching 99 per cent. The glaring issue in the light of these figures is that by the Centre’s own admission, the number of households without electricity in the country stands at a staggering seven to eight crore. In UP, this figure is about two crore.

This contradiction(opposition,विरोधाभाश) comes from the definition of electrified villages adopted by the government of India. According to the rural electrification policy guidelines of 2004, a village is classified as electrified if basic infrastructure like distribution transformers, poles and distribution lines are provided in the locality, including one “Dalit basti”, and if electricity is provided in one of the public places like schools, panchayat offices, health centres etc and the number of households electrified are 10 per cent of the total number of households in the village.

Prior to October1997, the definition was that a village should be classified as electrified if electricity is being used within its revenue area for any purpose. After October 1997 and till the arrival of the present policy in 2004, a village was deemed to be electrified if the electricity is used in any of the inhabited localities, within the revenue boundary of the village, for any purpose. Thus, even though a village may appear in the electrified list of villages, the actual number of households getting power may be a mere 10 per cent.

The recent controversy over whether Nagla Fatela village in Hathras district, now famous because of its mention by the prime minister in his Independence Day speech, was electrified in 1985 or 2015, is, in a way, an outcome of this bureaucratic juggling.

Further, as per the existing practices of the electricity supply code applicable in different states, all households within 40 metres of an electrical pole are supposed to take their connection from the pole. This leaves a colossal(large,बड़ा) chunk of the population located within the “electrified village” but outside this 40-metre limit. Coupled with this is the problem that even in electrified hamlets, not all the households within 40 meters of the distribution lines/poles, take the connection.

Thus there is a situation where people wanting to take connections cannot get it because they are situated more than 40 meters away and those within the area refuse to take connections and instead use what is commonly known as “katia” to take clandestine(illegal,अवैध) connections. This results in double the trouble: First, the revenue of discoms does not increase and second, the dissatisfaction among the villagers grows.

If you look into the numbers as per the census, there were 22.66 crore households in the country out of which only 16.58 crore had connections. Of these, 30-40 per cent are unmetered. Those with unmetered connections get electricity at very cheap or subsidised rates as they are billed either on a per connection basis or a per kilowatt basis. The discoms, it is widely believed, use this as an opportunity to load most of the stolen electricity into the consumption of this category. This is also the cause for the poor financial health of several discoms.

A three-pronged strategy is required to tackle this problem: One, people who fall within 40 metres of the poles should be persuaded to take the connections. Apart from persuasion(encouragement,प्रोत्साहन), a legislative approach could be to charge the households within the 40 meters an electricity cess, as is done in the case of water provided by the municipal corporations.

Two, power department officials should ensure that people within the 40 metres range take connections. One impediment(barrier,बाधा) to taking these connections is their cost, which should be reduced and charged in instalments, especially from low-income applicants. Three, an extensive assessment of how much investment is required to let the electricity network go up to all the households. This investment should be made on priority basis, as it would bring more revenue to the discoms and it may reduce the tariff burden on existing consumers.

If the investment on expanding the network to each household is too high, governments may consider encouraging private micro-grids and mini-grids. In several states, off-grid micro and mini-grids are a reality. In UP and Bihar, where the grid coverage is poor, 70-80 such projects have already come up. Many other states are following suit.

Simultaneously, the Central government has come up with a draft mini-grid policy which should give a big boost to them in the country. The need is to have a coordinated plan to extend the existing grid and to set up more mini-grids in remote villages. This would require not just coordination but active collaboration among the states and the Centre. Only this can turn the dream of “power for all” into a reality.

 courtesy:indian express

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dalit is right enough

On July 11, 2016, a video of cow vigilantes mercilessly beating up seven Dalit men for skinning a dead cow in Una district, Gujarat, came to light. In protest against the incident, many Dalits have refused to handle cow carcasses(body,शवो). The gau rakshaks should be happy, but they are not. Non-Dalits, presumably including gau rakshaks, have retaliated(react,प्रतिकार) with more violence against Dalits — this time for not picking up cow carcasses — in Samter (August 16), Bhavra (August 20) and Rajkot (August 24), all in Gujarat.

