National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme

The National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme is one of the few well-intentioned schemes to come out of the current UPA government. The NREGS guarantees 100days of unskilled work per family for every family that is below the poverty line. Now, lets not even go into how BPL classifications are calculated or the absurdity and lack of context to the BPL surveys. There are many points about this scheme which are at a macro level wrong --

1. As one of the recipients of this scheme famously said "Are our tummies on vacation the remaining 265 days?" What is the rationale behind 100 days per one member of family?
2. Providing work that required unskilled labor is essentially a welfare scheme. It is not promoting the skill sets of that targeted population. Its the classic case of "give them fish, rather than teach them to fish". Potentially the same money can be spent at every Panchayat level to provide training in skills that will lead the population towards economic independence and dignity.
3. As many social audits across the districts where the scheme is being implemented show, the muster rolls are largely fudged, corruption accounts for a huge drain on this money, and a very small percentage of the money actually trickles down to the intended recipient. In fact, Rajiv Gandhi, when he was the Prime Minister, famously admitted that only 15% of government spending manages to reach the recipient. The rest is wastage. A similar Employment Guarantee Scheme tried out in Maharashtra in 1976 had already fallen victim to this atrocious Public Distribution System. In fact, the Indian government does not have any evidence of being capable of properly implementing any social welfare scheme.

Given all these obvious issues, the question then is if not NREGS, then what? The problem is not restricted to unskilled work, and then neither is the solution. Clearly the solution needs to be autonomous, small, and needs to come from the bottom, from the folks who need the money. The government needs to stop dictating lives and stop interfering. The policies that restrict our manufacturing sector from matching the growth in the services sector need to go. Agriculture has to be supported, or the farmers transitioning from agriculture into manufacturing or services need to be provided the skills to do that (again, allow private enterprise, and it will come about organically, instead of some governmental masterminding). National budgets need to spend less on defence and instead pour some funds into Education (at all levels). And in the middle of all this, the right folks will get the right skills and will be able to get their right to livelihood.

A possible counter-argument of course is that while all this is happening, people are starving. Maybe a combination of some scheme with a larger solution in tow is probably what is recommended. However, the government seems intent on earning hearsay goodwill (read votes, and support of left-parties) by implementing only the welfare schemes, and the bureaucracy is happy to implement the scheme with its 85% drain on many crores of rupees!

The Agrarian Crisis of India Shining

India is rapidly developing. Services sector is booming. Our GDP is increasing at 9%. We are cutting nuclear deals with USA. Our youth have the credit to buy German and Japanese cars and motorcycles. Our farmers do not have the credit to buy seeds. We are cutting deals with Monsanto and undercutting our farmers. Over 60% of our economy is reliant on agriculture. Agriculture sector is in a serious crisis. India is ready for a massive collapse.

Thats the story of two different Indias. If you really think about it, everything about India is pluralistic. Agriculture is fundamentally unsustainable. Like education, the country needs to subsidize and support its agrarian sector. Particularly a country who's excess of 50% economy is agrarian and excess of 70% of the population are farmers. However, as the policies of the past decade unfold, we are seeing a continued spread of farmer suicides across the country.

P. Sainath has written extensively on this crisis. Click here to follow the link to indiatogether.org and scroll down along the right column to read Sainath's reports on the crisis in

• Andhra Pradesh (Anantpur and other nearby areas)
• Kerala (Wyanad)
• Maharashtra (Vidarbha)

I'll add more details to this post when I have more time.

Bhopal Gas Disaster Survivors Struggle

Shortly after midnight poison gas leaked from a factory in Bhopal, India, owned by Union Carbide Corporation. There was no warning, none of the plant's safety systems were working. In the city people were sleeping. They woke in darkness to the sound of screams with the gases burning their eyes, noses and mouths. They began retching and coughing up froth streaked with blood. Whole neighbourhoods fled in panic, some were trampled, others convulsed and fell dead. People lost control of their bowels and bladders as they ran. Within hours thousands of dead bodies lay in the streets. Read a survivor's account of "that night". More background here.

