COMMUNIST STUDY CIRCLE

Tamil Nadu government scholarship for SC/ST students doing full time PhD in arts, science and engineering-2015

noreply@blogger.com (Admin) — Tue, 23 Dec 2014 11:54:00 +0000

The scheme is open to candidates who belong to Scheduled Caste & Scheduled Tribe from Tamil Nadu and currently pursuing full time/regular Ph.D degrees in Sciences, Humanities, Social Sciences and Engineering & Technology in colleges and universities located within Tamil Nadu. The news paper advertisement of the scholarship scheme is given below (Click on the image to enlarge)

Eligibility:

1. SC/ST full time PhD scholars registered within Tamil Nadu.

2. Family income less than 2 Lakhs.

Filled in application should be sent to

The Director,
Adi Dravidar welfare department
Chepauk
Chennai-600005.

Application last date: 31.01.2015

The application can be downloaded from the following link:

Application Form

To see the Tamil font in the word document kindly download and install the following Tamil font in your system

Bamini Font

Tamil Nadu government Post-Matric Scholarship for SC/ST students studying in private Engineering,Medical,Nursing,Diploma,Teacher training,Arts and Science colleges 2014-2015

noreply@blogger.com (Admin) — Thu, 12 Jun 2014 12:07:00 +0000

As part of the Post-Matric Scholarship Scheme for SC/ST students devised by the Central government and implemented through States, the compulsory non-refundable fee charged towards registration/enrolment, tuition, games, union and library membership, medical examination and any other fee compulsorily payable at all private higher education— is covered, apart from a host of other fees.

1. Central and state government is offering SC/ST scholarships to all SC/ST students studying B.E/M.E/M.B.B.S/Diploma/paramedical/Nursing courses at all government and private institutions.

2. SC/ST students studying B.A/M.A/B.Sc/M.Sc in private colleges are waived tuition fees.

3. Government will pay the fees on behalf of the students to the institution from the beginning of the academic year.

4. Eligible students are exempted from paying any fees at the time of admission. Even if the students had paid the fees for first year the fees would (Must) be refunded by the concerned institutions.

5. Students who got admission through management quota and government quota at all private colleges are also eligible for this scholarship.

Who are eligible?

All SC/ST/Converted SC/ST Christians (students pursuing full time course) with an annual income of parents/guardian less than Rs. 2.5 lakhs are eligible for this scholarship.

How to apply?

You need not apply for this scholarship separately. The concerned institution need to implement this scheme. In short the College management should feed all details of SC/ST students admitted in their college in the online portal.

For reference-You can visit this website here http://escholarship.tn.gov.in/

Moreover government has clearly mentioned in its GO that college management should not collect tuition fees from SC/ST students. Kindly show this to the management.

You can download the Instructions given by government to the institutions and relevant GO from here:

http://escholarshipdr.tn.gov.in/edistrict_adw/struts/ScholarshipInstructions.pdf

http://escholarshipdr.tn.gov.in/edistrict_adw/struts/2013_GO106.pdf

http://escholarshipdr.tn.gov.in/edistrict_adw/struts/2013_GO107.pdf

In case of denial

In case the college management denies the scholarship benefit please feel free to contact me through my mail id (Get it from my Profile). Let us know the phone number of the principal with college name and address. We will contact them directly in this regard.

Government has appointed monitoring committee to oversee the implementation of this scheme throughout Tamil Nadu. We are ready to help needy students through proper channel.

Kind request to all:

Please forward this information to all. Help the poor and socially disadvantaged SC/ST students.

The list of important guidelines mentioned in the government order along with name of the course and amount of scholarships can be downloaded from the following links. (These guidelines can also be seen in the following link)

IMPORTANT: PLEASE DOWNLOAD THE G.O AND CIRCULAR FROM THE FOLLOWING LINKS:

G.O Ms.No. 92 Dt: September 11 ,2012 (80KB)

ஆதிதிராவிடர் நலம் - சுயநிதி கல்வி நிறுவனங்களில் (சிறுபான்மையினர் நிறுவனங்கள் உட்பட) அனைத்து விதமான படிப்புகளுக்கும் இலவச / கட்டண இருக்கையில் பயிலும் ஆதிதிராவிடர் / பழங்குடியினர்/ மதம் மாறிய கிறித்துவ ஆதிதிராவிடர் மாணவ / மாணவியர்களுக்கு அரசு நியமித்த சுயநிதிக் கல்லூரிகளுக்கான கட்டணக்குழு நிர்ணயிக்கும் கல்விக் கட்டணங்கள் மற்றும் அரசு நிர்ணயிக்கும் கல்வி கட்டணங்கள் போன்றவற்றை வழங்குதல் - வழிகாட்டு நெறிமுறைகள் - வெளியிடப்படுகிறது.

G.O Ms.No. 6 January 9, 2012 (49KB)

ஆதிதிராவிடர் மற்றும் பழங்குடியினர் நலம் - கல்வி – சுயநிதிக் கல்வி நிறுவனங்களில் அரசு ஒதுக்கீடு செய்யும் இலவச / கட்டண இருக்கைகளில் பயிலும் ஆதிதிராவிடர் / பழங்குடியினர் மாணவ / மாணவியர்க்கு கட்டாய, திருப்பி செலுத்தப்படாத அனைத்து கல்வி கட்டணங்களை வழங்கி ஆணைகள் - வெளியிடப்படுகின்றன.

Circular to All private college principals

Even after taking these steps if the management continue to ignore your pleas you can petition the CM cell cmcell.tn.gov.in for necessary action. You have to create a login name and file a petition under social justice. You will get a petition number and you can track the status of your petition online itself.

You can seek the assistance of Coimbatore-based social movement Dalit People Association. They have been conducting seminars and conferences across the state to make the benefits of the Post-Matric Scholarship Scheme reach the maximum number of Dalit students.

Contact number of Dalit People Association (DPA) will be given on request only!

Half Truths, Fully Baked-The New Indian Express way!!!!

noreply@blogger.com (Admin) — Sat, 24 Aug 2013 10:59:00 +0000

This is Article is a rejoinder to Mr. S. Gurumurthy's article in the Indian Express "A decade of economic Destruction" by Mr. R. Nandha kumar.

- R. NANDHAKUMAR

The article “A Decade of Economic Destruction”, written by S.Gurumurthy is more about politics than economics. He identified something as causes of the crisis and suggested entirely different things as remedies. For instance, he laments UPA’s tax-waivers to the corporate sector as ‘criminal mismanagement of the economy’ as it adds to the huge fiscal deficit of the country. His observation is right this far. But while suggesting remedies to rejuvenate economy, he does not utter a single word against tax-waivers. Instead he calls for postponing the much awaited Food Security Bill. [Though it is only a diluted version of the original draft bill, it will protect millions from hunger. And postponing the implementation is nothing short of shelving the bill.

According to the statistics he has given tax waivers have accumulated to Rs.30 lakh crore in the nine years of UPA rule. He points out that the waivers averaged Rs.2.6 lakh crore a year before the stimulus measures undertaken in 2008. And after that it almost doubled to a staggering Rs. 5 lakh crore per year. In his own words the implementation of Food Security Bill would cost the government only Rs. 2 lakh crore a year. So the rationale should be revoking the former; not the latter. Even the partial withdrawal of tax-waivers would pump an additional Rs.2.5 lakh crore to the economy. It will be more than enough for the proper implementation of food security bill.

The author’s intention is clear in the first paragraph itself. Its sub-title, “Messing up a robust Economy”, reminds one the BJP’s hilarious “India Shining” campaign. He says, under the NDA regime, India had a substantial Current Account Surplus of $ 22 billion and accuses the UPA for draining it all. Now the CAS has become CAD, which is $ 89 billion. It is obvious that the more widening CAD is a major cause for the current crisis. But is it right to say an economy is healthy – or robust – just because it is having surplus in its current account? Nothing other than the CAS is mentioned in the article to support the claim of ‘robust economy’.

The author is right in pointing out the fact that voluminous import of capital goods had suppressed the domestic production. But he fails miserably while attributing India’s loss to China’s gain. In the globalised world, India’s loss could be anybody’s gain. Indeed there are several occupants in the Indian market space and everybody gain. Japanese gain in exporting electronic goods, machinery and software; Koreans in electronic gadgets; Russians in arms and nuclear reactors; Americans in software, nuclear reactors, processed food, cinema and many other fields; Saudi Arabians in petroleum products; Israelis in modern weapons. It is not because of India’s unpreparedness that China grabs Indian market. In fact it grabs US market as well in the same magnitude. What does this mean? It is simply an efficient performer in global markets. So painting a big picture of China eating India is far from reality.

Though the article speaks a lot about stimulus packages, it does not spell out clearly who got benefit from those packages. It is only corporate giants; not small industries. To improve domestic production small and medium scale industries should be given priority. Stimulus packages in one form or the other should be available to them. Unless we improve our small scale domestic industries we could not compete with foreign players more effectively.

Fiscal and budget deficits, current account deficit and rupee’s continuous fall are the talking points of the economists now. Where had they gone when these figures are high? What did NDA do with current account surplus? What did UPA do when the country achieved double digit GDP growth? Absolutely nothing had been done for the welfare of the people. This does not mean that we can neglect this crisis altogether. Something must be done to save the economy. It is high time to think over the policies undertaken during the last 3 decades – not a decade as the author is arguing- and change them effectively if we really want progress.

(Note: In assessing the health of an economy, GDP is insisted upon. If it is high, the corresponding economy is considered to be vibrant and vice-versa. But GDP, as an indicator of the economy, lost its charisma long before. Now the policy-makers across the globe think of social indicators like health, education and nutritional status as effective indicators of a country’s economy. Many countries have already incorporated these into their policies -Bhutan’s National Happiness Index is an example -and are working towards improving them. But our government and opposition are so obsessed with the GDP that they cannot see beyond that. This is implicit in this article too.)

Grievance redressal procedures to be followed in getting Tamil Nadu government Post-Matric Scholarship for SC/ST

noreply@blogger.com (Admin) — Fri, 12 Jul 2013 10:24:00 +0000

I continue to receive mail enquires regarding the Tamil Nadu government Post-Matric Scholarship for SC/ST students studying in private Engineering, Medical, Nursing, Diploma, Teacher training, Arts and Science colleges. Hence I decided to post this additional information along with grievance redressal procedures to be followed in getting the scholarship.

· SC/ST students (Parents Annual income 2 Lakhs) studying in Deemed universities are also eligible for this Scholarship.

· As per the government order scholarship amount are disbursed through online process using a centralised website. College management should feed all details of SC/ST students admitted in their college in the online portal. You can visit this website here http://escholarship.tn.gov.in/.

· Moreover government has clearly mentioned in its GO that college management should not collect tuition fees from SC/ST students. Kindly show this to the management. you can download the GO from here:

http://escholarship.tn.gov.in/edistrict_adw/struts/ScholarshipInstructions.pdf;jsessionid=8CEAABEA54F81941AF3A09063F0BCD6B

Further references:

http://escholarship.tn.gov.in/edistrict_adw/struts/GO1.pdf

http://escholarship.tn.gov.in/edistrict_adw/struts/G.O.pdf

· Even after taking these steps if the management continue to ignore your pleas you can petition the CM cell cmcell.tn.gov.in for necessary action. You have to create a login name and file a petition under social justice. You will get a petition number and you can track the status of your petition online itself.

· You can seek the assistance of Chennai-based social movement Thudi Iyakkam. They have been conducting seminars and conferences across the state to make the benefits of the Post-Matric Scholarship Scheme reach the maximum number of Dalit students.

Contact number of Thudi Iyakkam will be given on request only!!!

Three Decades of High economic growth and failure of Indian Republic

noreply@blogger.com (Admin) — Sun, 27 Jan 2013 11:31:00 +0000

I thank the author Prof. Sankaran Krishna and The Hindu for such an highly informative article on Republic day. Its a great article to read in fact I read it thrice to get deep insight into the facts and views of the article.I have never came across such an in depth analysis particularly with reference to the middle class.

In many of the social parameters India is way behind our neighbors.This sums up the fact after liberalization only the elite have benefited not the larger section of poor.

Even after three decades of High economic growth, the Indian Republic has failed to achieve broad social progress. An obsession with GDP growth cannot deliver social progress.

A must read article to all "The great number fetish"

One of the most prominent features of India’s middle-class-driven public culture has been an obsession about our GDP growth rate, and a facile equation of that number with a sense of national achievement or impending arrival into affluence. In media headlines, political speeches, and everyday conversations, the GDP growth rate number — whether it is five per cent or eight per cent or whatever — has become a staple of our evaluations of the state of national well-being and future trajectory. Ever since Goldman Sachs (an investment banking firm headquartered in New York city) released a report in 2003 (“Dreaming with BRICs: the path to 2050”) touting Brazil, Russia, India and China (BRIC) as the harbingers of a new wave of global accumulation, we Indians have been afflicted by an optimism disease with little empirical traction. Since then, the GDP number’s implications for India’s development, her attractiveness as an investment site, our standing relative to China, and our competitiveness in the games nations play have become an inescapable part of our social lives. As the former CEO of Infosys and leading public intellectual Nandan Nilekani notes in his book Imagining India, “Wherever I go, I find that Indians know our growth numbers backward and forward, and there is a strong, common feeling among us that our country has finally come of age.”

Fast growth, limited results

Yet, in a recent essay, the eminent economists Amartya Sen and Jean Drèze pointed to an important problem with equating India’s economic performance with its GDP growth rate. They noted: “There is probably no other example in the history of world development of an economy growing so fast for so long with such limited results in terms of broad-based social progress.” Sen and Drèze were referring to the fact that for about 32 years now (since 1980), India has averaged annual GDP growth rates of approximately six per cent — whereas, the nation’s ranking in terms of the Human Development Index has remained unchanged over that period: we were ranked an abysmal 134 in 1980, we were ranked exactly that in 2011. In 1980, about 80 per cent of our population subsisted on less than two dollars a day, and that percentage has declined by as little as five per cent since then. Comparable growth rates sustained over similar lengths of time have utterly transformed societies in the 20th century: South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, and large parts of China, to mention the most prominent ones. They have gone from largely poor, illiterate and agrarian societies to middle class, literate, urbanised and industrial societies with standards of living vastly superior to ours. Whatever may be said about India, it is obvious that no structural transformation of our largely poverty-stricken economy has occurred and what is more, none seems very likely in the immediate future.

Not only have three decades of high GDP growth gone unaccompanied by a societal transformation, we seem to have regressed on certain fronts. For instance, while India ranked either first or second in 1980 within South Asia (defined here as comprising India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Sri Lanka, and Bhutan) on most yardsticks such as life expectancy, female literacy, infant mortality, maternal mortality ratio, improved sanitation, child immunisation, and mean years of schooling, today we are ranked either fifth or last among the South Asian nations on these same yardsticks. Ironically, the only indicator in which we have done well is in the rate of GDP growth per annum. A country like Bangladesh, whose annual GDP growth rate has averaged about half that of India’s over these years, has done vastly better in terms of translating that growth to the quality of life for its poor, its young, and its females. On most yardsticks that matter, Bangladesh now outperforms India. That 30 years of more than twice the much-disparaged “Hindu” rate of growth has left us at the absolute rock-bottom of the world tables in terms of malnourished children (44 per cent at the last count — significantly more than that anchor of all things sorry and sad about this world, sub-Saharan Africa whose percent of underweight children is 25 per cent) should tell us that there is something seriously amiss about looking at the annual growth rate of the GDP to measure the well-being of a society.

On demographic dividend

The Goldman Sachs report argued that by the year 2050, if Brazil, Russia, Indian and China grew at a certain rate per annum, they would be among the world’s six largest economies in terms of overall size. This does not tell us anything about either per capita incomes (in terms of which these countries would remain well behind the more affluent nations) or the quality of life of the majority of people therein. The report based its projections mainly on something called the “demographic dividend.” In simple terms, “young” societies like India and China have a disproportionately large percentage of people in the workforce relative to those outside it. The size of the working-age cohort is central to the overall attractiveness of an economy from the perspective of an investment bank like Goldman Sachs because it is likely to be in the market for all sorts of goods — homes, automobiles, appliances, electronics, cosmetics, fast-food, etc. The working-age cohorts’ employment earnings, moreover, can support a social security net for those who have retired and now have to subsist on pensions and savings. On a comparative yardstick, India’s demographic profile was seen by the BRIC report as most favourable because this ratio of working to non-working populations would remain in favour of the former well into the 21st century in our case.

In the euphoria over the BRIC report (it was the basis for the disastrous “India Shining” campaign of the Bharatiya Janata Party; the same projections were echoed in speeches by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, Union Finance Minister Chidambaram, Deputy Chairman of the Central Planning Commission Montek Ahluwalia; and they were quoted ad nauseam in the mainstream media) certain basic facts were glossed over.

Firstly, the GDP is a statistic from within the field of National Accounts whose very definition indicates its limited ambit: it is the total market value of all final goods and services produced in a country in a given year. In other words, it is a statistic that measures the quantity, not the quality or content, of economic activity in a society. When a country liberalises — either domestically as India began to do in 1980 or across its international borders as we began after 1991 — the increased volume of production, investment, trade and market exchanges will inevitably result in an increase in the GDP. To infer from the growth in GDP any consequences for societal welfare is not logical. The GDP’s precursor was devised during the Depression of the 1930s as western governments (in Britain and the United States most prominently) tried to get a handle on the basic statistics of the different sectors of their economies in order to plan state policies to get them out of recession and on to growth. Simon Kuznets and John Maynard Keynes, both pioneers in its creation and measurement, warned against confusing GDP with anything other than a measure of the sum of economic activity of a society, and especially against confounding it with societal welfare. Something like the Exxon Valdez disaster in Alaska will inevitably increase the GDP as the massive clean-up means billions of dollars will be spent, whereas the environmental impact of that disaster did nothing to diminish the GDP of the U.S. as damage to nature is rendered an externality. On the other hand, the positive impact of people in a community bartering or exchanging services (“I’ll baby sit for you this week while you fix the leak in my roof”) goes unregistered on the GDP metric.

Secondly, the BRIC report emerged not from an academic body or a policy think-tank. It came from an investment bank that was interested in getting people to put their money into a newly created “Emerging Market” fund. Creating a buzz about these economies, and finding some hard nugget or fact that seemed to suggest their fortunes were on the rise, is an inevitable part of the marketing of such funds. The “demographic dividend” argument offered a perfect empirical “fact” of just this sort. The extrapolations into the future (projections were made as far as 2030 and even 2050) by a firm that could not foresee (and was in fact a substantial culprit in) the financial crisis that engulfed the world economy barely four years later were essentially meaningless. It was moreover a tautological argument in the sense that given the overall size of the BRIC economies it was inevitable that their GDPs would over time end up being among the largest in the world. The greater the buzz Goldman Sachs could create about the BRIC economies, the likelier the “success” of their Emerging Market funds in the short run, which added to their profits as the firm made money off every transaction therein. The Goldman Sachs report should have been assessed as advertising copy rather than as unbiased prognostication about the future of the world economy. (By the late 2000s, as the BRIC economies with the exception of China failed to perform to expectations, Goldman Sachs had already lost interest in them and had started promoting MIST, another emerging market fund based on Mexico, Indonesia, South Korea and Turkey. The analogy to advertising sloganeering rather than economic analysis should be obvious to anyone here.)