Herein lies the Dalit dilemma(doubt,दुविधा) — he is damned if he does and he is damned if he doesn’t.

The bane of Hindu society is varna, the four-tier arrangement said to be sanctified(holy,पवित्र) by the scriptures. The arrangement encompassed the majority and assigned them places, but it also excluded a large number. The excluded were the outcasts or the untouchables. Inequality by birth was the basis of the arrangement. That inequality stayed with you throughout your life. Violence against Dalits is the punishment for disobeying the rules of the arrangement. Rohith Vemula summed it up: “My birth is my fatal accident.”

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The Dalit Mobilisation

The Dalits have decided that enough is enough. They have decided to mobilise. The scale of social mobilisation of Dalits in Gujarat and Maharashtra, and to some extent in other parts of the country, has not been seen in recent times. Although much of the media is not covering them, massive rallies and marches are being held. There is palpable(clear,स्पस्थ)anger in the community because of the sense of impunity(free from blame,दंडमुक्ति) with which they are being subjected to violence in certain parts of the country. According to the National Commission for Scheduled Castes, in 2015, Gujarat reported the highest crime rate against Dalits, followed by Chhattisgarh and Rajasthan.

Dalits are angry about the hollowness(falseness,खोखलापन) of the current hyper-nationalism where everything about India is called great and every criticism is labelled as anti-national. They are angry about the way the Una incident and other such incidents are being dismissed as isolated or as conspiracies. It is noteworthy that the boycott of cow carcasses, the rallies and the marches have happened through social, not political, mobilisation.

After a long period of silence, the Prime Minister spoke on August 6. He said, “I get so angry at those who are into the gau rakshak business… I have seen that some people are into crimes all night and wear the garb of gau rakshaks in the day.” The very next day, at a rally, he said, “You can shoot me rather than target the Dalits.” This is a strange statement for a Prime Minister: he should use the enormous(big,बड़ा) powers of his office to punish the perpetrators(criminal,अपराधी) of violence.

Change Agonisingly(painful,पीड़ाजनक) Slow

Change is taking place, but it is agonisingly slow. In urban areas, where economic and professional identities usually take precedence(priority,तरजीह), and in parts of India where social movements have brought about change, a majority of Hindus do not feel passionate about the caste order. Many Hindus may still prefer marriages within the caste, but have friends among Dalits. Many may express angst about the reservation system, but do not begrudge(envy,ईर्ष्या) the limited preference to Dalits in educational institutions and in some jobs.

However, there is a section of Hindu society that continues to look back with nostalgia(regret,खिन्नता) at the days of caste domination. Many of them have read a sign of approval in the BJP’s victory in 2014. The cow vigilantes are the latest manifestation of centuries of a supremacist ideology. The flurry of bans on cow slaughter and beef consumption, and the aggressive majoritarian narrative, have given them fresh wind.

Few people saw the casteist agenda more clearly than Dr Ambedkar and ‘Periyar’ E V Ramasamy. Both were pessimistic(negative,निराशावादी) about the reformation of Hindu society. Dr Ambedkar did not think that Dalits could find dignity within the fold of the Hindu religion and urged(forced,मजबूर) them to convert to Buddhism. Periyar’s way was atheism and rationalism. The third way is reform of the Hindu social order and accelerating the trends that will usher(show,दिखाना) in a new social order — education, industrialisation, urbanisation, communication and technological advance.

The Constitutional Goal

For the Hindu hyper-nationalists, the idea of a ‘Hindu’ nation is superior to the idea of a constitutional democratic republic. They will sweep the pains of caste history under the carpet. They think that to uphold the idea of a ‘Hindu’ nation it is necessary to underplay its flaws and hide the price that is paid by millions of Dalits and the minorities. On the other hand, the Constitution-makers did not deny the existence of these problems: they acknowledged the prevalence(spreading,प्रसार) of caste differences and discrimination(unfair,भेदभाव) and formulated what they believed would be intermediate solutions, such as reservation for the Scheduled Castes and rights of minorities.

The real focus of the Constitution is to secure a set of natural rights that every Indian should enjoy, irrespective of the historical injustices. It is to make caste, religion and gender irrelevant to citizenship and citizens’ rights.