All that was back in 1984. The government let the miscreants get away, and also made a deal with Union Carbide as compensation for those who died that night. The survivors today have a fight of a different nature altogether, as they fight the contamination, the water borne handicapping diseases, physical malformations, societal stigma, hunger, poverty -- it never ends. I visited Bhopal in January of 2007 and met with the survivors and visited the contaminated factory site. It was a surreal experience. Folks are obviously in a bad state for resources. The ground water is badly contaminated and there is no other water available except once a week. The governmental promises about pipelines from nearby Kolar river have not been kept. The factory site is dilapidated and lot of chemicals still lie around, and with every rainy season, further deeply get entrenched into the water table of the area.

• Click here for a full picture story of that visit.
• A lot of background details and up-to-date information is available from bhopal.net
  

Despite all this, the Bhopalis will first smile, and then offer you a cup of chai and then ask you "Ab boliyen, kaise aana hua?" I'll add more details and links and stories here when I get more time.

Mehdiganj Water Struggle

Mehdiganj is a village in Uttar Pradesh, around 20 Km from Varanasi. The communities in this village and in the surrounding areas have been facing a server water crisis and are fighting against the unjust practices of the local Coca Cola plant, which is the chief offender in their current water scenario. A few key points which are at the root of this issue are:

1. The ground water level in the area has gone down due to the excessive mining of water by the local Coca Cola plant.

2. The chemical waste let out by the plant into the nearby farms resulted large scale destruction of crops and soil has been damaged as well.

3. The plant has also occupied the local panchayat land and has been found guilty of tax theft.

A detailed website cataloging this struggle is available here.
More links:
Frequently Asked Questions (provides a lot of details and background)
Some documents (legal) relevant to the struggle
Demands of the local community in Mehdiganj

Orwellian truths on how to write

George Orwell in 1946 published the essay Politics and the English Language lamenting the abuse of cliches in the English language.

Now, it is clear that the decline of a language must ultimately have political and economic causes: it is not due simply to the bad influence of this or that individual writer. But an effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely. A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.

Read the whole essay, its definitely worth the while of anyone even remotely interested in the language. Orwell summarizes his points with the following six suggestions to be followed when communicating in English --

1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.
3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

Link to couple more Orwellian articles -- Nonsense Poetry and In defence of P G Wodehouse.

Government fostered Inequality, or how the many go hungry feeding the few

Read about this rather interesting restaurant in this essay by Russel Roberts. If You're Paying, I'll Have Top Sirloin first appeared in the Wall Street Journal, 18-May-1995.

When you eat there, you usually spend about $6—you have a sandwich, some fries and a drink. Of course you'd also enjoy dessert and a second drink, but that costs an additional $4. The extra food isn't worth $4 to you, so you stick with the $6 meal.

Sometimes, you go to the same restaurant with three friends. The four of you are in the habit of splitting the check evenly. You realize after a while that the $4 drink and dessert will end up costing you only $1, because the total tab is split four ways. Should you order the drink and dessert? If you're a nice person, you might want to spare your friends from having to subsidize your extravagance. Then it dawns on you that they may be ordering extras financed out of your pocket. But they're your friends. They wouldn't do that to you and you wouldn't do that to them. And if anyone tries it among the group, social pressure will keep things under control.

But now suppose the tab is split not at each table but across the 100 diners that evening across all the tables. Now adding the $4 drink and dessert costs only 4¢. Splurging is easy to justify now. In fact you won't just add a drink and dessert; you'll upgrade to the steak and add a bottle of wine. Suppose you and everyone else each orders $40 worth of food. The tab for the entire restaurant will be $4000. Divided by the 100 diners, your bill comes to $40. Here is the irony. You'll get your "fair share." The stranger at the restaurant a few tables over pays for your meal, but you also help subsidize his. It all "evens out."