Thirdly, for India (or any society) to realise its demographic dividend, at least three factors are critical: its youth need (a) quality education, (b) good health, and (c) jobs that pay a decent wage and enhance their intellectual and other skills. The story of India’s post-independence development has been one of failure across all three of these sectors, and the picture has not improved post the economic liberalisation initiated in 1991. Recent studies have confirmed what every Indian already knows: the quality of public education at the primary and secondary levels has been abysmal. In large part this is because since 1947 we have emphasised tertiary education for a narrow middle-class and elite, and underinvested in primary and secondary education for the masses. We have already seen that with the highest rate of malnourishment of children below the age of six in the entire world, and a public health infrastructure that exists more on paper than on the ground, especially outside the cities, large segments of our populace are not in good health. The difficulty of getting clean water, the unavailability of toilets, and decrepit or non-existent sewage systems, have also meant high incidence of preventable diseases like cholera, typhoid, and dysentery. And when it comes to jobs, recent decades of high growth, especially since 2000, have been accompanied by either stagnation or even decline in the absolute numbers of those employed in the organised sector of the economy. Unlike Korea or Taiwan or China (all three of whom also had a thoroughgoing land reform that eliminated landlordism and other feudal holdovers) whose growth was concentrated initially in relatively labour-intensive sectors such as manufacturing, ours has been skewed heavily towards skill- and education-intensive sectors like Information Technology, pharmaceuticals, and business process outsourcing. The performance in these sectors has been stellar in terms of exports and their contribution to the GDP, but not in terms of their ability to generate large numbers of jobs. Twenty years after the onset of the phenomenal IT boom, even with the most expansive definition of its ambit, this sector only employs about nine million Indians while India produces about 13 million new entrants into the job market every year.

What all this adds up to is this: given its history of inadequate investment in human capital and the present patterns and trajectory of its economy India seems unlikely to reap the demographic dividend that other societies seem to have cashed in on.

There is nothing inherent in demographic patterns that guarantees economic success: whether a certain set of preconditions eventuates in socially widespread and meaningful growth depends, as always, on state policies that prioritise human capital (the health and education of its citizenry); on efficient state and political party institutions to deliver these programmes to the people; and on the ability to insulate these programmes from being hijacked by elites and middlemen.

Middle class focus

How then can one explain the Indian middle class’ obsession with the GDP growth number, and the extent to which many of us have equated high growth rates of recent years as a sign of our emergence as a global power? One has to step outside the domain of the empirical and the economic, and into the social and the psychological to understand this obsession with a number, this fetish we have developed for the GDP.

The Indian middle class is not conventional in the sense of being sandwiched between rich, conservative elites and the lowest third of a society that is poor and potentially revolutionary. In that ideal type, the middle class was the vanguard in the emergence and consolidation of liberal democracy, individual freedoms, capitalist development, and a politics of moderation and civil society. There was a convergence between the material and ideological needs of this middle class that made it the champion of liberal democracy and market capitalism. Or as the comparative historian Barrington Moore Jr. put it in a pithy formulation: “no bourgeois, no democracy.” In India, the middle class is folded into the apex and is the dominant component of the top 20 per cent of society in terms of income and wealth, as well as in terms of cultural and symbolic capital as reflected in its education, caste-status and westernisation. It is overwhelmingly upper caste and its substantive, as distinct from rhetorical, commitment to egalitarianism and democracy outside its own narrow ambit, and often even within it, is shallow. This class’ self-image is that of a meritocratic group that has advanced through education, discipline, and deferred enjoyment. However, both the colonial period and the decades after independence show this “merit” to be based more on privileged and restricted access to western education and professions that emerged in the wake of modernisation rather than by rising to the top in a context marked by widespread equality of opportunity.

Even if its commitment to the idea of inclusive economic development that makes a significant impact on the daily lives of the vast majority of its fellow citizens was sincere, we have neither the political institutions — state bureaucracy or party cadres — nor the political commitment to act in ways that will, at least in the short-run, go against this middle class’ own material interests. This disjuncture between a set of ideological or rhetorical commitments to development, on the one hand, and, on the other, the absence of the institutional means to achieve them, as well as the fact that their very achievement might jeopardise our own status as an elite, makes the Indian middle class peculiarly susceptible to technocratic quick-fixes. Our desire to be seen by our peers in the rest of the world as an emerging economy, or a successful nation, seems to often overwhelm our ability to regard the economic and social reality that surrounds us with a clear eye. The GDP growth rate number, and its neat extrapolation into the future by reports like the one by Goldman Sachs that seem to literally leapfrog over the difficult, messy and forbidding social and political tasks that are the inevitable prerequisite of successful economic development, thus capture our imaginations in ways that are obsessive.

A fetish is an inanimate object imbued by humans with magical powers and believed to bring good luck or fortune. We have fetishised the GDP number and read all our hopes and dreams into a statistic that was never designed to bear the weight it has come to carry. The reverence and faith with which we have treated the GDP number says more about the social-psychology of our middle class and our desire to be seen as a successful and emerging economy than it does about the actual state of life for the vast majority of our fellow Indians.

(Sankaran Krishna is professor of political science, University of Hawaii at Manoa, Honolulu, U.S. Email: Krishna@hawaii.edu)

Source: The Hindu

Tamil Nadu government Post-Matric Scholarship for SC/ST students studying in private Engineering,Medical,Nursing,Diploma,Teacher training,Arts and Science colleges 2012-2013

noreply@blogger.com (Admin) — Thu, 11 Oct 2012 07:08:00 +0000

1. Central and state government is offering SC/ST scholarships to all SC/ST students studying B.E/M.E/M.B.B.S/Diploma/paramedical/Nursing courses at all government and private institutions.

2. SC/ST students studying B.A/M.A/B.Sc/M.Sc in private colleges are waived tuition fees.

3. The government will pay the fees on behalf of the students to the institution from 2012 onwards.

4. Even if the students have paid the fees for 2012 session the fees can be refunded from the institutions.

5. Students who got admission through management quota and government quota at all private colleges are also eligible for this scholarship.

Who can apply?

All SC/ST/Converted SC/ST Christians with the annual income of parents/guardian less than Rs. 2 Lakhs are eligible to apply for this scholarship.

How to apply?

You can apply to this scholarship through your institution itself with the following documents

1. A copy of the G.O’s and circular listed in the download link
2. Income certificate.
3. Caste certificate.

In case of denial

In case the college management denies such scholarships please feel free to contact me over my mail id.

Government has appointed monitoring committee to oversee the implementation of this scheme throughout Tamil Nadu.

Hence we are ready to help such students through proper channel. In case of denial let us know the phone number of the principal with college name and address. We will contact them directly in this regard.

Kind request to all:

Please forward this information to all. Help the poor and socially disadvantaged SC/ST students.

The list of important guidelines mentioned in the government order along with name of the course and amount of scholarships is listed below. (These guidelines can be seen in the attached file also)

IMPORTANT: PLEASE DOWNLOAD THE G.O AND CIRCULAR FROM THE FOLLOWING LINKS:

G.O Ms.No. 92 Dt: September 11 ,2012 (80KB)

G.O Ms.No. 6 January 9, 2012 (49KB)

Circular to All private college principals

Capitalistic Indian Media portrays Maruti workers as Villains

noreply@blogger.com (Admin) — Fri, 27 Jul 2012 13:55:00 +0000

I have gone through several leading news papers barring "The Hindu" almost every section of the Indian print and Media news companies portrayed the Maruti workers at Manesar plant as Villains. One must strongly condemn the killing of the HR manager at the Maruti, Manesar plant but on the same we also must think what led to this worker unrest at the Maruti plant? The general public should look in to the past in this issue because last year this same Maruti workers have led a peaceful protest for several months demanding for their right to establish worker's Union. At that time their struggle went off peacefully despite violent repression by the Maruti management. Indians follow outdated labor laws after the opening up of the Indian market even these outdated labour laws were not implemented now a day. Maruti is the leader in car manufacturing and it is the market leader despite earning huge amount of profit, the management of Maruti continue to exploit its workers. Indian democracy is at the hands of capitalists and its policies are largely influenced by the corporate houses. If such is the situation such labor unrest are bound to happen. A responsible government would look in to this issue seriously and draft its plan accordingly but since the Indian government is at the hands of capitalists a meaningful solution to this problem will be a question mark??????????

IMPORTANT NOTE:

India third 'snoopiest' country: Google Transparency Report. The GOI have requested Google to censor the internet contents/opinions of many users who speak against the Indian government. Even dictatorship countries haven't placed such a number of censor requests to the Google. So it’s clear that the government of India is keeping an eye on its internet users and with the help of Google, GOI have acquired the privacy details of the internet users to intimidate them. The important fact is that the Indian government seeks censorship to political views, hate speech, Government Criticism etc. It is clear we the Indians don’t have freedom of speech when it comes to criticizing government in key issues.

DISCLOSURE:

Hence I hereby declare that the above article is my personal opinion and it is not being copied from any other Internet/anti-India websites.

With this View I post here a well balanced article published @ Economic political weekly. The Hindu also have come up with some excellent articles on the problems faced by workers in the manufacturing sectors and also with detailed report on Manesar worker unrest. Here are the links to those articles.

Down and out on India’s shop floor

‘Outsider unions’ are unwelcome here

Roadblocks to rights in ‘Detroit of the South’

This ‘innovation’ is unfair to workers

'Manesar Workers are the Villains': Truth or Prejudice?

Rakhi Sehgal

The events of 18 July in the Manesar plant of Maruti Suzuki which ended with the murder of a manager were not a sudden conflagration. Anger at the plant had been building up for months over the management’s refusal to recognise an elected union; workers were increasingly frustrated over their inability to exercise their constitutional rights and the demand of equal pay for equal work was falling on deaf years. Rather than portray the workers as villains, managements in this industrial belt of Haryana have to ask themselves why they have not been able to develop a democratic industrial relations framework that can address the concerns of workers.

Rakhi Sehgal (rakhi.sehgal@gmail.com) is vice president of the Hero Honda Theka Mazdoor Sangathan, which is affiliated to the New Trade Union Initiative.

On Tuesday, 23 July, a Maruti Suzuki worker, VK from Sonepat said that though he had done nothing on 18 July – the day the Manesar plant witnessed large-scale violence ending in the death of an executive of the company – he was coming to surrender to the Gurgaon police because the police were threatening his family with arrest of his father if they could not find VK. He says he was working in the B-shift in the Manesar plant in the paint shop when violence broke out on 18 July but his first name matched the name of one of the 51 workers listed in the first information report (FIR) filed by Deepak Anand, general manager at Maruti Suzuki. Some of us tried to meet him and talk to him before he presented himself to the police, but he was picked up by the Gurgaon police and his family was told he would be taken to the Manesar police station where the FIR was registered. However, until the time of writing (24 July), VK could not be traced either at the Gurgaon police station of Sector 17-C which picked him up or at the Manesar police station where he was to be presented since the FIR was lodged at this station.

According to an unconfirmed report, Haryana police has detained the uncle of RV, an executive committee member of the Maruti Suzuki Workers’ Union (MSWU), because they are unable to locate RV himself. Another worker is afraid to seek medical help for fear of arrest and torture by the police. He is a B-shift worker who injured himself while fleeing the factory premises on the evening of 18 July and is afraid to meet or talk to anyone or seek medical help.

Workers’ colonies near the Manesar plant are deserted. Police swept through the area and went up to Jhajjar and Rohtak on the night of 18 July to pick up any worker wearing a Maruti Suzuki uniform or carrying a company identity card.[1] The Haryana police, administration and the Maruti Suzuki management have managed to terrorise Maruti Suzuki workers into silence and forced them underground. This strategy has worked well for Maruti Suzuki management as it has had all the freedom to present only its version of what is purported to have transpired on the evening of 18 July.

A handful of workers we managed to speak to were unanimous in the view that the death of the Maruti Suzuki executive Awanish Kumar Dev “should not have happened”. According to a worker, Awanish Dev had agreed to take back Jiya Lal, the suspended worker, who had protested caste abuse by a supervisor during A-shift on 18 July, but then Awanish Dev got a call from a senior, instructing him otherwise. Naresh Narwal, additional labour commissioner, and Gurgaon district administration officials told a joint trade union delegation that they too had received word that Maruti Suzuki management had agreed to take back the suspended worker the next day on 19 July and that the matter was almost resolved. Some B-shift workers we spoke to, report hearing the same.

What happened in the matter of a couple minutes that changed the course of events that evening? Was it the phone call from a senior manager, reversing the understanding and agreement with the union? Were the union leaders who protested the alleged reversal of the decision threatened inside that negotiating room? Did union members rush into the negotiating room to protect their leaders who they feared were being threatened or attacked? Or was it the case that some people dressed in workers uniforms carrying “weapons” entered the room and started thrashing managers, exhorting workers who were milling outside the room to follow their lead, and these instigators refused to listen to union leaders who pleaded with them to stop and drop their weapons? Was the fire deliberately started or was it an accident, a short-circuit? Was Awanish Kumar Dev’s death an accident or a brutal murder?

Perhaps We Will Never Know

Perhaps by the time workers and union leaders who were present in that negotiating room are able to present their story (if at all they are able to do so), no one would be willing to listen, because Maruti Suzuki management would have drowned out all reasonable voices and the relentless baying for the blood of workers would have reached such a crescendo that the guilt of all workers would be a foregone conclusion and no one would want to hear otherwise.

Build-up on 18 July

What we do know is that on 18 July the workers and their union were protesting the unilateral decision of Maruti Suzuki management to suspend Jiya Lal. The previous day, workers of both shifts had decided to skip their pre-shift meeting with supervisors to protest against management intransigence vis-à-vis their union in negotiations on the charter of demands submitted by MSWU. On 18 July morning, the supervisor, Ramkishore Majhi, stopped some workers, including Jiya Lal, when they were returning from their tea break and instructed them to stop boycotting the pre-shift meeting. In the exchange of heated words between the supervisor and group of workers, Ramkishore Majhi, reportedly hurled a caste abuse at Jiya Lal, who protested along with others in the group. Thereafter, Majhi reported this incident to his senior managers and Jiya Lal reported it to his union leaders. Without giving Jiya Lal an opportunity to present his version of the incident, or discussing the matter with the union leaders, or showing any intent to resolve the dispute, the Maruti Suzuki management took the unilateral decision of suspending Jiya Lal with immediate effect.

Union leaders and workers protested this high-handedness and called upon the Maruti Suzuki management to either discipline both Ramkishore Majhi and Jiya Lal, or revoke Jiya Lal’s suspension and talk to the union and both parties before taking any action. Disciplinary action against just the worker and not the supervisor when the supervisor was equally, if not more at fault, was not acceptable to the workers. Maruti Suzuki management refused and the situation escalated with every passing hour. Workers were angry with what they perceived to be yet another instance of a worker being punished in a jiffy without establishing his guilt and without talking to their democratically elected union, while supervisors and managers are presumed innocent and protected even when they are at fault. B-shift workers continued production while A-shift workers decided to stay back in the plant at the end of their shift until the dispute was satisfactorily resolved.

Workers had not reacted like that earlier in the month when Ram Mehar, president of the union had been suspended and then taken back a day later. Workers already had an enviable history of conducting a long non-violent struggle during the summer months of 2011. So what was different on 18 July? Had they had enough of management high-handedness and arrogance and decided that they must stand up against it? Were their actions fuelled by another alleged incident earlier in the week when supervisors and workers seem to have had a heated exchange and a supervisor allegedly told the workers they could do what they wanted, their story was going to end in the next two to three days (kar lo jo karna hai, agle do-deen din mein tum logon ka yahan se safaya ho jayega)?

Fighting for Recognition

What is clear is that workers and the union leaders had been increasingly frustrated by Maruti Suzuki management’s disrespect towards their elected union, to establish which they had sacrificed much and had also adhered to all pre-conditions laid down by the management so that it would “allow” the Haryana Labour Department to register the union!

Chairman of Maruti Suzuki India R C Bhargava claimed on 20 July in a press conference that it was the Government of Haryana which had reservations about the registration of a union and not the management. Does this claim have any credence in light of the fact that last year Maruti Suzuki withstood a five-month long agitation, massive production losses, loss of market share and gave a huge payout to the union leaders to abandon their struggle for the registration of their union? If Maruti Suzuki did not have reservations about the registration of a union, then how do we interpret Managing Executive Officer (Administration) S Y Siddiqui’s statement in June 2011 that Maruti Suzuki will neither permit the formation of a union nor “tolerate any external affiliation of the union”.

It has been repeatedly made clear to the workers that they were up against the collective might of a huge corporate like Maruti Suzuki with its clout, influence and money power, and a collusive labour department of the state government who were determined to thwart the exercise of the workers’ constitutional right to freedom of association.

Unfortunately, the formation and registration of a union does not automatically lead to its recognition by managements, many of which refuse to negotiate in good faith, if at all, with registered unions – a cause of much frustration among workers.

Workers of Maruti Suzuki were also pressurising their union not to give in to management demands to form a grievance committee and welfare committee, as agreed to by the previous union (the Maruti Suzuki Employees Union) in the October 2011 settlement. Workers feared that the management would use these committees to build a parallel system of governance and subvert the functioning of their democratically elected union and deny it legitimacy and recognition. Workers did not believe that the labour department of the state government could have issued challans to managers (for non-compliance with terms of the tripartite settlement of October 2011) independently, without the implicit “permission” of Maruti Suzuki management and they saw it as a pressure tactic to force the MSWU’s hand.

Managers and labour officers, who regularly visited the shop floor in Manesar, were fully aware of the mounting concerns, anger and frustration of the workers and yet did nothing to address and defuse the situation. Instead the Maruti Suzuki management escalated tensions by trying to intimidate the union leaders to agree to its terms – no collective bargaining and no serious discussion on the charter of demands until the union agreed to form the grievance and welfare committees! It refused to yield to the union’s conciliatory gesture that the formation of these committees could be a part of the negotiations and not a precondition. Maruti Suzuki management went so far as to lodge false cases against key union leaders at the Manesar police station last month when talks broke down on this issue. Union leaders were repeatedly harassed by the SHO of Manesar police station but they refused to yield to the threats and intimidation.

And yet R C Bhargava claims in the press conference that there were no issues between management and workers and “no one saw this coming”! If that is the case then the entire management team of Maruti Suzuki should be sacked and more competent managers should be hired.

Resisting Violations

The workers and the union leaders were also united in their demand – that the long-term settlement that was under negotiation should be implemented for all casual and contract workers employed at the Manesar plant, who worked alongside them on the shop floor. The management was adamant that it would not agree to do so. It used the same argument proffered time and again in this industrial belt by managements and labour department – that permanent workers do not have the legal right to espouse the cause of casual and contract workers! And that casual and contract workers do not have the legal right to raise an industrial dispute with the principal employer! That these so-called casual and contract workers are working in core production processes in violation of the Contract Labour (Regulation & Abolition) Act, 1970 is known to all and yet no company has been prosecuted for this violation in Haryana. And the Haryana government does not deem it necessary to comply with its statutory duty of constituting a State Contract Labour Advisory Board before which complaints can be raised, investigated and redressed. Maruti Suzuki management’s recent announcement, that by 2013 it will ensure no contract worker is employed in its core production processes, is an admission that this is the existing practice. Will the Haryana Government prosecute Maruti Suzuki (and all other companies) for violating the Contract Labour Act over several years?

The determination of the permanent workers of Maruti Suzuki to redress the injustice being meted out to their fellow workers in the name of business exigency and need for flexibility is evident from their stand taken during negotiations as reported by them. The MSWU offered to give up one year’s worth of arrears and economic benefits if the Maruti Suzuki management ensured implementation of the long-term agreement (LTA) on all casual and contract workers employed at the Manesar plant. The union had submitted that the LTA be made applicable from April 2011 and the management had countered that the Maruti Udyog Kamgar Union (MUKU) LTA was under implementation for the period 2009-11 and applied to the Manesar plant permanent workers as well. Therefore the MSWU settlement, when finalised, could not be implemented retrospectively from 2011. The MSWU countered that if the MUKU settlement was applicable to them from 2009 onwards when many of them were casual workers and trainees, then by the same logic, the MSWU settlement could be implemented for existing trainees, casual and contract workers. If the management agreed to do so, they would drop their demand for implementation of the settlement from April 2011 onwards, agree to its implementation from April 2012, and give up one year’s worth of economic benefits.