The project of creating this sense of equal citizenship is still a work-in-progress in this vast and complex land. Hindu hyper-nationalism, which is a form of majoritarianism, is at odds with the constitutional project. The conflict(battle,विवाद) is playing out, in an increasingly violent manner, before our eyes. The consequences(result,परिणाम) of a long-drawn conflict will be terrible for the country and its progress toward the goal of a peaceful and prosperous nation.

courtesy:indian express

click here for official link

A city is for all its citizens

“Universal” is a tricky word. It has an enormous(large,विशाल) appeal, an unquestioned romance of taking everyone along. Universal human rights, universal access to basic services, housing for all. It is the barometer of inclusion done right. The dark side of the romance is that it’s one of the hardest things to achieve. Often the “universal” is a vanishing(disappear,गायब) horizon and, like all horizons, the mirage is what makes you lose sight of the very real trade-offs and constraints in your way.

This week the Delhi Jal Board (DJB) announced a new horizon towards the idea of universal access to a basic urban service and human need: water. The “Jal Adhikar Connection” (a Right to Water Connection) promises to let households within slums in Delhi apply for legal, metered water connections “irrespective of the status of their residence.” This move — following the Government of Delhi’s already given pledge(promise,वादा) to extend water and sanitation services to unauthorised colonies — implies that legal, public and metered water could (like electricity) actually cover the city as it exists rather than as it is imagined in plans and laws.

The city is what it is

It is critical to emphasise how important this is. In Indian cities, one of the biggest blocks to any imagination of “universal” or “inclusive” development is not lack of money, land or technology as is so often imagined. It is that a large number of our fellow urban residents are not considered urban residents at all — they are not part of the “universe” to be reached. The grounds of their exclusion are particular to the way our cities have been built. For multiple reasons, Indian cities are largely auto-constructed. Put simply: they have been built not by the intentions of planners or architects but by people themselves. From the slum to the unauthorised colony, the historical urban village trying to change its identity to the new peri-urban development, each neighbourhood has some kind of tension with law and planning. In Delhi’s last reliable statistic on this in 2000, only 24 per cent of the city lived in a “planned colony.” Everyone else, nearly three-fourths of the city, lived or lives some distance from this legal and planned norm. It is now well argued that this “illegality” is not one most of these residents perform to seek personal gains; it is simply the only way in the context of state and market failures to find a way to make life in the city. As activists have long argued: when three-fourths of a people find themselves violating law, it is the law itself that is broken.

“Spatial illegality” has been a critical — and deeply under-recognised — part of what has broken the possibility of universal access to basic services in our cities. As the rules have changed over time, utilities like the DJB have been, at worst, prohibited from giving legal water connections in “illegal” slums and “unauthorised” colonies, or, at best, such provision has been left to discretion(sense,विवेक), the dreaded(fearful,भयानक) “may” rather than “shall” of public policy. In multiple legal challenges, courts have refused to acknowledge the urban right to water citing spatial illegality even if this leaves the basic needs of thousands unmet, their dignity denied.

The irony is that even those who defend such exclusions do not fully realise the cost they themselves pay for them. Partly as a result of spatial illegality, our city’s infrastructure is not a network or a system. It is a set of fragmented(break,खंडित)splinters. It struggles to move to its horizon, reaching one colony but bypassing the other, reaching one now and making the other wait, trying to navigate a geography not of demand and supply but of varied degrees of legality and legitimacy. Who gets infrastructure and when thus become matters of power and patronage, reproducing social inequalities in the space of the city.

Not only does this mean that rights and entitlements are conditioned on where you live in the city, it also means that DJB chief Kapil Mishra is absolutely right when he says that without expanding access more “universally,” the DJB can build neither a scientific system nor an efficient one. Infrastructure systems are just that: systems. They need scale and connectivity to be economically viable and technically sound. The DJB’s financial health and self-sufficiency will gain enormously when thousands of new households give revenue to the public utility instead of to tankers and private suppliers. Its pipelines will map, connect and function — their geographies seeking to reach rather than bypass, connect rather than fragment. Wastage will reduce, efficiencies will rise. There are good models to learn from here. When the Bangalore Water Supply and Sewerage Board introduced a category of “shared taps” to precisely(clearly,स्पस्थ्तया) open up water connections into slums, it saw its financial health improve alongside the improvements in the city’s overall indicators of health, work, housing quality and poverty. When Ahmedabad gave networked infrastructure to its slums, overall indicators of access slowly rose for the city as a whole.