But this outcome is a disaster. When you dine alone, you spend $6. The extra $34 of steak and other treats are not worth it. But in competition with the others, you've chosen a meal far out of your price range whose enjoyment falls far short of its cost.

Self-restraint goes unrewarded. If you go back to ordering your $6 meal in hopes of saving money, your tab will be close to $40 anyway unless the other 99 diners cut back also. The good citizen feels like a chump.

And so we read of the freshman Congressman who comes to Congress eager to cut pork out of the budget but in trouble back home because local projects will also come under the knife. Instead of being proud to lead the way, he is forced to fight for those projects to make sure his district gets its "fair share."

Matters get much worse when there are gluttons and drunkards at the restaurant mixing with dieters and teetotalers. The average tab might be $40, but some are eating $80 worth of food while others are stuck with a salad and an iced tea.

Those with modest appetites would like to flee the smorgasbord, but suppose it's the only restaurant in town and you are forced to eat there every night. Resentment and anger come naturally. And being the only restaurant in town, you can imagine the quality of the service.

Such a restaurant can be a happy place if the light eaters enjoy watching the gluttony of those who eat and drink with gusto.

People who are overeating at the expense of others should be ashamed. That shame will return when others are forced to cut back too. This requires deep cuts and an end to the government smorgasbord where the few benefit at the expense of the many.

PS: Link to Roberts' essay from a friend. This and many similar essays were reprinted in the book The Libertarian Reader, David Boaz, Editor, Free Press, 1997.

All in a day's work of an Indian MP

Parliamentary Research Services gathers statistics of attendance of our esteemed members of the Parliament and analyzes them. Take a look at their MP attendance analysis for the period 2004 to 2006. Many trends fall out, including the fact that parties with no stake in the ruling government (BJP, BSP) have the lowest attendances.

It's quite incredible, to see how the public money gets spent. Check out the daily agenda in the Loksabha -- I've picked yesterday, pick your own date, yesterday is one of the better days. Every single report being presented to the council, has time marked to make a statement showing reasons for delay in reporting it.

"Statement (Hindi and English versions) showing reasons for delay in laying the papers mentioned at (1) above."

The real irony comes from Aug 21st agenda. Check this out --

12. SHRI RAJESH VERMA and SHRI NIKHIL KUMAR CHOUDHARY to lay on the Table minutes (Hindi and English versions) of the 7th sittings of the Committee on Absence of Members from the sittings of the House held on 7 December, 2006.

Minutes of a meeting held in december 2006 regarding absence of members, is being presented in August 2007!!!

All this is the loksabha. The rajyasabha doesnt let anything out. Today's agenda is "government business". In the name of all that is sweet and pure, what else can they ever do?

SocialWatch India had an article back in 2003. Quoting from it --

Time lost on account of unruly behavior: The Lok Sabha lost over 60 hours to disruptions. The cost of Parliamentary transactions is currently estimated to be Rs 18,430 per minute. The loss to the public exchequer can be easily imagined. The only thing that can be said in favour of MPs is that the time lost due to disruptions was less in 2003 as compared to 2002. One can perhaps attribute this marginal improvement to the increasing media attention to disruption of Parliament and the mounting public displeasure over the way MPs are squandering public money. Decreasing number of sittings: For 36 years from the time of its inception in 1952, the Lok Sabha sat for over 100 days every year. In fact, it averaged 138 sittings in a year for several years and came down to 102 days in 1988. Since then, it has fallen to just about 80 days in a year. But the year 2003 saw a further decline- the Lok Sabha sat for only 74 days during the year.

Unfinished business-pending Bills: In Rajya Sabha more than 30 bills are pending, which include the bills pending for more than 10 years. This includes bills such as the Indian Medical Council (amendment) bill introduced in 1987. In the Lok Sabha, the end of every session during the year 2003 saw about 30-40 pending Government Bills. At the end of the fourteenth session, the number of pending Private Members Bills stood at 261.