Failing Industrial Relations Systems

There is a danger that the events of 18 July will impede a thorough examination of the reasons for the simmering discontentment among workers of Maruti Suzuki (and it would not be stretching it to say of all workers in the industrial belt of Gurgaon-Manesar-Dharuhera-Rewari).

We must recognise and find the collective will to address issues at the centre of the ongoing dispute between workers and management of Maruti Suzuki – the right to form a union (along with the right to affiliate with any central trade union if they choose to) and the right to equal wages and benefits for equal work and an end to discriminatory wage systems and wage theft. These workers have shown the courage to stand up to a powerful corporation and the might of the State. They are not willing to give up their right to form an autonomous union that the management cannot control or dictate to and they are unwilling to sell out their casual and contract workers by accepting a settlement that does not apply equally to all workers doing the same work. This is the biggest threat to the extant production system. And management wonders why the backlash is so severe.

There are many voices commenting on the lack of maturity among these workers, the expression of their demands and their discontentment, their youth, their lack of experience as many are first-generation industrial workers, their supposed hotheadeness and impatience, their aspiration to be upwardly mobile and to have the capacity to indulge in consumerism, and their demands for better wages (why not?). Getting caught up with these issues would be akin to missing the wood for the trees in the immediate circumstances. And yet with an eye towards the long term, one could ask of the Maruti Suzuki management and industrial relations and human resource management experts – if this is the profile of educated workers recruited from ITIs, working in some of the most sophisticated production processes in our country – then why have managements and experts not been able to evolve an appropriate and democratic industrial relations framework and a human resource management system that can address the concerns and aspirations of these workers?

To ignore the problems arising from a defunct industrial relations system and claim as S Y Siddiqui did that “the problem at Manesar, is not one of industrial relations. It is an issue of ‘crime and militancy’” is a gross dereliction on one’s responsibilities and blatant criminalisation of labour.

Trade unions must also introspect on how they are failing the new generation of workers and new formations of labour. We need to collectively reflect on the New Trade Union Initiative’s assessment of last October that “trade union movements have shown a lack of shared understanding and effective strategy to make the workers’ struggle at Maruti Suzuki a decisive trade union battle to change the orientation of the labour policies of companies and government. In order to move forward and build support for the Maruti Suzuki workers the trade union movement needs to build coordination in both the Gurgaon-Manesar-Dharuhera belt and at the national level.”

The Maruti Suzuki management, the labour department of the state, the Gurgaon district administration and the Haryana government must introspect and take responsibility for turning a blind eye to the neon flashing signs and failing to act to defuse or contain the situation before it spiralled so horribly out of control and resulted in the tragic death of Awanish Kumar Dev.

Equally tragic was the brutal murder on 18 October 2009 of 26-year-old Ajit Yadav, a worker at Rico Auto Industries, Gurgaon who was allegedly tossed into the company’s furnace by company officials and company-hired goons during a struggle by the workers to form a union to demand a wage hike and redress of onerous working conditions. Three years later the family of Ajit Yadav and workers of the Gurgaon industrial belt are still awaiting justice!

[1] On that evening, two buses taking workers of Honda Motorcycles and Scooters India. (HMSI) back home from Manesar after their shift ended were detained all night even though both the buses had been checked thoroughly twice already by Haryana police and no Maruti Suzuki workers were found in the buses. Calls by the HMSI Employees Union on behalf of their members trapped all night in the buses, fell on deaf ears. The buses were allowed to proceed to their destination only at 8 am the next morning

Free download of Dr. B. R. Ambedkar Books

noreply@blogger.com (Admin) — Fri, 18 May 2012 11:29:00 +0000

I am happy to post some important books and works done by Dr. B. R. Ambedkar.

INDEX OF BOOKS & ARTICLES BY Dr. B. R. AMBEDKAR

1. Administration and finance of the east India Company

2. Ancient Indian Commerce

3. Annihilation of Caste

4. Buddha or Karl Marx

5. Buddha and His Dhamma

6. Castes In India

7. Commercial Relations of India in the middle Ages

8. Communal Deadlock and a Way to solve it

9. Essays on Untouchables and Untouchability 1

10. Essays on Untouchables and Untouchability 2

11. Essays on Untouchables and Untouchability 3

12. Evidence before The Royal Commission On Indian Currency And Finance

13. Federation versus Freedom

14. Frustration

15. India and The Pre-requisites of Communism

16. India on the eve of the crown government

17. Lectures on the English Constitution

18. Maharashtra as a Linguistic Province

19. Manu and the Shudras

20. Mr. Gandhi and the Emancipation of the Untouchables

21. Need for Checks and Balances

22. Notes on Acts and Laws

23. Notes on History of India

24. Notes on Parliamentary Procedure

25. Pakistan or the Partition of India

26. Paramountcy and the claim of the Indian states to be independent

27. Philosophy of Hinduism

28. Plea to the Foreigner

29. Preservation of Social Order

30. Ranade Gandhi & Jinnah

31. Review: Currency & Exchange

32. Review: Report of the Taxation Inquiry Committee

33. Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Ancient India

34. Riddle in Hinduism

35. Small Holdings in India and their Remedies

36. Statement of Evidence to the Royal Commission on Indian Currency

37. States and Minorities

38. The Constitution of British India

39. The Evolution of Provincial Finance in British India

40. The Present Problem in Indian Currency

41. The Present Problem in Indian Currency 2

42. The Problem of Political Suppression

43. The Problem of the Rupee

44. The Untouchables and the Pax Britannica

45. The Untouchables Who were they and why they became Untouchables

46. Thoughts on Linguistic States

47. Untouchables or the Children of India

48. Waiting for a Visa

49. What Congress and Gandhi have done to the Untouchables?

50. Which is worse?

51. Who were the Shudras?

52. With the Hindus

Here is the Download Link:

Download Link 1

Download Link 2

Controversy over Dr.B.R.Ambedkar's Cartoon

noreply@blogger.com (Admin) — Fri, 18 May 2012 11:08:00 +0000

I am a strong supporter of freedom of speech and expression. But the inclusion of a cartoon in CBSE political science book is done with a wrongful intention and it needs to be condemned. Despite non cooperation by the constituent committee members and lack of support from many prominent political leaders (Including the then President Rajendra prasad and PM Nehru himself had some objections over the inclusion of some crucial laws and stalled the constitutional work). So Such is the truth the inclusion of the controversial cartoon does not shed any truth at all. Instead of criticizing the persons responsible for deliberately delaying the constitutional process its highly unfair to show a cartoon that criticizes Dr.B.R. Ambedkar alone. With this I am posting an article that appeared in The Hindu paper.

An illustration in a textbook must expand or add to the lesson; Shankar's cartoon of Ambedkar does neither. The controversy kicked up over the withdrawal of a textbook for high school over a cartoon after a ruckus in Parliament has been superficially interpreted and uniformly criticised without understanding the sensitivities of the oppressed for whom B.R. Ambedkar is a hero. The anger of Dalits is being interpreted as intolerance while in fact it is an assertion of a people who are in the process of finding their long-suppressed voice and learning to stand up to insults and humiliation. What is needed is not criticism and anger but sensitivity to the emotions of a horribly wronged people.

Those lamenting the move by the government in Parliament and the apology by Human Resource Development Minister Kapil Sibal for using the cartoon have preferred to understand it as a cynical move to “appease” the supporters of B.R. Ambedkar for political reasons, namely not to antagonise a large section of voters when elections are round the corner. A social scientist was scornful calling it “psepho-cracy” and ruing that the spirit of democracy hadn't seeped into society. Yet another said the government's withdrawal of the offending textbook was a “nominal if not hypocritical” acknowledgement of Dalit power. One could agree with both commentators: there is no question that democracy has not seeped into society which has remained deeply and irreconcilably divided along caste lines; what prevails in our society and in very many minds that have not been influenced either by education or modernity is “caste-ocracy.” As for Dalit power, it has not yet gained mass but is strong enough to force the government of the day to draw back. Hence, it is immaterial whether the acknowledgement is nominal or hypocritical. The crucial thing is that it is real.

While the government is supposed to have caved in to the protests in Parliament, it is a fact that the issue witnessed the unusual spectacle of the entire Opposition united in the belief that the cartoon had denigrated Ambedkar. The issue led to the resignation of two “chief advisers” of the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT), both professors of political science, as they did not agree with Parliament's stand on the issue.

What the critics say

The critics of the government's decision make the following points to show that the inflamed sentiments of Dalit supporters both in Parliament and outside are misplaced: that the cartoon is about 60 years old and that it was drawn by a well-known and highly popular cartoonist Shankar; that Nehru was democratic enough to appreciate and even enjoy the lampooning he occasionally got at Shankar's hands; that even Ambedkar would have chuckled at the cartoon especially since there is no evidence of him being offended by it when it was first published in 1948. Those who made the decision to include the cartoon also point out that an effort was made to make the lesson interesting, to infuse some humour in it. Using outdated cartoons as this one certainly is, is hardly fun. Perhaps Ambedkar laughed on seeing the cartoon. Or if he hadn't, he would have shaken it off as he had so many barbs in his lifetime, but that is beside the point. What is the relevance of this particular cartoon in the context of a lesson? Sure, it is important for a student to be told that the process was laborious and that it took several years for the Constitution to be finalised. A cartoon is a comment and a reflection on current situations and personalities of those times. Then, the cartoon was relevant and summarised pithily the delay in finalising the Constitution, but today, after 60 years, it is totally outdated and neither provides any insight nor reflects on the process of the making of the Constitution.

Importantly, any illustration with a lesson or with any piece of writing, expands and adds to the “body” or the text. It even contextualises the text. The cartoon neither adds to nor contextualises the Constitution. Importantly, in the overall context of the making of the Constitution, seen from the perspective of the present, how is the delay in finalising it important? There are more important things that need to be foregrounded to understand the process of the making of the Constitution such as how the then President Rajendra Prasad, a confirmed conservative opposed equal property rights for women, and how a modernist Nehru caved in to him and how when an outraged Ambedkar threatened to quit the team they agreed to it. Poking fun at somebody else's icons is so much easier than one's own, just as it is easy to use somebody else's opinion to introduce one's own predilection.

Panic situation

Apart from criticising the “intolerance” of Dalits and the “weak-kneed” response of the government, the critics are trying to create a panic situation, making alarmist statements that perhaps the government will now withdraw all the textbooks produced by the NCERT under the National Curriculum Framework or that now cartoonists will have to think twice before they put their pencils or paint brush to paper. At this rate all cartoons will have to be banned, says an apologist for the cartoon.

One of the professors claims that the cartoon was included to expose students to the different ways in which leaders and events were understood and viewed. One has no issue with this. If one wants to include criticism, then do it openly and not go about it indirectly. The way it has been done in the book shows dishonesty. Surely, a rational and reasoned critique won't be objected to by any thinking person. Shankar lampooned Nehru, Parliament and important events in his cartoons. Why were those not included to expose students to different interpretations? The professor also claims that for the first time, Ambedkar was given his due in a textbook as not just as Father of the Constitution but as one who laid the democratic foundations of the country: you give with one hand and take it away with another!

The issue is not that it is after all a cartoon; not about a sense of humour or the lack of it among some; nor is it about the unreasonableness or prickliness of some. It is about misrepresenting, it is about trivialising, it is about a lack of sensitivity. Most importantly, it is about a callousness that is rooted in one's own biases and prejudices. That is why the cartoon is hardly funny.

(R. Akhileshwari is a journalist and academic.)

IMPORTANT NOTE:

Free Download of "Riddles in Hinduism" ebook -By Dr.B.R.Ambedkar

noreply@blogger.com (Admin) — Thu, 10 May 2012 12:16:00 +0000

I am sharing the link of "Riddles in Hinduism" ebook -By Dr.B.R.Ambedkar.

You can download the book here.....!!!!

DOWNLOAD

Justice for Adivasi school teacher Soni Sori

noreply@blogger.com (Admin) — Thu, 03 May 2012 10:52:00 +0000

Police atrocities against innocent dalits and adhivasi’s are a common thing in India. It’s time we the civilized and educated citizens of India unite together to condemn inhuman acts of Indian police. In this post I publish an online campaign (started by Tehelka) for saving the life of an innocent adivasi school teacher Soni Sori.

Soni Sori, a 35-year-old Adivasi school teacher in Chhattisgarh, has been languishing in Raipur Jail since October 2011, she has written letters from jail asking the Nation to help her.

Why is she being tortured?

Soni has been tortured by the Chhattisgarh police - she complained that she was stripped naked and given electric shocks. A medical exam found small stones in her vagina and rectum.

The torture was under the supervision of Ankit Garg, Superintendent of Police. In a terrible twist of events he was given the President's Award on Republic Day.

Soni lives in Dantewada, a Naxalite stronghold. Last year, Soni fought with the Naxalites when they tried to stop her form hoisting the national flag on Independence Day. Naxalites shot her father in the leg saying he was a police informer. Yet the police first arrested her husband, and now Soni, for being Naxalite supporters!

Why do the police want her in jail?

Because she has constantly fought for her people’s rights - for minimum wages. She has taken on powerful companies that want the Adivasis’ land, and the Chhattisgarh government that supports these companies. She has taken on the police for their illegal activities.

Now, fed up of being in jail, far from her three young children, Sori has gone on hunger strike. In a letter to her lawyer she writes: “We Adivasis are only fated to suffer atrocities and die. We Adivasis are a business for the government.’’

Please Visit the following links to know more about this inhuman behavior of the Indian Police

Save Soni Sori and Punish Chattisgarh police

Capitalism: A Ghost Story

noreply@blogger.com (Admin) — Thu, 03 May 2012 09:51:00 +0000

This is an excellent article by Arundhati Roy (published in Outlook magazine)

Rockefeller to Mandela, Vedanta to Anna Hazare.... How long can the cardinals of corporate gospel buy up our protests?

Corbis (From Outlook, March 26, 2012)

Antilla the Hun Mukesh Ambani’s 27-storey home on Altamont Road. Its bright lights, say the neighbours, have stolen the night.

Is it a house or a home? A temple to the new India, or a warehouse for its ghosts? Ever since Antilla arrived on Altamont Road in Mumbai, exuding mystery and quiet menace, things have not been the same. “Here we are,” the friend who took me there said, “Pay your respects to our new Ruler.”

Antilla belongs to India’s richest man, Mukesh Ambani. I had read about this most expensive dwelling ever built, the twenty-seven floors, three helipads, nine lifts, hanging gardens, ballrooms, weather rooms, gymnasiums, six floors of parking, and the six hundred servants. Nothing had prepared me for the vertical lawn—a soaring, 27-storey-high wall of grass attached to a vast metal grid. The grass was dry in patches; bits had fallen off in neat rectangles. Clearly, Trickledown hadn’t worked.

But Gush-Up certainly has. That’s why in a nation of 1.2 billion, India’s 100 richest people own assets equivalent to one-fourth of the GDP.

The word on the street (and in the New York Times) is, or at least was, that after all that effort and gardening, the Ambanis don’t live in Antilla. No one knows for sure. People still whisper about ghosts and bad luck, Vaastu and Feng Shui. Maybe it’s all Karl Marx’s fault. (All that cussing.) Capitalism, he said, “has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, that it is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells”.

In India, the 300 million of us who belong to the new, post-IMF “reforms” middle class—the market—live side by side with spirits of the nether world, the poltergeists of dead rivers, dry wells, bald mountains and denuded forests; the ghosts of 2,50,000 debt-ridden farmers who have killed themselves, and of the 800 million who have been impoverished and dispossessed to make way for us. And who survive on less than twenty rupees a day.

Mukesh Ambani is personally worth $20 billion. He holds a majority controlling share in Reliance Industries Limited (RIL), a company with a market capitalisation of $47 billion and global business interests that include petrochemicals, oil, natural gas, polyester fibre, Special Economic Zones, fresh food retail, high schools, life sciences research and stem cell storage services. RIL recently bought 95 per cent shares in Infotel, a TV consortium that controls 27 TV news and entertainment channels, including CNN-IBN, IBN Live, CNBC, IBN Lokmat, and ETV in almost every regional language. Infotel owns the only nationwide licence for 4G Broadband, a high-speed “information pipeline” which, if the technology works, could be the future of information exchange. Mr Ambani also owns a cricket team.

RIL is one of a handful of corporations that run India. Some of the others are the Tatas, Jindals, Vedanta, Mittals, Infosys, Essar and the other Reliance (ADAG), owned by Mukesh’s brother Anil. Their race for growth has spilled across Europe, Central Asia, Africa and Latin America. Their nets are cast wide; they are visible and invisible, over-ground as well as underground. The Tatas, for example, run more than 100 companies in 80 countries. They are one of India’s oldest and largest private sector power companies. They own mines, gas fields, steel plants, telephone, cable TV and broadband networks, and run whole townships. They manufacture cars and trucks, own the Taj Hotel chain, Jaguar, Land Rover, Daewoo, Tetley Tea, a publishing company, a chain of bookstores, a major brand of iodised salt and the cosmetics giant Lakme. Their advertising tagline could easily be: You Can’t Live Without Us.

According to the rules of the Gush-Up Gospel, the more you have, the more you can have.

The era of the Privatisation of Everything has made the Indian economy one of the fastest growing in the world. However, like any good old-fashioned colony, one of its main exports is its minerals. India’s new mega-corporations—Tatas, Jindals, Essar, Reliance, Sterlite—are those who have managed to muscle their way to the head of the spigot that is spewing money extracted from deep inside the earth. It’s a dream come true for businessmen—to be able to sell what they don’t have to buy.

A whole spectrum of corruption A. Raja being led to jail in connection with the 2G scandal. (Photograph by Sanjay Rawat)

The other major source of corporate wealth comes from their land-banks. All over the world, weak, corrupt local governments have helped Wall Street brokers, agro-business corporations and Chinese billionaires to amass huge tracts of land. (Of course, this entails commandeering water too.) In India, the land of millions of people is being acquired and made over to private corporations for “public interest”—for Special Economic Zones, infrastructure projects, dams, highways, car manufacture, chemical hubs and Formula One racing. (The sanctity of private property never applies to the poor.) As always, local people are promised that their displacement from their land and the expropriation of everything they ever had is actually part of employment generation. But by now we know that the connection between GDP growth and jobs is a myth. After 20 years of “growth”, 60 per cent of India’s workforce is self-employed, 90 per cent of India’s labour force works in the unorganised sector.

Post-Independence, right up to the ’80s, people’s movements, ranging from the Naxalites to Jayaprakash Narayan’s Sampoorna Kranti, were fighting for land reforms, for the redistribution of land from feudal landlords to landless peasants. Today any talk of redistribution of land or wealth would be considered not just undemocratic, but lunatic. Even the most militant movements have been reduced to a fight to hold on to what little land people still have. The millions of landless people, the majority of them Dalits and adivasis, driven from their villages, living in slums and shanty colonies in small towns and mega cities, do not figure even in the radical discourse.

As Gush-Up concentrates wealth on to the tip of a shining pin on which our billionaires pirouette, tidal waves of money crash through the institutions of democracy—the courts, Parliament as well as the media, seriously compromising their ability to function in the ways they are meant to. The noisier the carnival around elections, the less sure we are that democracy really exists.


	India’s new megacorps—Tatas, Jindals, Essar, Reliance—are those who’ve moved to the head of the spigot that’s spewing money extracted from inside the earth.