Yet herein lies the first danger of taking an important move and losing ourselves in a mirage well before the horizon is near. Technical and economic efficiency are necessary and pivotal(crucial,निर्णायक) reasons to want to make access to water universal but are not, they must not be, sufficient ones. In an auto-constructed city where spatial illegality breaks access to basic rights, expanding the right to water must be a part of a larger effort to expand the right to the city itself.

The city planner’s public

Ambedkar once said that a Hindu’s public is just his caste. An Indian city’s public is too often just the legal, planned colony. The graded inequalities that follow between this imagined ideal and all other ways of inhabiting the city are real. The exclusions are simultaneously socially performed, legally enshrined, and economically reproduced. Recognising the right to water — it is a jal adhikar connection — must be the first step in taking on the spatial illegality that urban residents have been forced into and then held accountable for. It must begin to return to the Indian city its actual universal, its actual publics, to all of its residents. For this, we must begin at the most fundamental of all claims: to be recognised as being in the city, to be acknowledged, and to be valued as workers, citizens and bearers of rights rather than just the “poor,” “slum dwellers” or “encroachers.” What Delhi must do now is to stand by its Jal Board that has taken a first and important step to live up to being and becoming a truly public utility.

courtesy:the hindu

click here for official link

Weighing the burden of proof

 “An honest civil servant should not be harassed by anybody or agency or institution while in service or after retirement. It would make the civil servants working in the system nervous and edgy, which would not be in the interest of the country,” Sanjay Bhoosreddy, Honorary Secretary of the Central IAS Officers Association has said.

Ponderous(burdensome,कष्टकारक) words indeed in the context of former Union Coal Secretary H.C. Gupta, who is facing trial in several Coalgate cases, choosing not to have any lawyer to defend him. Mr. Gupta told the trial judge recently that he did not have the money to hire a lawyer. He also turned down an offer of state aid made by the judge. In all likelihood, he will argue his own case. This is an extraordinary decision that could prove to be a double-edged weapon. The skill required to defend an accused in a criminal case is a specialised one. In my view, Mr. Gupta is taking too big a chance out of desperation and disgust at the way things are taking shape around him.

Appeal to good senses

Mr. Gupta is obviously outraged(angry,गुस्सा) at the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) action. He probably understands that the law on the subject is against him, and he would therefore appeal directly to the good senses of the judge, something bordering on an attempt to play on emotions. Not for him the technicalities of what he is accused of. In his own eyes, he has done nothing wrong, and cannot be placed in the company of the corrupt and wily. He is only partly right.

Many in government and outside may dismiss him as a maverick(unorthodox,अपरंपरागत). From whatever I have heard of him, Mr. Gupta was an outstanding officer with a reputation for integrity. Remember also that the formal charge sheet against him by the CBI do not allege that he ever obtained any gratification for showing favour to the private companies that had received licences to operate a few coal mines. The charge sheet indicts him only as part of a ‘conspiracy’ to confer undue favour on private parties, and which caused loss to the public exchequer. This implied that he was negligent(careless,लापरवाह), and there was no application of mind on his part when the screening committee headed by him decided to examine the licence applications in question. There is no recorded evidence, however, that hedissented(disagreement,असहमति) from the majority opinion which favoured the grant of licences to some firms.

The conclusions of his committee were purely recommendatory in nature. That the final authority here was the Coal Minister, who, at that point of time, was Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, and that he was not prosecuted by the investigating agency, is not very relevant to Mr. Gupta’s defence — although the CBI decision, possibly backed by legal opinion, smacked of double standards. Remember, in Bofors, Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi figured posthumously in the charge sheet as ‘accused not sent for trial’ only because he held charge of Defence. There was no charge that Bofors made any payment to him. Interestingly, what many of us would look upon as a moral or constructive civil liability comes to be defined as ‘criminal misconduct’ under the Prevention of Corruption Act, 1988, which was enacted to lend more deterrence(obstacle,अवरोध) to what was being considered for long as a weak and toothless — the 1947 law against public servant corruption.