Who will watch the watchdogs?

Where then the promised freedom? 60 years and counting...

Sixty years to our independence today, as India awakes to a new president who, when running a bank, took money from the women depositors, distributed most of that money amongst her relatives as loans and, according to RBI, did nothing to recover that money, thereby causing that bank to shut down. A president who can talk to spirits. A president who, during emergency envisioned an India where people with hereditary diseases were to be forcibly sterilized. And yet, a president who is a woman too. In any other mature democracy, our president would be in jail for fraud, not in Rashtrapathi Bhavan. Today, India celebrates its sixty years of independence and its first woman president! The two represent the cornerstones of the evils in our social, economic, and political systems -- a resting on the laurels of past actions (we are an ancient civilization), and an apathetic acceptance of our curtailed personal freedom.

The story of our freedom struggle, was not the story of a Gandhi here and a Nehru there -- it was about millions of people who wanted to be master of their own destiny. The British empire was a natural target, and the relief is palpable in the speeches made on that historical day, three score years ago. The tragedy is that for most Indians, political freedom was enough. An oppressive regime gave way to an oppressive state, and we did not protest. Lack of economic freedom continued to keep India poor, and we did not protest. Corruption was rife, and we accepted it as a way of life, and did not protest. Personal freedom was routinely denied to us, and we did not protest. In parts of our country today, people are treated worse than the British treated us, and we do not protest. We have come to accept mediocrity, and we do not protest. As a nation, we stopped caring for freedom once we gained independence.

Take economic freedom, for instance. At the time of our independence, the Indian economy was very different - it was much poorer and less industrialized, and government was less important - revenue was just 5 per cent of the gross domestic product. But our governments introduced industrial licensing, and later used it to create government monopolies in a series of industries, including heavy machinery, fertilizer, coal, shipping and aircraft, and prevent new private entry into industries such as steel. Traditional, liberal (in the traditional sense of supporting freedom) Congress-party workers protested, some even left the Congress and started their own political parties, but as a nation we allowed our freedom to be curtailed, little realising the fact that in this lay the seeds of gross economic inequality we were to see sixty years later.

Take trade, for example. When two people make a transaction, they only do so because both are better off. Prosperity is the result of a chain of such win-win transactions between people profiting by fulfilling each other's needs. But Jawaharlal Nehru once described profit as a "dirty word" and gave in to the fatal conceit, to use Friedrich Hayek's phrase, of imagining that the economy, and the lives of people, could be planned.

The benefits of economic freedom are largely unintuitive, and rarely has lack of that freedom been protested by the masses in any society. But what about personal freedom? The Indian Penal Code, drafted by our imperial overlords in the 19th century to keep us natives in place, and tailored on Victorian morality, is filled with archaic laws that should have been repealed 60 years ago. Section 377 effectively outlaws homosexuality. Section 295(a), that makes it illegal to "outrage religious feelings", routinely used by bigots, from all religions, to stifle free expression. It is filled with laws that criminalise the act of giving offence, outlaw victimless crimes and treat women as the property of men.

What about our education system? The British empire set up an education system which guaranteed to generate a body of clerks to serve the Queen. Not once did we think about reviewing the system. Nor did we think about spending money to guarantee education to all our children. When Gandhiji asked for compulsory eight years of education for all children of free India, he was silenced by saying there is no money to do that other than by supporting the sale of liquor. Till date, despite the 86th amendment of the constitution which makes primary education a fundamental right of every child, the government drops the Right to Education bill on false excuses of lack of funds. We, the citizens of India, all these years, accepted this lack of freedom, not just for ourselves, we let this visit our children and the future generation of a nation.