Each new corruption scandal that surfaces in India makes the last one look tame. In the summer of 2011, the 2G spectrum scandal broke. We learnt that corporations had siphoned away $40 billion of public money by installing a friendly soul as the Union minister of telecommunication who grossly underpriced the licences for 2G telecom spectrum and illegally parcelled it out to his buddies. The taped telephone conversations leaked to the press showed how a network of industrialists and their front companies, ministers, senior journalists and a TV anchor were involved in facilitating this daylight robbery. The tapes were just an MRI that confirmed a diagnosis that people had made long ago.

The privatisation and illegal sale of telecom spectrum does not involve war, displacement and ecological devastation. The privatisation of India’s mountains, rivers and forests does. Perhaps because it does not have the uncomplicated clarity of a straightforward, out-and-out accounting scandal, or perhaps because it is all being done in the name of India’s “progress”, it does not have the same resonance with the middle classes.

In 2005, the state governments of Chhattisgarh, Orissa and Jharkhand signed hundreds of Memorandums of Understanding (MoUs) with a number of private corporations turning over trillions of dollars of bauxite, iron ore and other minerals for a pittance, defying even the warped logic of the free market. (Royalties to the government ranged between 0.5 per cent and 7 per cent.)

Only days after the Chhattisgarh government signed an MoU for the construction of an integrated steel plant in Bastar with Tata Steel, the Salwa Judum, a vigilante militia, was inaugurated. The government said it was a spontaneous uprising of local people who were fed up of the “repression” by Maoist guerrillas in the forest. It turned out to be a ground-clearing operation, funded and armed by the government and subsidised by mining corporations. In the other states, similar militias were created, with other names. The prime minister announced the Maoists were the “single-largest security challenge in India”. It was a declaration of war.

On January 2, 2006, in Kalinganagar, in the neighbouring state of Orissa, perhaps to signal the seriousness of the government’s intention, ten platoons of police arrived at the site of another Tata Steel plant and opened fire on villagers who had gathered there to protest what they felt was inadequate compensation for their land. Thirteen people, including one policeman, were killed, and 37 injured. Six years have gone by and though the villages remain under siege by armed policemen, the protest has not died.

Meanwhile in Chhattisgarh, the Salwa Judum burned, raped and murdered its way through hundreds of forest villages, evacuating 600 villages, forcing 50,000 people to come out into police camps and 3,50,000 people to flee. The chief minister announced that those who did not come out of the forests would be considered to be ‘Maoist terrorists’. In this way, in parts of modern India, ploughing fields and sowing seed came to be defined as terrorist activity. Eventually, the Salwa Judum’s atrocities only succeeded in strengthening the resistance and swelling the ranks of the Maoist guerrilla army. In 2009, the government announced what it called Operation Green Hunt. Two lakh paramilitary troops were deployed across Chhattisgarh, Orissa, Jharkhand and West Bengal.

After three years of “low-intensity conflict” that has not managed to “flush” the rebels out of the forest, the central government has declared that it will deploy the Indian army and air force. In India, we don’t call this war. We call it “creating a good investment climate”. Thousands of soldiers have already moved in. A brigade headquarters and air bases are being readied. One of the biggest armies in the world is now preparing its Terms of Engagement to “defend” itself against the poorest, hungriest, most malnourished people in the world. We only await the declaration of the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA), which will give the army legal immunity and the right to kill “on suspicion”. Going by the tens of thousands of unmarked graves and anonymous cremation pyres in Kashmir, Manipur and Nagaland, it has shown itself to be a very suspicious army indeed.

While the preparations for deployment are being made, the jungles of Central India continue to remain under siege, with villagers frightened to come out, or go to the market for food or medicine. Hundreds of people have been jailed, charged for being Maoists under draconian, undemocratic laws. Prisons are crowded with adivasi people, many of whom have no idea what their crime is. Recently, Soni Sori, an adivasi school-teacher from Bastar, was arrested and tortured in police custody. Stones were pushed up her vagina to get her to “confess” that she was a Maoist courier. The stones were removed from her body at a hospital in Calcutta, where, after a public outcry, she was sent for a medical check-up. At a recent Supreme Court hearing, activists presented the judges with the stones in a plastic bag. The only outcome of their efforts has been that Soni Sori remains in jail while Ankit Garg, the Superintendent of Police who conducted the interrogation, was conferred with the President’s Police Medal for Gallantry on Republic Day.

We hear about the ecological and social re-engineering of Central India only because of the mass insurrection and the war. The government gives out no information. The Memorandums of Understanding are all secret. Some sections of the media have done what they could to bring public attention to what is happening in Central India. However, most of the Indian mass media is made vulnerable by the fact that the major share of its revenues come from corporate advertisements. If that is not bad enough, now the line between the media and big business has begun to blur dangerously. As we have seen, RIL virtually owns 27 TV channels. But the reverse is also true. Some media houses now have direct business and corporate interests. For example, one of the major daily newspapers in the region—Dainik Bhaskar (and it is only one example)—has 17.5 million readers in four languages, including English and Hindi, across 13 states. It also owns 69 companies with interests in mining, power generation, real estate and textiles. A recent writ petition filed in the Chhattisgarh High Court accuses DB Power Ltd (one of the group’s companies) of using “deliberate, illegal and manipulative measures” through company-owned newspapers to influence the outcome of a public hearing over an open cast coal mine. Whether or not it has attempted to influence the outcome is not germane. The point is that media houses are in a position to do so. They have the power to do so. The laws of the land allow them to be in a position that lends itself to a serious conflict of interest.

The litfests Along with film, art installations, they have replaced the 1990s obsession with beauty contests. (Photograph by Tribhuvan Tiwari)

There are other parts of the country from which no news comes. In the sparsely populated but militarised northeastern state of Arunachal Pradesh, 168 big dams are being constructed, most of them privately owned. High dams that will submerge whole districts are being constructed in Manipur and Kashmir, both highly militarised states where people can be killed merely for protesting power cuts. (That happened a few weeks ago in Kashmir.) How can they stop a dam?

The most delusional dam of all is Kalpasar in Gujarat. It is being planned as a 34-km-long dam across the Gulf of Khambhat with a 10-lane highway and a railway line running on top of it. By keeping the sea water out, the idea is to create a sweet water reservoir of Gujarat’s rivers. (Never mind that these rivers have already been dammed to a trickle and poisoned with chemical effluent.) The Kalpasar dam, which would raise the sea level and alter the ecology of hundreds of kilometres of coastline, had been dismissed as a bad idea 10 years ago. It has made a sudden comeback in order to supply water to the Dholera Special Investment Region (SIR) in one of the most water-stressed zones not just in India, but in the world. SIR is another name for an SEZ, a self-governed corporate dystopia of “industrial parks, townships and mega-cities”. The Dholera SIR is going to be connected to Gujarat’s other cities by a network of 10-lane highways. Where will the money for all this come from?


	After three years of trying to flush out the rebels, the Centre’s said it’ll deploy the armed forces. In India, this is not war, it’s ‘Creating a Good Investment Climate’.

In January 2011, in the Mahatma (Gandhi) Mandir, Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi presided over a meeting of 10,000 international businessmen from 100 countries. According to media reports, they pledged to invest $450 billion in Gujarat. The meeting was scheduled to take place at the onset of the 10th anniversary year of the massacre of 2,000 Muslims in February-March 2002. Modi stands accused of not just condoning, but actively abetting, the killing. People who watched their loved ones being raped, eviscerated and burned alive, the tens of thousands who were driven from their homes, still wait for a gesture towards justice. But Modi has traded in his saffron scarf and vermilion forehead for a sharp business suit, and hopes that a 450-billion-dollar investment will work as blood money, and square the books. Perhaps it will. Big Business is backing him enthusiastically. The algebra of infinite justice works in mysterious ways.

The Dholera SIR is only one of the smaller Matryoshka dolls, one of the inner ones in the dystopia that is being planned. It will be connected to the Delhi Mumbai Industrial Corridor (DMIC), a 1,500-km-long and 300-km-wide industrial corridor, with nine mega-industrial zones, a high-speed freight line, three seaports and six airports, a six-lane intersection-free expressway and a 4,000 MW power plant. The DMIC is a collaborative venture between the governments of India and Japan, and their respective corporate partners, and has been proposed by the McKinsey Global Institute.

The DMIC website says that approximately 180 million people will be “affected” by the project. Exactly how, it doesn’t say. It envisages the building of several new cities and estimates that the population in the region will grow from the current 231 million to 314 million by 2019. That’s in seven years’ time. When was the last time a state, despot or dictator carried out a population transfer of millions of people? Can it possibly be a peaceful process?

The Indian army might need to go on a recruitment drive so that it’s not taken unawares when it’s ordered to deploy all over India. In preparation for its role in Central India, it publicly released its updated doctrine on Military Psychological Operations, which outlines “a planned process of conveying a message to a select target audience, to promote particular themes that result in desired attitudes and behaviour, which affect the achievement of political and military objectives of the country”. This process of “perception management”, it said, would be conducted by “using media available to the services”.

The army is experienced enough to know that coercive force alone cannot carry out or manage social engineering on the scale that is envisaged by India’s planners. War against the poor is one thing. But for the rest of us—the middle class, white-collar workers, intellectuals, “opinion-makers”—it has to be “perception management”. And for this we must turn our attention to the exquisite art of Corporate Philanthropy.

Of late, the main mining conglomerates have embraced the Arts—film, art installations and the rush of literary festivals that have replaced the ’90s obsession with beauty contests. Vedanta, currently mining the heart out of the homelands of the ancient Dongria Kondh tribe for bauxite, is sponsoring a ‘Creating Happiness’ film competition for young film students whom they have commissioned to make films on sustainable development. Vedanta’s tagline is ‘Mining Happiness’. The Jindal Group brings out a contemporary art magazine and supports some of India’s major artists (who naturally work with stainless steel). Essar was the principal sponsor of the Tehelka Newsweek Think Fest that promised “high-octane debates” by the foremost thinkers from around the world, which included major writers, activists and even the architect Frank Gehry. (All this in Goa, where activists and journalists were uncovering massive illegal mining scandals, and Essar’s part in the war unfolding in Bastar was emerging.) Tata Steel and Rio Tinto (which has a sordid track record of its own) were among the chief sponsors of the Jaipur Literary Festival (Latin name: Darshan Singh Construction Jaipur Literary Festival) that is advertised by the cognoscenti as ‘The Greatest Literary Show on Earth’. Counselage, the Tatas’ “strategic brand manager”, sponsored the festival’s press tent. Many of the world’s best and brightest writers gathered in Jaipur to discuss love, literature, politics and Sufi poetry. Some tried to defend Salman Rushdie’s right to free speech by reading from his proscribed book, The Satanic Verses. In every TV frame and newspaper photograph, the logo of Tata Steel (and its tagline—Values Stronger than Steel) loomed behind them, a benign, benevolent host. The enemies of Free Speech were the supposedly murderous Muslim mobs, who, the festival organisers told us, could have even harmed the school-children gathered there. (We are witness to how helpless the Indian government and the police can be when it comes to Muslims.) Yes, the hardline Darul-Uloom Deobandi Islamic seminary did protest Rushdie being invited to the festival. Yes, some Islamists did gather at the festival venue to protest and yes, outrageously, the state government did nothing to protect the venue. That’s because the whole episode had as much to do with democracy, votebanks and the Uttar Pradesh elections as it did with Islamist fundamentalism. But the battle for Free Speech against Islamist Fundamentalism made it to the world’s newspapers. It is important that it did. But there were hardly any reports about the festival sponsors’ role in the war in the forests, the bodies piling up, the prisons filling up. Or about the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act and the Chhattisgarh Special Public Security Act, which make even thinking an anti-government thought a cognisable offence. Or about the mandatory public hearing for the Tata Steel plant in Lohandiguda which local people complained actually took place hundreds of miles away in Jagdalpur, in the collector’s office compound, with a hired audience of fifty people, under armed guard. Where was Free Speech then? No one mentioned Kalinganagar. No one mentioned that journalists, academics and filmmakers working on subjects unpopular with the Indian government—like the surreptitious part it played in the genocide of Tamils in the war in Sri Lanka or the recently discovered unmarked graves in Kashmir—were being denied visas or deported straight from the airport.

But which of us sinners was going to cast the first stone? Not me, who lives off royalties from corporate publishing houses. We all watch Tata Sky, we surf the net with Tata Photon, we ride in Tata taxis, we stay in Tata Hotels, we sip our Tata tea in Tata bone china and stir it with teaspoons made of Tata Steel. We buy Tata books in Tata bookshops. Hum Tata ka namak khate hain. We’re under siege.

If the sledgehammer of moral purity is to be the criterion for stone-throwing, then the only people who qualify are those who have been silenced already. Those who live outside the system; the outlaws in the forests or those whose protests are never covered by the press, or the well-behaved dispossessed, who go from tribunal to tribunal, bearing witness, giving testimony.

But the Litfest gave us our Aha! Moment. Oprah came. She said she loved India, that she would come again and again. It made us proud. This is only the burlesque end of the Exquisite Art. Though the Tatas have been involved with corporate philanthropy for almost a hundred years now, endowing scholarships and running some excellent educational institutes and hospitals, Indian corporations have only recently been invited into the Star Chamber, the Camera stellata, the brightly lit world of global corporate government, deadly for its adversaries, but otherwise so artful that you barely know it’s there.

What follows in this essay might appear to some to be a somewhat harsh critique. On the other hand, in the tradition of honouring one’s adversaries, it could be read as an acknowledgement of the vision, flexibility, the sophistication and unwavering determination of those who have dedicated their lives to keep the world safe for capitalism.

Their enthralling history, which has faded from contemporary memory, began in the US in the early 20th century when, kitted out legally in the form of endowed foundations, corporate philanthropy began to replace missionary activity as Capitalism’s (and Imperialism’s) road opening and systems maintenance patrol. Among the first foundations to be set up in the United States were the Carnegie Corporation, endowed in 1911 by profits from the Carnegie Steel Company; and the Rockefeller Foundation, endowed in 1914 by J.D. Rockefeller, founder of Standard Oil Company. The Tatas and Ambanis of their time.

Some of the institutions financed, given seed money or supported by the Rockefeller Foundation are the UN, the CIA, the Council on Foreign Relations, New York’s most fabulous Museum of Modern Art, and, of course, the Rockefeller Center in New York (where Diego Riviera’s mural had to be blasted off the wall because it mischievously depicted reprobate capitalists and a valiant Lenin. Free Speech had taken the day off.)

J.D. Rockefeller was America’s first billionaire and the world’s richest man. He was an abolitionist, a supporter of Abraham Lincoln and a teetotaller. He believed his money was given to him by God, which must have been nice for him.

Here’s an excerpt from one of Pablo Neruda’s early poems called Standard Oil Company:

Their obese emperors from New York
are suave smiling assassins
who buy silk, nylon, cigars
petty tyrants and dictators.

They buy countries, people, seas, police, county councils,
distant regions where the poor hoard their corn
like misers their gold:
Standard Oil awakens them,
clothes them in uniforms, designates
which brother is the enemy.
the Paraguayan fights its war,
and the Bolivian wastes away
in the jungle with its machine gun.

A President assassinated for a drop of petroleum,
a million-acre mortgage,
a swift execution on a morning mortal with light, petrified,
a new prison camp for subversives,
in Patagonia, a betrayal, scattered shots
beneath a petroliferous moon,
a subtle change of ministers
in the capital, a whisper
like an oil tide,
and zap, you’ll see
how Standard Oil’s letters shine above the clouds,
above the seas, in your home,
illuminating their dominions.

When corporate-endowed foundations first made their appearance in the US, there was a fierce debate about their provenance, legality and lack of accountability. People suggested that if companies had so much surplus money, they should raise the wages of their workers. (People made these outrageous suggestions in those days, even in America.) The idea of these foundations, so ordinary now, was in fact a leap of the business imagination. Non-tax-paying legal entities with massive resources and an almost unlimited brief—wholly unaccountable, wholly non-transparent—what better way to parlay economic wealth into political, social and cultural capital, to turn money into power? What better way for usurers to use a minuscule percentage of their profits to run the world? How else would Bill Gates, who admittedly knows a thing or two about computers, find himself designing education, health and agriculture policies, not just for the US government, but for governments all over the world?

Over the years, as people witnessed some of the genuinely good the foundations did (running public libraries, eradicating diseases)—the direct connection between corporations and the foundations they endowed began to blur. Eventually, it faded altogether. Now even those who consider themselves left-wing are not shy to accept their largesse.


	RIL owns 27 TV channels. But the reverse is also true. Dainik Bhaskar owns 69 companies with interests in mining, power generation, real estate and textiles.

By the 1920s, US capitalism had begun to look outwards, for raw materials and overseas markets. Foundations began to formulate the idea of global corporate governance. In 1924, the Rockefeller and Carnegie foundations jointly created what is today the most powerful foreign policy pressure group in the world—the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), which later came to be funded by the Ford Foundation as well. By 1947, the newly created CIA was supported by and working closely with the CFR. Over the years, the CFR’s membership has included 22 US secretaries of state. There were five CFR members in the 1943 steering committee that planned the UN, and an $8.5 million grant from J.D. Rockefeller bought the land on which the UN’s New York headquarters stands.

All eleven of the World Bank’s presidents since 1946—men who have presented themselves as missionaries of the poor—have been members of the CFR. (The exception was George Woods. And he was a trustee of the Rockefeller Foundation and vice-president of Chase-Manhattan Bank.)

At Bretton Woods, the World Bank and IMF decided that the US dollar should be the reserve currency of the world, and that in order to enhance the penetration of global capital, it would be necessary to universalise and standardise business practices in an open marketplace. It is towards that end that they spend a large amount of money promoting Good Governance (as long as they control the strings), the concept of the Rule of Law (provided they have a say in making the laws) and hundreds of anti-corruption programmes (to streamline the system they have put in place.) Two of the most opaque, unaccountable organisations in the world go about demanding transparency and accountability from the governments of poorer countries.

Given that the World Bank has more or less directed the economic policies of the Third World, coercing and cracking open the markets of country after country for global finance, you could say that corporate philanthropy has turned out to be the most visionary business of all time.

Corporate-endowed foundations administer, trade and channelise their power and place their chessmen on the chessboard, through a system of elite clubs and think-tanks, whose members overlap and move in and out through the revolving doors. Contrary to the various conspiracy theories in circulation, particularly among left-wing groups, there is nothing secret, satanic, or Freemason-like about this arrangement. It is not very different from the way corporations use shell companies and offshore accounts to transfer and administer their money—except that the currency is power, not money.

The transnational equivalent of the CFR is the Trilateral Commission, set up in 1973 by David Rockefeller, the former US National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski (founder-member of the Afghan Mujahideen, forefathers of the Taliban), the Chase-Manhattan Bank and some other private eminences. Its purpose was to create an enduring bond of friendship and cooperation between the elites of North America, Europe and Japan. It has now become a penta-lateral commission, because it includes members from China and India. (Tarun Das of the CII; N.R. Narayanamurthy, ex-CEO, Infosys; Jamsheyd N. Godrej, managing director, Godrej; Jamshed J. Irani, director, Tata Sons; and Gautam Thapar, CEO, Avantha Group).

The Aspen Institute is an international club of local elites, businessmen, bureaucrats, politicians, with franchises in several countries. Tarun Das is the president of the Aspen Institute, India. Gautam Thapar is chairman. Several senior officers of the McKinsey Global Institute (proposer of the Delhi Mumbai Industrial Corridor) are members of the CFR, the Trilateral Commission and the Aspen Institute.


	Coercing a woman out of a burqa is not about liberating her, but about unclothing her. Coercing a woman out of a burqa is as bad as coercing her into one.