Element of ‘abuse of office’

Several judgments over the years had exposed the lacunae(lack,खामिया) in the 1947 Act, which enabled the corrupt to get off scot-free on being given a benefit of the doubt. Significant was the Supreme Court observation inM. Narayanan Nambiar v. State of Kerala, that under Section 5(1) (d) of the 1947 Act, an element of abuse of office was a necessary ingredient while trying to establish that a public servant used corrupt or illegal means to obtain pecuniary(financial,धन संबंधी) benefits. And ‘abuse of office’ was too vague(unclear,अस्पस्थ) an expression that let many corrupt officers off the hook. In several other judgments on the subject, courts had narrowed down the circumstances under which a public servant could be prosecuted for corruption. This is the background to the promulgation of the 1988 Act, which, under Section 13(1) (d), laid down five forms of criminal misconduct by a public servant. Finding that some officers were giving in too easily to corrupt demands from above — and did not do anything to resist such demands under the belief that as long as they were not beneficiaries, no criminal liability was liable to be attached to them — the government decided that such kind of abetment(incite,उकसाना) of graft in high places had to be penalised. This accounts specifically for Section 13(1) (d) (iii), according to which, a public servant commits the offence of criminal misconduct if he, “while holding office as a public servant, obtains for any person any valuable thing or pecuniary advantage without any public interest”.

The tirade of the IAS and several senior servants belonging to other superior services against Section 13(1) (d) (iii) is on the ground that the burden of proof in criminal cases, which normally rests with the prosecution, shifts here to the public servant arraigned by law, and the latter had to prove to the satisfaction of the court that he did not at all benefit from the transaction under probe. This incidentally is germane(relevant,सार्थक) to the defence of H.C. Gupta. This criticism is not true, although on a superficial(external,सतही) reading it appears as if the prosecution had no responsibility at all to establish the guilt of an accused.

Several decisions related to the 1947 Act and expert views on the 1988 Act clarify that court presumption of any accused’s guilt contemplated here is not automatic. Such presumption follows only after the prosecution had done its duty of presenting evidence that the accused had “obtained or (has) agreed to obtain for himself or for any other person gratification (other than legal remuneration)”. Also, Section 20 of the 1988 Act, which deals with the circumstances under which a court can raise a presumption against an accused is specific to habitual offenders and not to others. Besides, the presumption is one of law and not facts. These interpretations alone should allay(reduce,कम) the misgivings and fears of an honest civil servant that he would be hauled up for transparent decisions which stand the risk of going wrong and causing loss to the exchequer.

Amendment before Parliament

An amendment to the PC Act of 1988 is before a select committee in Parliament. It deals with Section 13(1) (d). It is just possible that this subsection may be eventually substantially diluted or wholly deleted. If this happens, the logical question would be one of how to introduce deterrence against a civil servant who, though honest, would like to just drift and permit himself to cave in against a dishonest Minister. This is a serious issue that negates(invalidate,नकारना) the basic concept of civil service accountability. This would actually promote the tendency of the executive to choose weak civil servants who may be personally honest but are known to be extremely timid(afraid,डरा हुआ), and from whom no resistance at all to dishonest decisions could be expected. The malady(illness,रोग) is particularly prevalent(popular,प्रचलित) in some States where dishonesty is the order of the day.

The popular impression now is that in our country there is no fear of the anti-corruption law on the part of government officials. When this is the hard reality on the ground, concerned citizens would do well to collectively protest against any dilution of anti-corruption safeguards as the proposed amendment seeks to do.

A final word. What is the IAS Officers Association doing to promote integrity among its members? I would like to ask the same question of those holding positions in other associations, such as those for the IPS and IFS. Such groups cannot be mere trade unions fighting for rights. Their obligations include a stout(strong,मजबूत) advocacy of adherence by their members to ethics while serving the public. Whatever I hear on the subject may not however be music to the ears of those who currently stand for probity.

 courtesy:the hindu

click here for official link