Milton Friedman, a prime proponent of local governance, once said -- "There are four ways in which you can spend money. You can spend your own money on yourself. When you do that, why then you really watch out what you're doing, and you try to get the most for your money. Then you can spend your own money on somebody else. For example, I buy a birthday present for someone. Well, then I'm not so careful about the content of the present, but I'm very careful about the cost. Then, I can spend somebody else's money on myself. And if I spend somebody else's money on myself, then I'm sure going to have a good lunch! Finally, I can spend somebody else's money on somebody else. And if I spend somebody else's money on somebody else, I'm not concerned about how much it is, and I'm not concerned about what I get. And that is a government."

Dr. Ambedkar, deified today as the demigod of Dalit politics, rejected the word socialist in the preamble of our constitution and remarked thus -- "What should be the policy of the State, how the society should be organized in a social and economic sense are matters which must be decided by the people themselves according to time and local circumstances. It cannot be laid down in the constitution itself, because that is destroying democracy altogether".

Freedom for a country should mean every person being free to live their lives as they please, as long as they do not interfere with the similar freedoms of others. These past sixty years, India's democracy has not matured into a participatory republic but has only remained symbolic by allowing an orderly transfer of power through the ballot box. Instead of participating in the governance and demanding our freedoms, for long we have allowed our mai-baap sarkar to treat us as subjects, not citizens, and continue to deny us our freedoms.

In the Hindu culture, the 60th anniversary is an important milestone, amongst other things an occasion to renew marriage vows. Sixty years ago, our nation married democracy, and this anniversary is an opportunity to renew those vows. Today is an opportunity to think about the freedoms we dont have; the freedoms that have been denied to us; the freedoms that we so easily didnt care for. There is an age old political adage that we get the leaders we deserve. Today, as India celebrates its sixty years of independence, let us be the leaders we
deserve to have.

2000 Presidential Eve of Republic Day Address

President K.R. Narayanan's address to the nation on the eve of Republic Day 2000 is often quoted as an example of how the President must view the nation, and to confront its many wrongs. Too often in the past, the head of state remained spectator to political events, and inadequately seized of his role in furthering the India imagined in the Constitution. President Narayanan's address is a marked deviation from that apathy. The text of his address is reproduced in full here.


Fellow citizens,

On the eve of the Golden Jubilee of our Republic I have the privilege to extend to all Indians living in India or abroad, my heartiest greetings and felicitations. I also send my greetings to the brave personnel of our armed forces who stand guard to defend the unity and territorial integrity of the nation. And I pay my homage to the memory of those who laid down their lives in the defence of the Republic from external aggression and intermittent terrorist attacks across the border. On this solemn occasion our thoughts go back to the Father of the Nation who lived and died for the freedom and unity of our nation, and to the countless men and women who followed him into the arena and faced immense hardships and sufferings in the heroic struggle for independence. Our thoughts also go back to the founding fathers of our Constitution whose far-sighted vision and arduous labors gave us a Constitution which enshrined the traditional concepts of liberty, equality and fraternity adding to them the concept of Justice social, economic and political -- and declaring our nation a sovereign democratic Republic.

The word Republic is no ordinary word. It is a commitment to the effect that, in our State, supreme power is exercised not by some remote monarch but by the people. It is an affirmation that the wielder of power in India - the adhinayaka - is the great aggregation of our people as a whole, whom Rabindranath Tagore has immortalized as the jana-gana. Let us, on this anniversary, hail that proclamation and commitment. Let us celebrate the exceptional status we enjoy, the status of being the worlds largest democracy. Given the chequered career of democracies elsewhere, we can be grateful to be citizens of this Republic; where an individual, be he ever so high, the Constitution and the laws made by the people remain higher than him; and where the Executive remains accountable to the Parliament.