The Ford Foundation (liberal foil to the more conservative Rockefeller Foundation, though the two work together constantly) was set up in 1936. Though it is often underplayed, the Ford Foundation has a very clear, well-defined ideology and works extremely closely with the US state department. Its project of deepening democracy and “good governance” are very much part of the Bretton Woods scheme of standardising business practice and promoting efficiency in the free market. After the Second World War, when Communists replaced Fascists as the US government’s enemy number one, new kinds of institutions were needed to deal with the Cold War. Ford funded RAND (Research and Development Corporation), a military think-tank that began with weapons research for the US defense services. In 1952, to thwart “the persistent Communist effort to penetrate and disrupt free nations”, it established the Fund for the Republic, which then morphed into the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions whose brief was to wage the cold war intelligently without McCarthyite excesses. It is through this lens that we need to view the work Ford Foundation is doing, with the millions of dollars it has invested in India—its funding of artists, filmmakers and activists, its generous endowment of university courses and scholarships.

The Ford Foundation’s declared “goals for the future of mankind” include interventions in grassroots political movements locally and internationally. In the US, it provided millions in grants and loans to support the Credit Union Movement that was pioneered by the department store owner, Edward Filene, in 1919. Filene believed in creating a mass consumption society of consumer goods by giving workers affordable access to credit—a radical idea at the time. Actually, only half of a radical idea, because the other half of what Filene believed in was the more equitable distribution of national income. Capitalists seized on the first half of Filene’s suggestion, and by disbursing “affordable” loans of tens of millions of dollars to working people, turned the US working class into people who are permanently in debt, running to catch up with their lifestyles.

Embracing death Microcredit has been the bane of many a farmer. Many have been forced to commit suicide.

Many years later, this idea has trickled down to the impoverished countryside of Bangladesh when Mohammed Yunus and the Grameen Bank brought microcredit to starving peasants with disastrous consequences. Microfinance companies in India are responsible for hundreds of suicides—200 people in Andhra Pradesh in 2010 alone. A national daily recently published a suicide note by an 18-year-old girl who was forced to hand over her last Rs 150, her school fees, to bullying employees of the microfinance company. The note said, “Work hard and earn money. Do not take loans.”

There’s a lot of money in poverty, and a few Nobel Prizes too.


	But which of us sinners was going to cast the first stone? We watch Tata Sky, surf the net with Tata Photon, sip Tata Tea. Hum Tata ka namak khate hain!

By the 1950s, the Rockefeller and Ford foundations, funding several NGOs and international educational institutions, began to work as quasi-extensions of the US government that was at the time toppling democratically elected governments in Latin America, Iran and Indonesia. (That was also around the time they made their entry into India, then non-aligned, but clearly tilting towards the Soviet Union.) The Ford Foundation established a US-style economics course at the Indonesian University. Elite Indonesian students, trained in counter-insurgency by US army officers, played a crucial part in the 1965 CIA-backed coup in Indonesia that brought General Suharto to power. Gen Suharto repaid his mentors by slaughtering hundreds of thousands of Communist rebels.

Eight years later, young Chilean students, who came to be known as the Chicago Boys, were taken to the US to be trained in neo-liberal economics by Milton Friedman at the University of Chicago (endowed by J.D. Rockefeller), in preparation for the 1973 CIA-backed coup that killed Salvador Allende, and brought in General Pinochet and a reign of death squads, disappearances and terror that lasted for seventeen years. (Allende’s crime was being a democratically elected socialist and nationalising Chile’s mines.)

In 1957, the Rockefeller Foundation established the Ramon Magsaysay Prize for community leaders in Asia. It was named after Ramon Magsaysay, president of the Philippines, a crucial ally in the US campaign against Communism in Southeast Asia. In 2000, the Ford Foundation established the Ramon Magsaysay Emergent Leadership Award. The Magsaysay Award is considered a prestigious award among artists, activists and community workers in India. M.S. Subbulakshmi and Satyajit Ray won it, so did Jayaprakash Narayan and one of India’s finest journalists, P. Sainath. But they did more for the Magsaysay award than it did for them. In general, it has become a gentle arbiter of what kind of activism is “acceptable” and what is not.

Team Anna Whose voice are they, really?. (Photograph by Sanjay Rawat)

Interestingly, Anna Hazare’s anti-corruption movement last summer was spearheaded by three Magsaysay Award winners—Anna Hazare, Arvind Kejriwal and Kiran Bedi. One of Arvind Kejriwal’s many NGOs is generously funded by Ford Foundation. Kiran Bedi’s NGO is funded by Coca Cola and Lehman Brothers.

Though Anna Hazare calls himself a Gandhian, the law he called for—the Jan Lokpal Bill—was un-Gandhian, elitist and dangerous. A round-the-clock corporate media campaign proclaimed him to be the voice of “the people”. Unlike the Occupy Wall Street movement in the US, the Hazare movement did not breathe a word against privatisation, corporate power or economic “reforms”. On the contrary, its principal media backers successfully turned the spotlight away from massive corporate corruption scandals (which had exposed high-profile journalists too) and used the public mauling of politicians to call for the further withdrawal of discretionary powers from government, for more reforms, more privatisation. (In 2008, Anna Hazare received a World Bank award for outstanding public service). The World Bank issued a statement from Washington saying the movement “dovetailed” into its policy.

Like all good Imperialists, the Philanthropoids set themselves the task of creating and training an international cadre that believed that Capitalism, and by extension the hegemony of the United States, was in their own self-interest. And who would therefore help to administer the Global Corporate Government in the ways native elites had always served colonialism. So began the foundations’ foray into education and the arts, which would become their third sphere of influence, after foreign and domestic economic policy. They spent (and continue to spend) millions of dollars on academic institutions and pedagogy.

Joan Roelofs in her wonderful book Foundations and Public Policy: The Mask of Pluralism describes how foundations remodelled the old ideas of how to teach political science, and fashioned the disciplines of “international” and “area” studies. This provided the US intelligence and security services a pool of expertise in foreign languages and culture to recruit from. The CIA and US state department continue to work with students and professors in US universities, raising serious questions about the ethics of scholarship.

Uniquely placed Nandan Nilekani, ‘CEO’ of Project UID. (Photograph by Jitender Gupta)

The gathering of information to control people they rule is fundamental to any ruling power. As resistance to land acquisition and the new economic policies spreads across India, in the shadow of outright war in Central India, as a containment technique, the government has embarked on a massive biometrics programme, perhaps one of the most ambitious and expensive information-gathering projects in the world— the Unique Identification Number (UID). People don’t have clean drinking water, or toilets, or food, or money, but they will have election cards and UID numbers. Is it a coincidence that the UID project run by Nandan Nilekani, former CEO of Infosys, ostensibly meant to “deliver services to the poor”, will inject massive amounts of money into a slightly beleaguered IT industry? (A conservative estimate of the UID budget exceeds the Indian government’s annual public spending on education.) To “digitise” a country with such a large population of the largely illegitimate and “illegible”—people who are for the most part slum-dwellers, hawkers, adivasis without land records—will criminalise them, turning them from illegitimate to illegal. The idea is to pull off a digital version of the Enclosure of the Commons and put huge powers into the hands of an increasingly hardening police state. Nilekani’s technocratic obsession with gathering data is consistent with Bill Gates’s obsession with digital databases, “numerical targets”, “scorecards of progress”. As though it is a lack of information that is the cause of world hunger, and not colonialism, debt and skewed profit-oriented, corporate policy.

Corporate-endowed foundations are the biggest funders of the social sciences and the arts, endowing courses and student scholarships in “development studies”, “community studies”, “cultural studies”, “behavioural sciences” and “human rights”. As US universities opened their doors to international students, hundreds of thousands of students, children of the Third World elite, poured in. Those who could not afford the fees were given scholarships. Today in countries like India and Pakistan there is scarcely a family among the upper middle classes that does not have a child that has studied in the US. From their ranks have come good scholars and academics, but also the prime ministers, finance ministers, economists, corporate lawyers, bankers and bureaucrats who helped to open up the economies of their countries to global corporations.


	Corporate philanthropy is as much a part of our lives as Coca Cola. Global finance buys into protest movements via NGOs. More troubled an area, more the NGOs.

Scholars of the Foundation-friendly version of economics and political science were rewarded with fellowships, research funds, grants, endowments and jobs. Those with Foundation-unfriendly views found themselves unfunded, marginalised and ghettoised, their courses discontinued. Gradually, one particular imagination—a brittle, superficial pretence of tolerance and multiculturalism (that morphs into racism, rabid nationalism, ethnic chauvinism or war-mongering Islamophobia at a moment’s notice) under the roof of a single, overarching, very unplural economic ideology—began to dominate the discourse. It did so to such an extent that it ceased to be perceived as an ideology at all. It became the default position, the natural way to be. It infiltrated normality, colonised ordinariness, and challenging it began to seem as absurd or as esoteric as challenging reality itself. From here it was a quick easy step to ‘There is No Alternative’.

It is only now, thanks to the Occupy Movement, that another language has appeared on US streets and campuses. To see students with banners that say ‘Class War’ or ‘We don’t mind you being rich, but we mind you buying our government’ is, given the odds, almost a revolution in itself.

One century after it began, corporate philanthropy is as much part of our lives as Coca Cola. There are now millions of non-profit organisations, many of them connected through a byzantine financial maze to the larger foundations. Between them, this “independent” sector has assets worth nearly 450 billion dollars. The largest of them is the Bill Gates Foundation with ($21 billion), followed by the Lilly Endowment ($16 billion) and the Ford Foundation ($15 billion).


	Nilekani’s technocratic obsession with gathering data is consistent with that of Bill Gates, as though lack of information is what is causing world hunger.

As the IMF enforced Structural Adjustment, and arm-twisted governments into cutting back on public spending on health, education, childcare, development, the NGOs moved in. The Privatisation of Everything has also meant the NGO-isation of Everything. As jobs and livelihoods disappeared, NGOs have become an important source of employment, even for those who see them for what they are. And they are certainly not all bad. Of the millions of NGOs, some do remarkable, radical work and it would be a travesty to tar all NGOs with the same brush. However, the corporate or Foundation-endowed NGOs are global finance’s way of buying into resistance movements, literally like shareholders buy shares in companies, and then try to control them from within. They sit like nodes on the central nervous system, the pathways along which global finance flows. They work like transmitters, receivers, shock absorbers, alert to every impulse, careful never to annoy the governments of their host countries. (The Ford Foundation requires the organisations it funds to sign a pledge to this effect.) Inadvertently (and sometimes advertently), they serve as listening posts, their reports and workshops and other missionary activity feeding data into an increasingly aggressive system of surveillance of increasingly hardening States. The more troubled an area, the greater the numbers of NGOs in it.

Mischievously, when the government or sections of the Corporate Press want to run a smear campaign against a genuine people’s movement, like the Narmada Bachao Andolan, or the protest against the Koodankulam nuclear reactor, they accuse these movements of being NGOs receiving “foreign funding”. They know very well that the mandate of most NGOs, in particular the well-funded ones, is to further the project of corporate globalisation, not thwart it.

Armed with their billions, these NGOs have waded into the world, turning potential revolutionaries into salaried activists, funding artists, intellectuals and filmmakers, gently luring them away from radical confrontation, ushering them in the direction of multi-culturalism, gender, community development—the discourse couched in the language of identity politics and human rights.

The transformation of the idea of justice into the industry of human rights has been a conceptual coup in which NGOs and foundations have played a crucial part. The narrow focus of human rights enables an atrocity-based analysis in which the larger picture can be blocked out and both parties in a conflict—say, for example, the Maoists and the Indian government, or the Israeli Army and Hamas—can both be admonished as Human Rights Violators. The land-grab by mining corporations or the history of the annexation of Palestinian land by the State of Israel then become footnotes with very little bearing on the discourse. This is not to suggest that human rights don’t matter. They do, but they are not a good enough prism through which to view or remotely understand the great injustices in the world we live in.

‘Mining happiness’ Vedanta is stripping all that the Dongria Kondh tribals hold sacred. (Photograph by Sandipan Chatterjee)

Another conceptual coup has to do with foundations’ involvement with the feminist movement. Why do most “official” feminists and women’s organisations in India keep a safe distance between themselves and organisations like say the 90,000-member Krantikari Adivasi Mahila Sangathan (Revolutionary Adivasi Women’s Association) fighting patriarchy in their own communities and displacement by mining corporations in the Dandakaranya forest? Why is it that the dispossession and eviction of millions of women from land which they owned and worked is not seen as a feminist problem?

The hiving off of the liberal feminist movement from grassroots anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist people’s movements did not begin with the evil designs of foundations. It began with those movements’ inability to adapt and accommodate the rapid radicalisation of women that took place in the ’60s and ’70s. The foundations showed genius in recognising and moving in to support and fund women’s growing impatience with the violence and patriarchy in their traditional societies as well as among even the supposedly progressive leaders of Left movements. In a country like India, the schism also ran along the rural-urban divide. Most radical, anti-capitalist movements were located in the countryside where, for the most part, patriarchy continued to rule the lives of most women. Urban women activists who joined these movements (like the Naxalite movement) had been influenced and inspired by the western feminist movement and their own journeys towards liberation were often at odds with what their male leaders considered to be their duty: to fit in with ‘the masses’. Many women activists were not willing to wait any longer for the “revolution” in order to end the daily oppression and discrimination in their lives, including from their own comrades. They wanted gender equality to be an absolute, urgent and non-negotiable part of the revolutionary process and not just a post-revolution promise. Intelligent, angry and disillusioned women began to move away and look for other means of support and sustenance. As a result, by the late ’80s, around the time Indian markets were opened up, the liberal feminist movement in a country like India has become inordinately NGO-ised. Many of these NGOs have done seminal work on queer rights, domestic violence, AIDS and the rights of sex workers. But significantly, the liberal feminist movements have not been at the forefront of challenging the new economic policies, even though women have been the greatest sufferers. By manipulating the disbursement of the funds, the foundations have largely succeeded in circumscribing the range of what “political” activity should be. The funding briefs of NGOs now prescribe what counts as women’s “issues” and what doesn’t.

The NGO-isation of the women’s movement has also made western liberal feminism (by virtue of its being the most funded brand) the standard-bearer of what constitutes feminism. The battles, as usual, have been played out on women’s bodies, extruding Botox at one end and burqas at the other. (And then there are those who suffer the double whammy, Botox and the Burqa.) When, as happened recently in France, an attempt is made to coerce women out of the burqa rather than creating a situation in which a woman can choose what she wishes to do, it’s not about liberating her, but about unclothing her. It becomes an act of humiliation and cultural imperialism. It’s not about the burqa. It’s about the coercion. Coercing a woman out of a burqa is as bad as coercing her into one. Viewing gender in this way, shorn of social, political and economic context, makes it an issue of identity, a battle of props and costumes. It is what allowed the US government to use western feminist groups as moral cover when it invaded Afghanistan in 2001. Afghan women were (and are) in terrible trouble under the Taliban. But dropping daisy-cutters on them was not going to solve their problems.

In the NGO universe, which has evolved a strange anodyne language of its own, everything has become a “subject”, a separate, professionalised, special-interest issue. Community development, leadership development, human rights, health, education, reproductive rights, AIDS, orphans with AIDS—have all been hermetically sealed into their own silos with their own elaborate and precise funding brief. Funding has fragmented solidarity in ways that repression never could. Poverty too, like feminism, is often framed as an identity problem. As though the poor have not been created by injustice but are a lost tribe who just happen to exist, and can be rescued in the short term by a system of grievance redressal (administered by NGOs on an individual, person to person basis), and whose long-term resurrection will come from Good Governance. Under the regime of Global Corporate Capitalism, it goes without saying.

Indian poverty, after a brief period in the wilderness while India “shone”, has made a comeback as an exotic identity in the Arts, led from the front by films like Slumdog Millionaire. These stories about the poor, their amazing spirit and resilience, have no villains—except the small ones who provide narrative tension and local colour. The authors of these works are the contemporary world’s equivalent of the early anthropologists, lauded and honoured for working on “the ground”, for their brave journeys into the unknown. You rarely see the rich being examined in these ways.

Having worked out how to manage governments, political parties, elections, courts, the media and liberal opinion, there was one more challenge for the neo-liberal establishment: how to deal with growing unrest, the threat of “people’s power”. How do you domesticate it? How do you turn protesters into pets? How do you vacuum up people’s fury and redirect it into blind alleys?

Here too, foundations and their allied organisations have a long and illustrious history. A revealing example is their role in defusing and deradicalising the Black Civil Rights movement in the US in the 1960s and the successful transformation of Black Power into Black Capitalism.

The Rockefeller Foundation, in keeping with J.D. Rockefeller’s ideals, had worked closely with Martin Luther King Sr (father of Martin Luther King Jr). But his influence waned with the rise of the more militant organisations—the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Black Panthers. The Ford and Rockefeller Foundations moved in. In 1970, they donated $15 million to “moderate” black organisations, giving people grants, fellowships, scholarships, job training programmes for dropouts and seed money for black-owned businesses. Repression, infighting and the honey trap of funding led to the gradual atrophying of the radical black organisations.


	Stones were pushed up Soni Sori’s vagina to get her to ‘confess’. Sori remains in jail; her interrogator, Ankit Garg, was awarded the police medal this Republic Day.

Martin Luther King Jr made the forbidden connections between Capitalism, Imperialism, Racism and the Vietnam War. As a result, after he was assassinated, even his memory became a toxic threat to public order. Foundations and Corporations worked hard to remodel his legacy to fit a market-friendly format. The Martin Luther King Junior Centre for Non-Violent Social Change, with an operational grant of $2 million, was set up by, among others, the Ford Motor Company, General Motors, Mobil, Western Electric, Procter & Gamble, US Steel and Monsanto. The Center maintains the King Library and Archives of the Civil Rights Movement. Among the many programmes the King Center runs have been projects that “work closely with the United States Department of Defense, the Armed Forces Chaplains Board and others”. It co-sponsored the Martin Luther King Jr Lecture Series called ‘The Free Enterprise System: An Agent for Non-violent Social Change’. Amen.

A similar coup was carried out in the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa. In 1978, the Rockefeller Foundation organised a Study Commission on US Policy toward Southern Africa. The report warned of the growing influence of the Soviet Union on the African National Congress (ANC) and said that US strategic and corporate interests (i.e., access to South Africa’s minerals) would be best served if there were genuine sharing of political power by all races.

Black ‘liberation’ Or a bow to the Washington Consensus?. (Photograph by Reuters, From Outlook, March 26, 2012)

The foundations began to support the ANC. The ANC soon turned on the more radical organisations like Steve Biko’s Black Consciousness movement and more or less eliminated them. When Nelson Mandela took over as South Africa’s first Black President, he was canonised as a living saint, not just because he was a freedom fighter who spent 27 years in prison, but also because he deferred completely to the Washington Consensus. Socialism disappeared from the ANC’s agenda. South Africa’s great “peaceful transition”, so praised and lauded, meant no land reforms, no demands for reparation, no nationalisation of South Africa’s mines. Instead, there was Privatisation and Structural Adjustment. Mandela gave South Africa’s highest civilian award—the Order of Good Hope—to his old supporter and friend General Suharto, the killer of Communists in Indonesia. Today, in South Africa, a clutch of Mercedes-driving former radicals and trade unionists rule the country. But that is more than enough to perpetuate the illusion of Black Liberation.

The rise of Black Power in the US was an inspirational moment for the rise of a radical, progressive Dalit movement in India, with organisations like the Dalit Panthers mirroring the militant politics of the Black Panthers. But Dalit Power too, in not exactly the same but similar ways, has been fractured and defused and, with plenty of help from right-wing Hindu organisations and the Ford Foundation, is well on its way to transforming into Dalit Capitalism.

‘Dalit Inc ready to show business can beat caste’, the Indian Express reported in December last year. It went on to quote a mentor of the Dalit Indian Chamber of Commerce & Industry (DICCI). “Getting the prime minister for a Dalit gathering is not difficult in our society. But for Dalit entrepreneurs, taking a photograph with Tata and Godrej over lunch and tea is an aspiration—and proof that they have arrived,” he said. Given the situation in modern India, it would be casteist and reactionary to say that Dalit entrepreneurs oughtn’t to have a place at the high table. But if this is to be the aspiration, the ideological framework of Dalit politics, it would be a great pity. And unlikely to help the one million Dalits who still earn a living off manual scavenging—carrying human shit on their heads.


	Do we need weapons to fight wars? Or do we need wars to create a market for weapons? It’s the one thing that the US hasn’t outsourced to China.

Young Dalit scholars who accept grants from the Ford Foundation cannot be too harshly judged. Who else is offering them an opportunity to climb out of the cesspit of the Indian caste system? The shame as well as a large part of the blame for this turn of events also goes to India’s Communist movement whose leaders continue to be predominantly upper caste. For years it has tried to force-fit the idea of caste into Marxist class analysis. It has failed miserably, in theory as well as practice. The rift between the Dalit community and the Left began with a falling out between the visionary Dalit leader Dr Bhimrao Ambedkar and S.A. Dange, trade unionist and founding member of the Communist Party of India. Dr Ambedkar’s disillusionment with the Communist Party began with the textile workers’ strike in Mumbai in 1928 when he realised that despite all the rhetoric about working class solidarity, the party did not find it objectionable that the “untouchables” were kept out of the weaving department (and only qualified for the lower paid spinning department) because the work involved the use of saliva on the threads, which other castes considered “polluting”.

Ambedkar realised that in a society where the Hindu scriptures institutionalise untouchability and inequality, the battle for “untouchables”, for social and civic rights, was too urgent to wait for the promised Communist revolution. The rift between the Ambedkarites and the Left has come at a great cost to both. It has meant that a great majority of the Dalit population, the backbone of the Indian working class, has pinned its hopes for deliverance and dignity to constitutionalism, to capitalism and to political parties like the BSP, which practise an important, but in the long run, stagnant brand of identity politics.

In the United States, as we have seen, corporate-endowed foundations spawned the culture of NGOs. In India, targeted corporate philanthropy began in earnest in the 1990s, the era of the New Economic Policies. Membership to the Star Chamber doesn’t come cheap. The Tata Group donated $50 million to that needy institution, the Harvard Business School, and another $50 million to Cornell University. Nandan Nilekani of Infosys and his wife Rohini donated $5 million as a start-up endowment for the India Initiative at Yale. The Harvard Humanities Centre is now the Mahindra Humanities Centre after it received its largest-ever donation of $10 million from Anand Mahindra of the Mahindra Group.


	When Mandela took over, socialism disappeared from the ANC agenda. Today, a clutch of Mercedes-driving ex-radicals and trade unionists rule the country.

At home, the Jindal Group, with a major stake in mining, metals and power, runs the Jindal Global Law School and will soon open the Jindal School of Government and Public Policy. (The Ford Foundation runs a law school in the Congo.) The New India Foundation funded by Nandan Nilekani, financed by profits from Infosys, gives prizes and fellowships to social scientists. The Sitaram Jindal Foundation endowed by Jindal Aluminium has announced five cash prizes of Rs 1 crore each to be given to those working in rural development, poverty alleviation, environment education and moral upliftment. The Reliance Group’s Observer Research Foundation (ORF), currently endowed by Mukesh Ambani, is cast in the mould of the Rockefeller Foundation. It has retired intelligence agents, strategic analysts, politicians (who pretend to rail against each other in Parliament), journalists and policymakers as its research “fellows” and advisors.

ORF’s objectives seem straightforward enough: “To help develop a consensus in favour of economic reforms.” And to shape and influence public opinion, creating “viable, alternative policy options in areas as divergent as employment generation in backward districts and real-time strategies to counter nuclear, biological and chemical threats”.

I was initially puzzled by the preoccupation with “nuclear, biological and chemical war” in ORF’s stated objectives. But less so when, in the long list of its ‘institutional partners’, I found the names of Raytheon and Lockheed Martin, two of the world’s leading weapons manufacturers. In 2007, Raytheon announced it was turning its attention to India. Could it be that at least part of India’s $32 billion defence budget will be spent on weapons, guided missiles, aircraft, warships and surveillance equipment made by Raytheon and Lockheed Martin?

Do we need weapons to fight wars? Or do we need wars to create a market for weapons? After all, the economies of Europe, US and Israel depend hugely on their weapons industry. It’s the one thing they haven’t outsourced to China.

In the new Cold War between US and China, India is being groomed to play the role Pakistan played as a US ally in the cold war with Russia. (And look what happened to Pakistan.) Many of those columnists and “strategic analysts” who are playing up the hostilities between India and China, you’ll see, can be traced back directly or indirectly to the Indo-American think-tanks and foundations. Being a “strategic partner” of the US does not mean that the Heads of State make friendly phone calls to each other every now and then. It means collaboration (interference) at every level. It means hosting US Special Forces on Indian soil (a Pentagon Commander recently confirmed this to the BBC). It means sharing intelligence, altering agriculture and energy policies, opening up the health and education sectors to global investment. It means opening up retail. It means an unequal partnership in which India is being held close in a bear hug and waltzed around the floor by a partner who will incinerate her the moment she refuses to dance.

In the list of ORF’s ‘institutional partners’, you will also find the RAND Corporation, Ford Foundation, the World Bank, the Brookings Institution (whose stated mission is to “provide innovative and practical recommendations that advance three broad goals: to strengthen American democracy; to foster the economic and social welfare, security and opportunity of all Americans; and to secure a more open, safe, prosperous and cooperative international system”.) You will also find the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation of Germany. (Poor Rosa, who died for the cause of Communism, to find her name on a list such as this one!)

Though capitalism is meant to be based on competition, those at the top of the food chain have also shown themselves to be capable of inclusiveness and solidarity. The great Western Capitalists have done business with fascists, socialists, despots and military dictators. They can adapt and constantly innovate. They are capable of quick thinking and immense tactical cunning.

But despite having successfully powered through economic reforms, despite having waged wars and militarily occupied countries in order to put in place free market “democracies”, Capitalism is going through a crisis whose gravity has not revealed itself completely yet. Marx said, “What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.”


	Capitalism is in crisis. The international financial meltdown is closing in. The two old tricks that dug it out of past crises—War and Shopping—simply will not work.

The proletariat, as Marx saw it, has been under continuous assault. Factories have shut down, jobs have disappeared, trade unions have been disbanded. The proletariat has, over the years, been pitted against each other in every possible way. In India, it has been Hindu against Muslim, Hindu against Christian, Dalit against Adivasi, caste against caste, region against region. And yet, all over the world, it is fighting back. In China, there are countless strikes and uprisings. In India, the poorest people in the world have fought back to stop some of the richest corporations in their tracks.

Capitalism is in crisis. Trickledown failed. Now Gush-Up is in trouble too. The international financial meltdown is closing in. India’s growth rate has plummeted to 6.9 per cent. Foreign investment is pulling out. Major international corporations are sitting on huge piles of money, not sure where to invest it, not sure how the financial crisis will play out. This is a major, structural crack in the juggernaut of global capital.

Capitalism’s real “grave-diggers” may end up being its own delusional Cardinals, who have turned ideology into faith. Despite their strategic brilliance, they seem to have trouble grasping a simple fact: Capitalism is destroying the planet. The two old tricks that dug it out of past crises—War and Shopping—simply will not work.

I stood outside Antilla for a long time watching the sun go down. I imagined that the tower was as deep as it was high. That it had a twenty-seven-storey-long tap root, snaking around below the ground, hungrily sucking sustenance out of the earth, turning it into smoke and gold.

Why did the Ambanis’ choose to call their building Antilla? Antilla is the name of a set of mythical islands whose story dates back to an 8th-century Iberian legend. When the Muslims conquered Hispania, six Christian Visigothic bishops and their parishioners boarded ships and fled. After days, or maybe weeks at sea, they arrived at the isles of Antilla where they decided to settle and raise a new civilisation. They burnt their boats to permanently sever their links to their barbarian-dominated homeland.

By calling their tower Antilla, do the Ambanis hope to sever their links to the poverty and squalor of their homeland and raise a new civilisation? Is this the final act of the most successful secessionist movement in India? The secession of the middle and upper classes into outer space?

As night fell over Mumbai, guards in crisp linen shirts with crackling walkie-talkies appeared outside the forbidding gates of Antilla. The lights blazed on, to scare away the ghosts perhaps. The neighbours complain that Antilla’s bright lights have stolen the night.

Perhaps it’s time for us to take back the night.

1. Edited March 18, 2012: the year of CIA backed coup in Indonesia was earlier incorrectly mentioned as 1952. Corrected to 1965

2. Edited March 20, 2012: The sentence that now reads “All this in Goa, where activists and journalists were uncovering massive illegal mining scandals, and Essar’s part in the war unfolding in Bastar was emerging” was earlier published as: “All this in Goa, while activists and journalists were uncovering massive illegal mining scandals that involved Essar”

Why I (one should) hate The Hindu and its editor N.Ram in Srilankan Tamil issue?

noreply@blogger.com (Admin) — Sun, 25 Mar 2012 07:15:00 +0000

I am writing this article on seeing one of the most distressing war crime videos committed by the srilankan soldiers (animals in uniforms) aired by channel 4.Whats been interesting to note is that barring some progressive news groups majority of the bigger news agencies in India viz The Hindu, Times of India etc see India’s support to the US sponsored resolution against srilanka and the entire war crimes committed by the srilankan army against the Tamils as an diplomatic issue between India and srilanka. Instead of covering and condemning the heinous war crimes committed by the Lankans Indian media especially The Hindu headed by N.Ram continue to serve as an unofficial media partner to Srilankan government. Even the so called biggest enemy Pakistan never kills Indian fisher men but the lankan navy has killed more than 100s of Tamil fishermen brutally till now and the killings haven’t stopped yet. As a leader in print media the The Hindu never questioned this Lankan government attitude towards Tamil fisherman in India. The Hindu news paper continues to betray Tamil people both in Tamilnadu and in Srilanka. Even after the Geneva resolution The Hindu paper is openly supporting the srilankan war criminals in its news editorial and news analysis report. We the people of Tamilnadu must expose this shameful act of The Hindu and its (mama) editor N.Ram.

A picture of N.RAM posted in a blog against his fascist attitude

Here are the facts and findings in support of my claims

The Hindu is an open supporter of Srilankan government. So one can easily say this Hindu group would never highlight the truth in Srilankan Tamil issue. Some classical examples are

1. When a Srilankan news paper (Sunday times of srilanka) refused to accept (on account of growing dangerous trend towards the journalist in lanka) the highest Srilankan honor for a journalist. The Hindu Ram accepted the ‘Best Journalist of Asia award’ from an NGO (supported by War criminal mahinda)

2. He is also the First Indian National to get "SriLanka Rathna" award from the srilankan government. If such is the closeness between The Hindu Ram and war criminal Mahinda. How can one expect The Hindu group to speak the truth?????

3. No journalist in the world would term a visit to a refugee camp as an up lifting experience as N.Ram described in one of his article immediately after the end of war between the LTTE and Lankan army on 2009 Visiting the Vavuniya IDP camps: an uplifting experience,. It is to be noted that the srilankan government at that time refused entry to any international journalist or even the Red Cross officials in to the refugee camps but for The Hindu N.Ram the war criminal mahinda arranged for a special helicopter to look in to the internally displaced camp for the war displaced Tamil people.

4. Here is an article listing the one sided attitude (in support of srilankan government) of The Hindu and its chief N.Ram towards the srilankan Tamil issue and also the Tamil fishermen rights in katchatheevu islands.

“The Hindu”s extreme Pro Sri Lankan Propaganda

The Sri Lanka crisis and the recent offensive of the Sri Lankan army on the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam gained much media attention in India. The Hindu group coverd the developments very closely. However, most readers notice that The Hindu is biased on the issue and often functions as propaganda machinery for the Sri Lankan government and its Army. Mr N Ram of The Hindu is known to have been involved in the high level discussions between all the involved parties – the Tamil rebels, Indian government officials and Sri Lanka government officials during early 80′s. The group has maintained an extreme hardline pro Sri Lanka stand on the issue ignoring the Tamil and Indian interests in the region. There have been several public protests in the state of Tamil Nadu against the biased reporting of The Hindu on the Sri Lanka issue………To read the complete story click on the following link “The Hindu”s extreme Pro Sri Lankan Propaganda

“The Hindu”s lies about Katchatheevu Island

Hindu editorial against the Sovereignty of India and invites Contempt of court

On 22.06.2006 The Hindu published their editorial with a title “Katchatheevu is settled” propagating a lie as if they are announcing a foreign policy. Immediately it is republished in Sri Lanka with a title “Katchatheevu is settled, say Indian media “………To read the complete story click on the following link “The Hindu”s lies about Katchatheevu Island.

5. A letter that never got published in The Hindu news paper.

An Open Letter to The Hindu

A friend asked me to look at the last page of the Hindu today (July 4th, 2009). At a first look, it appeared as though there were a lot of advertisements on the page. After a closer observation, I found out that I was not far from the truth. The lead article “Visiting the Vavuniya IDP camps: an uplifting experience” is nothing short of an advertisement for the Lankan government. The article flows like a good corporate ad – the (non-existent) virtues of the Lankan state have been overstated while its miserable failures have been understated…….. To read the complete story click on the following link An Open Letter to The Hindu

6. An article by a Delhi based journalist on The Hindu Ram

The Ram-Rajapaksa Tape: Fictional By Satya Sagar

I appeal to all the readers don’t stamp me as Tamil nationalist, on reading this article. As a Human rights activist I wanted to highlight this one sided journalism of The Hindu. Please spread this article and create awareness about this modern day Media mafia The Hindu N.Ram.

Note: This type of one sided reporting of The Hindu is happening in The Mullaiperiyar dam issue as well. A total of more than 10-15 reports in support of the kerala government (barring few in support of the truth) has been published in The Hindu paper so far. (Most of the article is contributed by Ramaswamy R. Iyer).

IMPORTANT NOTE:

Free download of Dr.B.R.Ambedkar books

noreply@blogger.com (Admin) — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 14:51:00 +0000

B.R.Ambedkar Annihilation of Caste

Since caste is at the heart of the problems within Hinduism, this is a classic statement of what to do about it.

B.R.Ambedkar Philosophy of Hinduism

A hard-hitting and eminently scholarly masterpiece that is a must read for a Hindu wishing to be a progressive and make Hinduism progressive. This is not a piece for those Hindus who are insecure in their Hinduism and become defensive immediately.

Dead Men Talking-Arundhati Roy

noreply@blogger.com (Admin) — Fri, 14 Oct 2011 12:07:00 +0000

David Barsamian

“I have worked on Chhattisgarh, the Gujarat pogrom, Narmada dams.... But it’s all about Kashmir. The official narrative must not be contested.”

Dead Men Talking

The Indian state can silence the living, not the voice of the silent

Arundhati Roy

On September 23, 2011, at about three in the morning, within hours of his arrival at the New Delhi airport, the US radio journalist David Barsamian was deported. This dangerous man, who produces independent, free-to-air programmes for public radio, has been visiting India for 40 years, doing dangerous things like learning Urdu and playing the sitar. He has published book-length interviews with Edward Said, Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Ejaz Ahmed and Tariq Ali. (He even makes an appearance as a young, bellbottom-wearing interviewer in Peter Wintonick’s documentary film on Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman’s Manufacturing Consent.) On his more recent trips to India he has done a series of radio interviews with activists, academics, filmmakers, journalists and writers (including myself). Barsamian’s work has taken him to Turkey, Iran, Syria, Lebanon and Pakistan. He has never been deported from any of these countries.

So why does the world’s largest democracy fear this lone, sitar-playing, Urdu-speaking, left-leaning radio producer? Here is how Barsamian himself explains it: “It’s all about Kashmir. I’ve done work on Jharkand, Chhattisgarh, West Bengal, Narmada dams, farmer suicides, the Gujarat pogrom and the Binayak Sen case. But it’s Kashmir that is at the heart of the Indian state’s concerns. The official narrative must not be contested.”

News reports about his deportation quoted official “sources” as saying that Barsamian had “violated his visa norms during his visit in 2009-10 by indulging in professional work while holding a tourist visa”. Visa norms in India are an interesting peephole into the government’s concerns and predilections. Taking cover under the shabby old banner of the War on Terror, the Union home ministry has decreed that scholars and academics invited for conferences or seminars require security clearance before they will be given visas. Corporate executives and businessmen do not. So somebody who wants to invest in a dam or build a steel plant or buy a bauxite mine is not considered a security hazard, whereas a scholar who might wish to participate in a seminar about, say displacement or communalism or rising malnutrition in a globalised economy, is. Foreign terrorists with bad intentions have probably guessed by now that they are better off wearing Prada suits and pretending they want to buy a mine than wearing old corduroys and saying they want to attend a seminar. (Some would argue that mine-buyers in Prada suits are the real terrorists.)

David Barsamian did not travel to India to buy a mine or to attend a conference. He just came to talk to people. The complaint against him, according to “official sources”, is that he had reported on events in Jammu and Kashmir during his last visit to India and that these reports were “not based on facts”. Remember Barsamian is not a reporter, he’s a man who has conversations with people, mostly dissidents, about the societies in which they live. Is it illegal for tourists to talk to people in the countries they visit? Would it be illegal for me to travel to the US or Europe and write about the people I met, even if my writing was “not based on facts”? Who decides which “facts” are correct and which are not? Would Barsamian have been deported if the conversations he recorded had been in praise of the impressive turnouts in Kashmir’s elections, instead of about what life is like in the densest military occupation in the world? (Six lakh actively deployed armed personnel for a population of 10 million people.) Or if they had been about the army’s rescue operations in the 2005 earthquake instead of about the massive unarmed uprisings that took place on three consecutive summers? (And which received no round-the-clock media attention, and no one thought to call “the Kashmir Spring”).

David Barsamian is not the first person to be deported over the Indian government’s sensitivities over Kashmir. Professor Richard Shapiro, an anthropologist from San Francisco, was deported from Delhi airport in November 2010 without being given any reason. Most of us believe it was the government’s way of punishing his partner, Angana Chatterji, a co-convenor of the International People’s Tribunal on Human Rights and Justice, which first brought international attention to the existence of unmarked mass graves in Kashmir. May Aquino, from the Asian Federation against Involuntary Disappearances (AFAD), Manila, was scheduled to visit Kashmir in September 2011. She was deported from the Delhi airport. Earlier this year, on May 28, the outspoken Indian democratic rights activist Gautam Navlakha was deported to Delhi from Srinagar airport. (Farooq Abdullah, the former chief minister of Kashmir, justified the deportation, saying that writers like Navlakha and myself had no business entering Kashmir, because “Kashmir is not for burning”—whatever that means.) Kashmir is in the process of being isolated, cut off from the outside world by two concentric rings of border patrols—in Delhi as well as Srinagar—as though it’s already a free country with its own visa regime. Within its borders, of course, it’s open season for the government and the army. The art of controlling Kashmiri journalists and ordinary people with a deadly combination of bribes, threats, blackmail and a whole spectrum of unutterable, carefully crafted cruelties has evolved into an art form.

Photograph by Reuters, From Outlook, October 10, 2011

Cacophony of the deceased

It’s insensitive of the unmarked graves to embarrass the Government of India just when India’s record is due for review before the UNHRC.

While the government goes about trying to silence the living, the dead have begun to speak up. It was insensitive of Barsamian to plan a trip to Kashmir just when the state human rights commission was finally shamed into officially acknowledging the existence of 2,700 unmarked graves from three districts in Kashmir. Reports of thousands of other graves are pouring in from other districts. It is insensitive of the unmarked graves to embarrass the Government of India just when India’s record is due for review before the UN Human Rights Council.