Thanks to our early and visionary support to science and technology we have made advances in that field as would excite human imagination anywhere. Thanks to our kisans and mazdoors and entrepreneurs the wheels of our agriculture, commerce and industry turn steadily with the world; and thanks, above all, to the striving of our agricultural communities, our granaries remain full. From the 1970s when our GDP grew at only around 3.5% per annum, economic growth rate has accelerated to around 6.5%. It is not generally realised that in the 1990s, India has become one of the 10 fastest growing economies in the world. We can be justly proud of the abundance of our entrepreneurial ability, the high levels of domestic private savings, and also of the high level of managerial and technical skills. All these have enabled our economic reforms to have a solid and a stable base for further and more rapid growth.

This is a day when we take pride in our achievements, but it must surely also be a day of honest self-analysis and self-questioning about where we, as a people and a society, are headed.

Fifty years into our life in the Republic we find that Justice - social, economic and political - remains an unrealized dream for millions of our fellow citizens. The benefits of our economic growth are yet to reach them. We have one of the worlds largest reservoirs of technical personnel, but also the worlds largest number of illiterates; the worlds largest middle class, but also the largest number of people below the poverty line, and the largest number of children suffering from malnutrition. Our giant factories rise from out of squalor; our satellites shoot up from the midst of the hovels of the poor.

Not surprisingly, there is sullen resentment among the masses against their condition erupting often in violent forms in several parts of the country. Tragically, the growth in our economy has not been uniform. It has been accompanied by great regional and social inequalities. Many a social upheaval can be traced to the neglect of the lowest tier of society, whose discontent moves towards the path of violence. Dalits and tribals are the worst affected by all this. In parts of rural India forms of sadism seem to be earmarked for dalit women. From the time of Draupadi our womenfolk had been subjected to public disrobing and humiliation as a means of vendetta individual, social or political. For Dalit women it has become a common experience in rural areas, but what is astounding is that it has been extended as one of the methods of ragging in our elite colleges and universities.

To open a newspaper or to hear the news over television now requires nerves of steel. Violence in society has bared a hundred fangs as the advertisement-driven consumerism is unleashing frustrations and tensions in our society. The unabashed, vulgar indulgence in conspicuous consumption by the nouveau-riche has left the underclass seething in frustration. One half of our society guzzles aerated beverages while the other has to make do with palmfuls of muddied water. Our three-way fast lane of liberalization, privatization and globalization must provide safe pedestrian crossings for the unempowered India also so that it too can move towards Equality of Status and Opportunity. Beware of the fury of the patient man says the old adage. One could say beware of the fury of the patient and long-suffering people.

We cannot and ought not halt movement in the trajectories of our modern progress. Factories will and must rise, satellites must and will soar to the heavens, and dams over rivers will rise to prevent floods, generate electricity and irrigate dry lands for cultivation. But that should not cause ecological and environmental devastation, and the uprooting of human settlements, especially of tribals and the poor. Ways and methods can be found for countering the harmful impact of modern technology on the lives of the common people. I believe that the answer to the ill-effects of science and technology is not to turn our back on technology, but to have more science and technology that is directed to human needs and for the betterment of the human condition.

While Government must be held responsible for environmental and human consequences of mega projects, the responsibility for environmental protection cannot however lie with Government alone. It must also be borne by civil society. There is need to improve the tone of our social and economic life through improved work ethic and environmental behavior. Far too many of us lack the professional pride to see a task well performed, a responsibility well borne. Accountability in the delivery of public services is shockingly low. One reason why our infrastructure remains weak is that the quality of civil work executed is poor - compromised by sub-standard materials, corrupt practices and sloppy supervision.

We ignore the social dimension of our actions and practices. The late Dr. Adiseshiah, one of our prominent economists and academicians, wrote about his mother that she was a highborn lady who kept her house spotlessly clean. Every morning she used to sweep and clean the household herself and then dump the rubbish in the neighbors garden. Self-regarding purity and righteousness ignoring others has been the bane of our culture. It has created a gulf in our society between people even with regard to the basic needs and fundamental rights. For example, water is a basic need and a fundamental right of the people. Yet to-day millions of our people are struggling to get adequate clean drinking water.