Apart from Dangerous David, who else is the world’s largest democracy afraid of? There’s young Lingaram Kodopi, an adivasi from Dantewada, who was arrested on September 9, 2011. The police say they caught him red-handed in a marketplace while he was handing over protection money from Essar, an iron ore mining company, to the banned Communist Party of India (Maoist). His aunt Soni Sori says that he was picked up by plainclothes policemen in a white Bolero from his grandfather’s house in Palnar village. Now she’s on the run too. Interestingly, even by their own account, the police arrested Lingaram but allowed the Maoists to escape. This is only the latest in a series of bizarre, almost hallucinatory accusations they have made against Lingaram and then withdrawn. His real crime is that he’s the only journalist who speaks Gondi, the local language, and who knows how to negotiate the remote forest paths in Dantewada, Chhattisgarh, the other war zone in India from which no news must come.

Having signed over vast tracts of indigenous tribal homelands in central India to multinational mining and infrastructure corporations in a series of secret Memorandums of Understanding—in complete contravention of the law as well as the Constitution—the government has begun to flood the forests with hundreds of thousands of security forces. All resistance, armed as well as unarmed, has been branded ‘Maoist’. (In Kashmir, the preferred phrase is “jehadi elements”). As the civil war grows deadlier, hundreds of villages have been burnt to the ground. Thousands of adivasis have fled as refugees into neighbouring states. Hundreds of thousands are living terrified lives hiding in the forests. Paramilitary forces have laid siege to the forest. A network of police informers patrol village bazaars, making trips for essential provisions and medicines a nightmare for villagers. Untold numbers of nameless people are in jail, charged with sedition and waging war on the state, with no lawyers to defend them. Very little news comes out of those forests, and there are no body counts.

Photograph by Sanjay Rawat

Lingaram Kodopi

He was arrested while apparently handing protection money from Essar. His real crime: he knows Gondi as well as the forest paths in Dantewada.

So it’s not hard to see why young Lingaram Kodopi poses such a threat. Before he trained to become a journalist, he was a driver in Dantewada. In 2009, the police arrested him and confiscated his jeep. He was locked up in a small toilet for 40 days where he was pressurised to become a Special Police Officer (SPO) in the Salwa Judum, the government-sponsored vigilante army that was at the time tasked with forcing people to flee from their villages. (The Salwa Judum has since been declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court.) The police released Lingaram after the Gandhian activist Himanshu Kumar filed a habeas corpus petition in court. But then the police arrested Lingaram’s old father and five other members of his family. They attacked his village and warned villagers not to shelter him. Eventually, Lingaram escaped to Delhi where friends and well-wishers got him admission into a journalism school. In April 2010, he travelled to Dantewada and escorted to Delhi the witnesses and victims of the barbarity of the Salwa Judum, the police and paramilitary forces, enabling them to give testimony at the Independent People’s Tribunal. (In his own testimony, Lingaram was sharply critical of the Maoists as well.)

That did not deter the Chhattisgarh police. On July 2, 2010, the senior Maoist leader, Comrade Azad, the official spokesperson for the Maoist Party, was captured and executed by the Andhra Pradesh police. Deputy Inspector General S.R.P. Kalluri of the Chhattisgarh police announced at a press conference that Lingaram Kodopi had been elected by the Maoist Party to take over Comrade Azad’s role. (It was like accusing a young schoolchild in 1936 Yenan of being Zhou-en-Lai.) The charge was met with such derision that the police had to withdraw it. They had also accused Lingaram of being the mastermind of a Maoist attack on a Congress legislator in Dantewada. But perhaps because they had already made themselves look so foolish and vindictive, they decided to bide their time.

Here stands, India’s ‘gravest’ threat

Paramilitary forces have laid siege to the forest. All resistance, armed or unarmed, has been branded ‘Maoist’. Entire villages are being burned.

Lingaram remained in Delhi, completed his course and received his diploma in journalism. In March 2011, paramilitary forces burned down three villages in Dantewada—Tadmetla, Timapuram and Morapalli. The Chhattisgarh government blamed the Maoists. The Supreme Court assigned the investigation to the Central Bureau of Investigation. Lingaram returned to Dantewada with a video camera and trekked from village to village documenting first-hand testimonies of the villagers who indicted the police. (You can see some of these on YouTube.) By doing this, he made himself one of the most wanted men in Dantewada. On September 9, the police finally got to him.

Lingaram has joined an impressive line-up of troublesome news-gatherers and disseminators in Chhattisgarh. Among the earliest to be silenced was the celebrated doctor Binayak Sen who first raised the alarm about the crimes of the Salwa Judum as far back as 2005. He was arrested in 2007, accused of being a Maoist and sentenced to life imprisonment. After years in prison, he is out on bail now. Several people followed Binayak Sen into prison—including Piyush Guha and the filmmaker Ajay T.G. Both have been accused of being Maoists. These arrests put a chill into the activist community in Chhattisgarh, but didn’t stop some of them from continuing to do what they were doing. Kopa Kunjam worked with Himanshu Kumar’s Vanvasi Chetna Ashram, doing exactly what Lingaram tried to do much later—travelling to remote villages, bringing out the news, and carefully documenting the horror that was unfolding. (He was my first guide into the forest villages of Dantewada.) Much of this documentation has made its way into legal cases that are proving to be a source of worry and discomfort to the Chhattisgarh government.

In May 2009, the Vanvasi Chetna Ashram, the last neutral shelter for journalists, writers and academics who were travelling to Dantewada, was demolished by the Chhattisgarh government. In December 2009, on Human Rights Day, Kopa was arrested. He was accused of colluding with the Maoists in the murder of one man and the kidnapping of another. The case against Kopa has begun to fall apart as the police witnesses, including the man who was kidnapped, have disowned the statements they purportedly made to the police. It doesn’t really matter, because in India we all know the process is the punishment. It will take years for Kopa to establish his innocence, by which time the administration hopes the arrest will have served its purpose. Many villagers who were encouraged by Kopa to file complaints against the police have been arrested too. Some are in jail. Others have been made to live in roadside camps manned by SPOs. That includes many women who committed the crime of being raped. Soon after Kopa’s arrest, Himanshu Kumar was hounded out of Dantewada. In September 2010, another adivasi activist, Kartam Joga, was arrested. His offence was to have filed a petition in the Supreme Court in 2007 about the rampant human rights abuses committed by the Salwa Judum. He is being accused of colluding with the Maoists in the April 2010 killing of 76 crpf personnel in Tadmetla. Kartam Joga is a member of the Communist Party of India (CPI) which has a tense, if not hostile relationship with the Maoists. Amnesty International has named him a Prisoner of Conscience.

Meanwhile, the arrests continue at a steady pace. A casual look at the First Information Reports (FIRs) filed by the police give a pretty clear idea of how the deadly business of Due Process works in Dantewada. The texts of many of the FIRs are exactly the same. The name of the accused, the date, the nature of the crime and the names of witnesses are simply inserted into the biscuit mould. There’s nobody to check. Most of those involved, prisoners as well as witnesses, cannot read or write.

In plain sight

A YouTube video grabs in which Kodopi records a villager’s testimony indicting the police in the burning of three Dantewada villages .

One day, in Dantewada too, the dead will begin to speak. And it will not just be dead humans, it will be the dead land, dead rivers, dead mountains and dead creatures in dead forests that will insist on a hearing.

Meanwhile, life goes on. While intrusive surveillance, internet policing and phone-tapping and the clampdown on those who speak up becomes grimmer with every passing day, it’s odd how India is becoming the dream destination of literary festivals. There are about 10 of them scheduled over the next few months. Some are funded by the very corporations on whose behalf the police have unleashed their regime of terror. The Harud Literary festival in Srinagar (postponed for the moment) was slated to be the newest, most exciting one—“As the autumn leaves change colour the valley of Kashmir will resonate with the sound of poetry, literary dialogue, debate and discussions....” Its organisers advertised it as an “apolitical” event, but did not say how either the rulers or the subjects of a brutal military occupation that has claimed tens of thousands of lives, bereaved thousands of women and children and maimed a hundred thousand people in its torture chambers can be “apolitical”. I wonder—will the literary guests come on tourist visas? Will there be separate ones for Srinagar and Delhi? Will they need security clearance? Will a Kashmiri who speaks out go directly from the festival to an interrogation centre, or will she be allowed to go home and change and collect her things? (I’m just being crude here, I know it’s more subtle than that.)

The festive din of this spurious freedom helps to muffle the sound of footsteps in airport corridors as the deported are frog-marched on to departing planes, to mute the click of handcuffs locking around strong, warm wrists and the cold metallic clang of prison doors.

Our lungs are gradually being depleted of oxygen. Perhaps it’s time to use whatever breath remains in our bodies to say: Open the bloody gates.

Source:http://www.outlookindia.com/article.aspx?278491

Collection of essays on Operation Green Hunt

noreply@blogger.com (Admin) — Fri, 14 Oct 2011 12:01:00 +0000

A Collection of Essays
'Against the War on People'

To download this book kindly click on the following link

DOWNLOAD

Anna Hazare's campaign-A corporate sponsored show

noreply@blogger.com (Admin) — Fri, 07 Oct 2011 22:01:00 +0000

Is Anna a true leader....? Many educated people are going behind him like a herd...! Anna Hazare is supported by (bribe giving) corporate and corporate media....! How can one support this corrupt person? By calling this corporate sponsored protest as another freedom struggle we all insulting the true freedom fighters of India......!

Before going in to the review of the Jan lokapal bill we must know about the persons involved in drafting this lokpal bill and the hidden agenda behind this bill. Even some of the members in the Anna team have a point to prove on their integrity. This article cannot be seen as a attack on some individuals, i am trying to emphasise the facts surrounding this protests and the true intentions of these corrupt individuals. Since most of the English media (corporate sponsored) and some regional media are portraying this fast by Anna as another freedom struggle. It’s high time we all must stop this kind of news (nonsense), because it directly insults the true freedom fighters of the Indian nation. Here are the serious integrity issues relating to the Anna team:

1. Anna Hazare: Termed as another Gandhi he is accused of misusing his trust money for celebrating his B’day. To add up to these allegations- I request the readers to look in to the following links about Anna`s atrocities in His own village.

I'd rather not be Anna- Arundhati Roy

The Making of Anna Hazare

2. Arvind Kejriwal: This former IIT student is being projected as next youth icon (next to/instead of Rahul!). Soon after getting a capitalists sponsored award he rose to prominence. Later he started a NGO called kabir. He is a key member in the Anna team. His NGO is said to have got donations from Ford foundation and several other unknown persons to the tune of 250,000 $. Till now the identity of the donors are not being disclosed in the organization’s official website. Here is an excerpt of the interview given by Arvind Kejriwal to THE HINDU on the donations received from outsiders. Arvind Kejriwal himself does not follow transparency in his own organization. But he is advocating transparency to the government?

THE HINDU: “Another of your NGOs, Kabir, received grants from the Ford Foundation (FF). According to the FF, Kabir received $172,000 in 2005 and $197,000 in 2008. The FF also sanctioned an “in-principle” grant of $200,000 for 2011, which you have not accepted so far. Why does Kabir not mention the FF and these specific details on its website?

Arvind Kejriwal: We did not give the specific details because we also got some other NRI contributions and these were clubbed together. I will make sure that the website gives the break-up.”

3. Kiran bedi: Abusive use of power is also a corrupt practice. So kiran bedi itself guilty of this corrupt practice. She has been projected as a straight forward IPS officer but her official work record speaks the other way! She has derailed from her duties several times. She has used her power to secure her daughter’s admission at Delhi’s Lady Hardinge College for an MBBS course through the Mizoram quota. I request the readers to read the following links to know more about it.

The True Face Of Kiran Bedi by Subir Ghosh

It’s very clear that the main leaders of the campaign itself corrupt and we are following the wrong person/ group of people and portraying them as crusaders of corruption. So it’s high time that we all must think about their true intentions and the supporting force behind the Anna teams’s protests. Maoists are seen as a terrorist outfit because they don’t believe in the Indian state and they seek to over throw the Indian state by armed struggle. Same is the case in the Anna team and its supporters –They don’t believe in the constitution of India. They seek to control the entire government under a dictatorship kind of bill. So in a way Anna team should also be seen considered as a dangerous outfit. Many of the supporting organization of the Anna team are right wing saffron terrorist’s organization like RSS, VHP and many anti reservation outfits like youth for equality team. Thus one can easily conclude that these short minded persons don’t recognize the “right to equality” clause mentioned in the constitution of India.

Will Jan lokpal bill eradicate corruption?

The answer is NO! because one must keep in mind that there are numerous laws are in place to tackle the corruption practice in India. But the fact is these laws are not being properly implemented and executed by the law enforcing agencies. If we can find a proper way and will to implement this already existing law we can eradicate corruption at the grass root levels. But as far as the big scams involving the corporate companies the government must come with a new law such as “if a company is found to involve in corrupt practices it should be nationalized or banned from any other future business, hefty fine should be imposed on them or one must make it as a non-bailable offence”. The entire lokpal bill is critical in giving punishment to the bribe accepting politicians and government servants but it does not have a mention on the extent of punishment that would be given to bribe giving capitalists and industrialists. A person who induces another to indulge in wrong doings deserves better punishment than the other. Lokpal bill deserves to be in trash it deserves nothing more than that! There are numerous articles written about the flaws in the lokpal bill some are given in the references section do please read it and spread awareness about it.

The root cause of corruption can be understood clearly when we look in to the liberalization policies that are implemented in India after the 1990`s. The primary reason said for its implementation is that it would reduce corruption in India. At that time it was widely believed that the biggest corruption takes place at the government run institutions, hence the role of private institutions is seen as an alternative to combat corruption. But after the liberalization policies were implemented the corruptions and scams grow even bigger. The amount of money associated with each scams accounted for more than thousand crores or lakhs of crores. Although before liberalization India saw some big corruptions, the scams in that period was very few and the money involved in it was very meager when compared to the present cases.

A few notable Scams before liberalization:

Jeep Scandal of 1948-Rs 80 lakh.

Bofors in 1985-86-Rs 64 crore.

Liberal Benefits?
The opening up of the economy post-’91 boosted scam monies into the stratosphere

Total scam money (approx) in Rs crore since 1992:
73000000000000

1992
Harshad Mehta securities scam Rs 5,000 cr
1994
Sugar import scam Rs 650 cr
1995
Preferential allotment scam Rs 5,000 cr
Yugoslav Dinar scam Rs 400 cr
Meghalaya Forest scam Rs 300 cr
1996:
Fertiliser import scam Rs 1,300 cr
Urea scam Rs 133 cr
Bihar fodder scam Rs 950 cr
1997
Sukh Ram telecom scam Rs 1,500 cr
SNC Lavalin power project scam Rs 374 cr
Bihar land scandal Rs 400 cr
C.R. Bhansali stock scam Rs 1,200 cr
1998
Teak plantation swindle Rs 8,000 cr
2001
UTI scam Rs 4,800 cr
Dinesh Dalmia stock scam Rs 595 cr
Ketan Parekh securities scam Rs 1,250 cr
2002
Sanjay Agarwal Home Trade scam Rs 600 cr
2003
Telgi stamp paper scam Rs 172 cr
2005
IPO-Demat scam Rs 146 cr
Bihar flood relief scam Rs 17 cr
Scorpene submarine scam Rs 18,978 cr
2006
Punjab's City Centre project scam Rs 1,500 cr,
Taj Corridor scam Rs 175 cr
2008
Pune billionaire Hassan Ali Khan tax default Rs 50,000 cr
The Satyam scam Rs 10,000 cr
Army ration pilferage scam Rs 5,000 cr
State Bank of Saurashtra scam Rs 95 cr
Illegal monies in Swiss banks, as estimated in 2008 Rs 71,00,000 cr
2009:
The Jharkhand medical equipment scam Rs 130 cr
Rice export scam Rs 2,500 cr
Orissa mine scam Rs 7,000 cr
Madhu Koda mining scam Rs 4,000 cr

Source: http://www.outlookindia.com/article.aspx?262842

It must be noted that the above stats does not include the 2G, CWG scam, the KG basin scam and the illegal mining scam etc. If we add up the scam money involved in these scams the total scam money would grow up even bigger. Thus from the above facts we can clearly say that the root cause of the corruption lies in the liberalization policies carried out by the Government of India. The root cause of corruption is privatization policy! A classic example is the health sector. In India hospital business is seen as a great oppurtunity to earn huge amount of profits. In the name of improving the quality of health sector the GOI opened up the health sectors to the private players. But instead of improving the quality of health sector it has driven millions of poor Indian people to debt by indiscriminate collection of fees. The main slogan of private ownership is to “earn profit-no matter how they come by”. So in such a scenario no private involvement is required in key sectors such as agriculture, education, food distribution (PDS), transport, health and other social sectors. Without eliminating corporates from these key sectors we cannot eradicate corruption no matter how many laws/bills are tabled.

With most of the politicians is either coming from a business family or a corporate sponsored person, it’s up to the voters of India to prevent them from winning the elections. Without preventing the corporate-politician nexus it’s difficult to achieve a corruption free society. The Lokpal bill does not highlight the key issue of corruption involving big MNC`s, corporate sectors etc. and it remain silent on corporate scams. Even some of the English media like Times now, CNN-IBN and NDTV 24x7 that supports this Anna Team campaign is also facing serious allegations in various issues such as paid news and Redia tape case etc. When more than 50,000 trible people protested against the wrongful acquisition of their home land for a foreign company POSCO at Orissa, no one from the Anna team or the media highlighted it (this protest also happened at the same time of Anna’s so called protest!). Also till now the villagers of kudumkulam of Tamilnadu are staging a marathon protest against the building up of nuclear power plant but no one highlighted this issue. So, it’s not wise on our part to support the Anna team blindly because their true motives are even more dangerous than the corruption issue. By the time I finish writing this article a new illegal mining scam at Goa to the tune of Rs.4000 cr is being reported!!!! The so called corruption crusader ANNA HAZARE again started to give ultimatum to the union government of India to pass the lokpal bill!

Arundhati Roy on Anna Hazare's campaign:

part one:

part two:

An NGO's view on ANNA HAZARE:

Further reading:

1. I'd rather not be Anna- Arundhati Roy

2. The True Face of Kiran Bedi by Subir Ghosh

3. Liberal benefits The opening up of the economy post-’91

4. The Making of Anna Hazare

5. Many Avatars of Indian Corruption

6. Lokpal bill of the Anna Team

7. Why I cannot support the Jan Lokpal - a detailed analysis

IMPORTANT NOTE:

Why I cannot support the Jan Lokpal - a detailed analysis

noreply@blogger.com (Admin) — Fri, 07 Oct 2011 21:53:00 +0000

I am pleased to post an opinion article on Lokpal bill by Mr. Sandeep Dongre, 2001 batch alumni of IIM Bangalore.

I wanted to deal with this issue in two parts:

A) The means adopted by Anna Hazare and team to drive their point of view

B) The Actual merit of “Jan Lokpal Bill”- its ability in itself to effectively deal with corruption

A) The means adopted by Anna Hazare and team to drive their point of view:

Law making is the primary function of any legislature. With the formation of the Republic of India on 26 January 1950, things changed profoundly. All Indians have a say in how laws are made and how they are implemented. We can amend or repeal laws that we do not like. There is, of course, a method to do this, which must be followed. These are the constitutional methods that Dr. Ambedkar referred to in his ‘Grammar of Anarchy’ speech.