Less than 150 years ago, there were hardly any government-sponsored water supply schemes in India. But India had a long-standing strong tradition of water management, which was built on the technology of rainwater harvesting. Not only that tradition still survives in the Northeast and the Himalayan region like Ladakh but remnants of that tradition can be found in Tamilnadu, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Rajasthan and other States. There is no reason why we cannot revive this tradition of our forefathers. Water is required for not only drinking, but for agriculture and animal husbandry. Good water management can help to increase water supply and regenerate rural ecology and rural economy. Governments efforts to increase water supply can be supplemented by a peoples movement to capture and conserve rainwater. We have to organize a peoples movement for stopping the pollution of our rivers and ground water reserves. This would be a great contribution to our economy as well as to public health.

I have referred earlier to the question of illiteracy in our country. It is today an accepted fact that literacy and education is at the root of human as well as economic development. Why is it that as a nation we do not feel the desperate urgency of making our people literate? I hope that vested interests have not been fearful of awakening the masses through education. On the contrary we should have faith in the people. We should organize a mass movement for literacy. Cannot we involve the millions of our students, teachers and civil servants to spread literacy among the masses, at least on a part-time basis? Through such a movement not only literacy but national and social causes like population control, environmental consciousness could be spread among the people, not to speak of awareness of and opposition to many ills that are plaguing our society.

Fortunately civic actions in India have multiplied during recent years. The civil society should be further encouraged to grow and address social, cultural and environmental challenges confronting the nation. We need a comprehensive policy to promote the growth of civil society interacting with various branches and levels of Government. Even in a developed and affluent society like the U.S.A. there are around 6 million such organizations disposing of 8% of the countrys GDP in their activities. Not only the Government but the private sector also has an important role to play in a comprehensive civic action plan. We have a model for us in the constructive programme chalked out and implemented during the independence movement by Mahatma Gandhi.

I said a little earlier that this is an occasion for honest self-analysis. I think it would not be wrong to say that as a society we are becoming increasingly insensitive and callous. Gandhiji had tried to popularize the Gujarati song which describes the true Vaishnava as one who knows the other persons pain. He may not find too many of that description in India today. Be it the way cars and buses are driven in our city roads, the way garbage and, particularly, middle class plastic garbage, is strewn around, the way public servants treat the public, or the public handles public utilities, the manner in which we squander or pollute precious reserves like water, the way owners of vehicles allow toxic gases to be spewed into the air that we breathe, the way we allow children to be exploited, the disabled to be passed by, speaks of a stony-hearted society, not a compassionate one that produced the Buddha, Mahavira, Nanak, Kabir and Gandhi.

And then there is our greatest national drawback: the status of our women, and our greatest national shame, the condition of the Dalits, the erstwhile untouchables. Fifty years after our Constitution, the plain truth is that the female half of Indian population continues to be regarded as it was in the 18th and 19th centuries. It is more than 170 years since Raja Rammohan Roy caused sati to be abolished. But the infamous practice still manages to raise its head and, what is worse, even gets explained away as suicide or as saintly sacrifice! What one finds disconcerting is even the absence of political rhetoric on these social ills. Commenting on the male-female disparity in India, Gandhiji wrote in 1931: (and I quote) You cannot have one set of weights and measures for the one and a different one for the other. Yet we have never heard of a husband mounting the funeral pyre of his deceased wife. (Unquote) Unless the status of women in Indian society changes, the Equality spoken of in our Preamble will remain hollow. It is against this attitude of society and the habit of discrimination prevalent in society that the demand for constitutional reservation for women in the Legislatures and Parliament has become a compelling necessity.

We have to ponder over the condition of not only women in our society, but of the Dalits, the tribals and other weaker sections. Untouchability has been abolished by law but shades of it remain in the ingrained attitudes nurtured by the caste system. Though the constitutional provision of reservation in educational institutions and public services flow from our Constitution, these provisions remain unfulfilled through bureaucratic and administrative deformation or by narrow interpretations of these special provisions. It seems, in the social realm, some kind of a counter-revolution is taking place in India. It is forgotten that these benefits have been provided not in the way of charity, but as human rights and as social justice to a section of society who constitute a big chunk of our population, and who actually contribute to our agriculture, industry and services as landless laborers, factory and municipal workers. There are signs that our privileged classes are getting tired of the affirmative action provided by Constitutional provisions. On this Golden Jubilee I would like to say that let us not get tired of what we have provided for our weaker sections, for otherwise as Dr. Ambedkar pointed out, the edifice of our democracy would be like a palace built on dung heap.

If on an occasion like this golden jubilee of our Republic we ponder some of these issues, it would be the better for us. While there is need to be honest with ourselves, I must emphasize, we must act, not despair. In moments of crisis we rise gloriously to the occasion as few societies do. The late war in Kargil showed it; the cyclone in Orissa did so too. And, even more recently, the stoic fortitude with which the nearly 170 passengers and crew aboard the hijacked plane showed how we are capable of the highest endurance, calm, fortitude and human care. But we do not have to reserve our best qualities for national or natural calamities; they should manifest themselves in our daily life. The Biblical exhortation Do not do unto others what thou wouldst not others do unto thyself was anticipated by Vyasa in his words, "Aatmanaha pratikulaani pareshaam na samaacharet."

The world watches us with a combination of admiration and concern: admiration at what we have achieved despite great odds, and concern over the fact that, even with great investments of money and energy we remain far from our goal. Indians do well, they say; India does not. We must examine the import of that observation and try to rectify the situation. Of course the rest of the world, too, is faced by crises. The end of the Cold War has not ended all conflicts, it has only changed its character. Even as we want equality amongst ourselves, so do we want equality among the nations of the world. This does not and cannot mean that all countries have the same of everything. But it does mean that no nation or continent can seek overlordship over others claiming political, economic, technological or strategic superiority.

We are privileged, as Indians, to have played a leading role in the decolonizing of the mighty continents of Asia and Africa. We are the initiators of the concept of non-alignment in a world when it was bitterly divided by Cold War, and whether the great powers now recognize or not the role of non-alignment in ending the Cold War, the fact of its contribution remains for all to see. And we are also co-authors with the Peoples Republic of China of the Five Principles of peaceful co-existence which provide the world a code of conduct in international relations. The principles like the respect for the territorial integrity and independence of nations, non-interference in their internal matters and mutual benefit and equality are precious concepts which cannot become redundant in a world of globalization. We are privileged also to be playing a role to see that in the new millennium all the nations of the world, enjoy the same political status and have a level playing field, economically and technologically. This will be our endeavor in all the world bodies of which we are proud to be members or associated with -- the United Nations, the Commonwealth, the Non-Aligned Movement and the new formations such as the WTO and important regional groupings like ASEAN, SAARC, the Indian Ocean Rim Association.

We are proud to belong to South Asia and to the Asian Continent. We celebrate this year the 50th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations with China. We wish that country and its people every happiness. We want to live in peace with Pakistan. We want the relations to conform to the best traditions of good neighborliness, eschewing terrorist interventions and the propaganda of hatred. In the spirit in which Jawaharlal Nehru declared in the Constituent Assembly, I take this opportunity to send greetings to all our immediate neighbors, to the sister continent of Africa, the Commonwealth of Nations, the European Union, the United States of America and Latin America, to Japan, and to the Arab nations and the countries of the Pacific and Central Asia with whom we have traditional ties of friendship. To Russia with which our political, economic, cultural and strategic relations remain strong we reiterate our fraternal goodwill.

I once again extend my greetings to all fellow citizens. May all of us cross the golden milestone and march along the vision of the founding fathers of our Republic. Jai Hind.

K R Narayanan
President of India, January 2000