When constitutional methods are available, there is no case for non-constitutional methods like Satyagraha, hunger strikes or the more extreme ‘Fast unto death’. No matter how good the intention is, Fasts unto the death ultimately undermines the due process. Anna Hazare is a genuine person but he should not adopt undemocratic means to drive home his point. Emotional Blackmail has no place in a parliamentary form of democracy. If two really genuine persons go on fasts until death for two opposing reasons, how are we ever going to resolve? A good example of this came to light when both the two opposing factions of the ‘Separate Telangana State Movement went on fast unto death and as is evident, the whole process came to a standstill.

India has experienced a very effective form of parliamentary democracy and it is best left to it to resolve complex matters like this. Though a very scary picture is getting portrayed, very few will disagree that India is well on its path to the top and a true parliamentary democracy has ensured it smoothly. One cannot invite the death of democracy by allowing such protests.

I will devote next few paragraphs in understanding Anna and his ‘My Way or the Highway’ style of working.

Ralegaon Siddhi has prospered under the leadership of Anna Hazare and it really looks green and fresh in an otherwise dry area. Everybody is aware of the immense hard work put in by Anna and his team and the results are there for everyone to see. Noted Journalist Mukul Sharma who has studied Anna's village community in Ralegaon Siddhi since 1919 says that Anna is a strong follower of a belief system where the people following him consider it their natural duty to obey, and the exercising person thinks it a natural right to rule. No matter what the issue, there is an absolute recognition of authority.

Let me clearly state that the END is absolutely not in question, the MEANS are. Though the intentions might not be doubted, but Anna has been exercising a set of self-made rules which everyone in the village has compulsorily followed. These rules are far removed from what a true democracy means.

a) Getting things done by way of severe punishment is the accepted way in the village to achieve the set goals. So it was decided that anybody who consumes alcohol has to be physically punished. There are instances of drunken people tied to pole outside village’s temple and beaten. Even the villagers now agree that anybody found drunken should be brought in the centre of the village and beaten. A group of 25 youth in the village has been formed who are authorized to give punishment to drunkards (could you strike the resemblance to Jan Lokpal??). They have been dutifully tying drunkards to the pole and beating overnight.

b) Several instances of using force in implementing Family planning measures.

c) Anna’s authority even peeps into making rules for ‘Eating habits’ and trust this is a severe breach of people’s freedom. We can respect people who actively propagate ‘Vegetarianism’ but definitely not by force. There are hardly any people eating non-vegetarian food in the village. Dalits in his village were categorically told that main reason other people stay away from them is because their living is dirty, thinking is dirty and even food habits are dirty. By continuously putting pressure, the Dalits were forcefully turned into vegetarians

d) Anna strongly criticizes electoral and party politics- no wonder that there have been no elections of gram panchayat in the village since the last 24 years. Even for National/State level elections, posters and pamphlets are not allowed in the village

e) Entertainment in the form of film songs or cinema is a strict NO in the village. However, religious films like Sant Tukaram, Sant Gyaneshwar can be played. Even during marriages, only religious songs are allowed. Last year, A villager

Installed a dish antenna at his home and he was severely criticized by Anna himself.

Kailash Pote, a landless Chamar, gives a different meaning to village, family and Hindu religion. “We do not call Ralegan Siddhi a village. We call it a family in which Annajee is the headman and we are the people who provide service to the family. Here Hindus mean Marathas only. We Chamars and Mahars are never called Hindus. How can we claim that everybody is equal here?”

The above explain the use of extreme means by Anna to get things done which he believes is Right.

Lastly, As BG Varghese rightly points out, Due process can be trying at times; but banishing it for quick-fix populist methods is dangerous and could lead to anarchy and counter-violence. It is legitimate to criticize venal politicians but unfair to denigrate all politicians. Without politicians there can be no politics or political process, only dictatorship. We need to secure political and electoral reforms and reform of the police and criminal justice systems to put in place an interlocking mechanism that ensures purity in public life. There is much work to be done and hopefully the government has seen the writing on the wall.

B) The merit of ‘Jan Lokpal Bill’ - its actual ability to effectively deal with corruption:

Mr. Pratap Bhanu says, The Lokpal Bill does not tackle any of the root causes of corruption. The bill amounts to an unparalleled concentration of power in one institution that will literally be able to summon any institution and command any kind of police, judicial and investigative power. In other words, in a situation where the problem is power, we create an entity that has even more power. It has even appointed officials instead of elected ones

There are many loopholes in the Bill which I have discussed below:

a) The three Pillars of Indian Democracy - namely the Legislature, Executive and Judiciary - keep checks and balances on the other, and so they must remain separate, because that’s the only way to ensure that there is no abuse of power. The Jan Lokpal intends to disturb this fine balance by virtually creating a fourth pillar. It intends to create an Executive outside the constitutional framework, answerable to nobody. Chances of such an organization getting corrupted by the sheer lust for power are much greater than the Executive functioning within a constitutional framework, where checks and balances ensure accountability

b) The appointment of the Lokpal will be done by a – Bharat Ratna awardees, Nobel prize winners of Indian origin, Magsaysay award winners, Senior Judges of Supreme and High Courts, the Chairperson of the National Human Rights Commission, the Comptroller and Auditor General of India, the Chief Election Commissioner, and members of the outgoing Lokpal board and the Chairpersons of both houses of Parliament. Only one person, the chairperson of the Lok Sabha, is a democratically elected person. The idea of a Jan Lokpal is modeled on an Ombudsman but there is no example where a country decided that Nobel Prize winners and those awarded with state conferred honors can be given the task of selecting those entrusted with the power to punish people

c) The autonomy and independence of the Judiciary is protected under the Constitution, which allows a member of the higher Judiciary to be removed only through the cumbersome impeachment process. The intent was to ensure that justice is administered without fear or favor. The Jan Lokpal proposal of putting higher judiciary under Lokpal is absurd. The consequences are even worse, when you consider that under it the Jan Lokpal Bill will have independent investigating and prosecuting agencies. Will any judge ever dare differ with the views of a prosecutor of the Jan Lokpal since he might face prosecution himself if his orders are misunderstood? Is it logical that Investigation and Prosecution be done by the same agency?

d) Since this country understands the language of cricket well, just try to imagine Indian captain Dhoni on field. During the course of play, several critical decisions need to be taken and it should be best left to the captain on the field to do that. If we start with the premise that Dhoni is likely to falter and should be under strict scrutiny for each and every decision he takes on field, it will be completely impossible for him to take out-of-box decisions. Most of the audience might not agree with his decision to let the last over of the match bowled by a new bowler but we cannot raise a suspicion every time he does so. If we don’t want the whole functioning of the government come to standstill on petty issues, the Prime Minister may be best kept out of Jan Lokpal.

e) We have to understand, there are enough strong laws available in this country to address literally every issue under the Sun. Implementation of a new bill will require a strong will and huge additional resources and that is where the whole problem lies. Consumer courts were created to give speedy justice but today a large number of cases are pending before it just because of lack of resources. The law was always there to arrest the likes of Mr. Kalmadi or Mr. Raja but it could happen only when it was backed by a strong will to do it. State Lokayukta is there in India in as many as 18 states today but only a Santosh Hegde could make a difference in Karnataka. There are strong laws against illegal construction, land grabbing and even mining, the need of the hour is to implement it and not spend time into making additional laws.

f) The resource crunch will destabilize the Jan Lokpal. If both the Central govt. and State govt. employees are to be brought under its scanner, the number of people it will have to cover will be around 10-12million. Obviously, huge machinery will be needed to deal with this. Also, the same system of corrupted civil servants, politicians, anti-corruption agencies, judges, media, civil society groups and ordinary citizens will work under the Lokpal to deal with corruption and just because they will work for Lokpal, will they become incorruptible? Won’t it mean adding another bunch of bribes to the long list of existing ones?

g) There is NO right to appeal- The right to at least one appeal against an order, which affects someone adversely, is inherent in the Constitution. There is no specific clause regarding appeals in the Jan Lok Pal Bill, and that is unconstitutional, to say the least

Noted political analyst Pratap Bhanu Mehta has nicely summed up the addition of Jan Lokpal as one more law. He says, “To many of us, this proposal seems like the way we approached educational reform: if BA is not good quality, introduce MA; since MA does not work, have MPhil; since we can’t trust our PhDs, have a further NET exam, endlessly deferring to new institutions at the top of the food chain without attending to basics..”

I sincerely feel that Jan Lokpal is a Medicine which has severe side-effects. While there are many ways which can help us effectively fight corruption arising out of political nexus, there is only one way to fight social corruption:

The RTI legislation can be the most effective tool in eradicating corruption. The many government decisions taken on critical issues have to be brought under public scrutiny and it is how the government can be made accountable for its decisions. Another effective way of dealing with corruption arising out of political nexus is with the help of electoral reforms like proportional representation, state funding of elections which will lead to uniform spending of candidates and most importantly the right to recall of elected representatives.

Corruption in day to day life is more of a social issue. It is a value system where when I benefit its desirable, when I am the victim, it’s not. Only a true introspection can get us to its roots. It has to be tackled from inside and only then a Lokpal can be effective.

IMPORTANT NOTE:

India third 'snoopiest' country: Google Transparency Report. The GOI have requested Google to censor the internet contents/opinions of many users who speak against the Indian government. Even dictatorship countries haven't placed such a number of censor requests to the Google. So it’s clear that the government of India is keeping an eye on its internet users and with the help of Google, GOI have acquired the privacy details of the internet users to intimidate them. The important fact is that the Indian government seeks censorship to political views, hate speech, Government Criticism etc. It is clear we the Indians don’t have freedom of speech when it comes to criticizing government in key issues.

DISCLOSURE:

Hence I hereby declare that the above article is the personal opinion of the author and it is not being copied from any other Internet/anti-India websites.

In support of Samacheer Kalvi

noreply@blogger.com (Admin) — Fri, 05 Aug 2011 13:18:00 +0000

I am posting this article in support of Samacheer Kalvi. On seeing some of the capitalist run news paper I am of the opinion that most of them are completely against the implementation of “Samacheer Klavi”. Most of the news paper opinion looks like as if it was written by the PRO of all private schools association of Tamilnadu and their views are in support of the private schools. In my view the syllabus of the private schools are not superior to the government schools. The reason behind the success of the private school is that they have better infrastructure facilities when compared to that of the government schools. Private schools produce students with high marks by simply giving them tests and coaching classes. For eg: private schools teach (in the name of quality education) syllabuses that are meant for higher classes (say for 8^th standard) to (6^th class students) smaller classes and burden the children. This is done because private schools see education as a lucrative business opportunity. Most of the private schools don’t even have qualified teachers. When a common platform such as samacheer kalvi is implemented the private schools cannot run matriculation schools under the guise of giving quality education and thereby they may not earn profits. A good government should provide its children equal platform to perform. In India only the rich is blessed with quality education. Whereas majority of the poor children are made to sit under the tree as their class room. That's why the admission of Erode collector's daughter in a local government school is published as big news. This vast divide cannot be cleared on a single day but a scheme like samacheer kalvi at least provide some sorts of equal platform for the students from both private and government schools.

The so called expert committee formed by the State government is an eye wash because some of the expert committee members are indeed not subject/educational experts but they are owners of private schools. A clear case of conflict of interest. How can one accept the report of this one sided expert committee. We all must remember great scientists namely Dr.A.P.J.Abdul kalam, Dr.Mayilsamy Annadurai and Dr.Sivadhanu pillai had their school education at Government schools only. How can one term the government syllabus as low quality when it produces such great scientists to the nation? The thing is not with the quality of syllabus its all about good educational environment, infrastructure, and quality teachers. Parents also should come out of the myth that only private schools are superior to the government schools. Thus in my opinion the government’s priority in education should be to nationalize the educational system and it should completely abolish the private run educational institutions

IMPORTANT NOTE:

India third 'snoopiest' country: Google Transparency Report.The GOI have requested Google to censor the internet contents/opinions of many users who speak against the Indian government. Even dictatorship countries haven't placed such a number of censor requests to the Google. So its clear that the government of India is keeping an eye on its internet users and with the help of Google, GOI have acquired the internet users privacy details to intimidate them. The important fact is that the Indian government seek censorship to political views,hate speech,Government Criticism etc.It is clear that We the Indians don’t have freedom of speech here in India when it comes to government criticism in key issues.

DISCLOSURE:

Hence I hereby declare that the above article is My personal opinion and it is not being copied from any other Internet/anti-India websites.

Biography of Karl Marx-The father of communism

noreply@blogger.com (Admin) — Fri, 15 Jul 2011 18:38:00 +0000

DOWNLOAD LINK :

KARL MARX BIOGRAPHY

War crimes of Srilankan army against Tamil people and Indian media's support to the Srilankan Government

noreply@blogger.com (Admin) — Thu, 14 Jul 2011 16:19:00 +0000

Main stream media and news print agencies such as THE HINDU, INDIAN EXPRESS, NDTV and DINAMALAR etc are still lending a helping hand to the Lankan government by publishing articles in support of the Lankan government. The main stream media is one sided and is continually keeping the people of Tamilnadu and India in dark by hiding the war crimes of the Lankan army against the innocent Tamil people in refugee camps. Although fault lie on both the Lankan and LTTE sides, lakhs of innocent Tamil people were made to pay a big price for this bloody war. Even during the war or be it now the main stream media systematically black out the Human rights violations news that is still prevalent in IDP (internally displaced people (Tamil)) camps run under the Lankan army. According to the Human rights watch more than 1 Lakh 20 thousand Tamil people were brutally killed by the Lankan army with the support of India (primarily) and China. One need not be a Tamil to condemn this war crime but all real Human beings irrespective of the religion, geographical location would/should condemn this war crime.

I am writing this because I got shocked and emotionally moved after seeing the Channel 4 documentary film, “Srilankan killing fields” that was telecasted last week in Headlines Today news channel. I feel ashamed to say we live in a civilized society/world.

In this post I would like to share my mail sent to THE HINDU and Col.Hari, Chief of the Intelligence unit of the Indian peace keeping force (IPKF) in response to his article "The moment of truth for the LTTE". At that time the civil war between the Srilankan government and the LTTE was fought fiercely. Also during that period the main stream media in India are busy in hiding the true facts of the bloody war. They did not point out the human rights violation of the Lankan army instead they published what the Lankan government has told them.

Flag this message

reg:The article in The Hindu

Saturday, 7 February, 2009 1:22 AM

From:

"selva sharma"

View contact details

To:

colhari@yahoo.com

Respected sir,

I read your article "The moment of truth for the LTTE" in Hindu news paper dated feb 5,2009.I accept your views regarding LTTE's systematic elimination of Tamil leaders to an extent. But apart from that your article is completely baseless and one sided.LTTE alone cannot be blamed for the civil war, indeed the majority sinhalas and the political parties representing the sinhalas only paved the way for the formation of an extremist LTTE organization. Tamils in ceylon first fought for their rights peacefully. But the sinhala political parties used the ethnic tension to their advantage for political gains and power. Right from the independence srilnakan government are one sided and sponsored many riots against Tamils in Srilanka. You haven't mention these facts in any part of your article!
Some Government sponsored violence in Srilanka:
*Gal oya riots 1956
*1958 riots
*1977 riots
*Jaffna library burning 1981
*Black july 1983.

The war in lanka will definitely end within few weeks from now, LTTE will be defeated. But the question is will the Tamils in Srilanka be granted equal rights? I am sure that the Srilankan government do nothing for the empowerment of Tamils. This fact is evident by seeing the killing of innocent Tamils even in so called safe zones by the Srilankan army. History shows that Srilankan government is always against ethnic Tamils.

"However,The LTTE started dissipating its goodwill in India when it colluded with its "sworn sinhala enemy" R.Premadasa to get the Indian forces off its back and send them out of Srilanka...."

The above said lines in the article are true to some extent. But one also needs to concede the grave human rights violation committed by the IPKF in Srilanka. Valvettiturai massacre, Jaffna teaching hospital massacre are some examples. But sir as an head of intelligence of IPKF you should have conceded your failure in Jaffna football ground massacre of our fellow countrymen.

Also one logical question arises sir, What is the need for the Indian government to supply weapons to this Sinhala government which is virtually against India in all aspects right from the India-China war, India-Pakistan wars. Also even our enemy Pakistan never shoots at the Indian fishermen, if they accidentally cross the fishing border. But the so called close ally of India, Srilanka has so far killed more than 600 Tamil fishermen. What does the Indian navy and government did to save my State's fishermen. Had the Pakistan has done this kind of act i am sure our country would have fought a war with Pakistan. No writer in this print media raised this kind of questions till now.

Regards,

A.Selvasharma,

M.Sc.Chemisrty,

Department of Chemistry,

Bharathiar university

Tamilnadu.

The reply to the above mail from Col.Hari was mere “Thanks for your feedbacks”. I sent a modified mail to THE HINDU too but it never got published.

I am sharing this mail and views because many innocent Children, Women and Men are brutally killed everyday all around the world in the name of war against terrorism. Its high time we all must and should join hands in condemning violence or army action against innocent people wheather it happens in our country or in Palestine, Sudan Afghanistan, Srilanka or Pakistan. I also request you to dedicate some time for the social issues and spread awareness among many educated (there are many educated illiterates in India!) and uneducated persons. Changes don't happen in a day. But if we don't start today, change may never happen. After all Revolutions don’t happen within a day…….!

IMPORTANT NOTE:

India third 'snoopiest' country: Google Transparency Report.The GOI have requested Google to censor the internet contents/opinions of many users who speak against the Indian government. Even dictatorship countries haven't placed such a number of censor requests to the Google. So its clear that the government of India is keeping an eye on its internet users and with the help of Google, GOI have accquired the internet users privacy details to intimidate them. The important fact is that the Indian government seek censorship to political views,hate speech,Government Criticism etc.It is clear that We don’t have freedom of speech here in India when it comes to government criticism in key issues.

DISCLOSURE:

Hence I hereby declare that the above article is My personal opinion and it is not being copied from any other Internet/anti-India websites.

Land mark verdict by the Supreme court of India on Salwa Judum

noreply@blogger.com (Admin) — Thu, 14 Jul 2011 15:41:00 +0000

In a landmark verdict the supreme court of India have ordered the Chattisgarh government and Union government to end salwa judum.

What is/Who are SALWA JUDUM,SPO,KOYA COMMONDOS?

SALWA JUDUM,SPO (special police officers),KOYA COMMONDOS is an armed group formed by the pro capitalistic Indian/state government comprising of young, barely literate and poorly trained innocent tribals to fight the Maoists/Naxalites in six northern states of India.

Why Human rights activists and people are against SALWA JUDUM,SPO,KOYA COMMONDOS?

SPO's were given power to execute innocent people without any law.This has resulted in several Human rights violation in tribal region.The sufferings of the innocent Tribal people due to the lawless violence of state supported SPO's is higher when compared to that of the Maoists.

Why the Government itself employing the innocent tribal youths against the Moists instead of the police and army?

Its very simple the Government does not have the will power to sacrifice its own police in combating the Maoists. Instead they are using innocent tribal youths as "cannon fodder" for the state.

Also the government does this type of strategy to evacuate the tribal people from the mineral rich forest areas so that it can be handedover to big corporate houses such as TATA,Reliance,Vedanta,Mittal steels,POSCO. (Remember the theme of hollywood movie,AVATAR).Thus in the name of curbing Maoists violence, the Indian government is supporting the big corporates. .

What the Supreme Court said in its judgment?

The supreme court of India in its judgment statement state that, "Laws cannot remain silent when the canons roar"

The court also made the link between the state's illegal counter-insurgency strategy (Salwa judam) and the wider "Neoliberal' approach being followed by the government at the central and state levels.” The Salwa judum is the illegimate product of a system that sees nothing wrong in giving tax breaks to the rich and guns to the poor to fight each other"

IMPORTANT NOTE:

India third 'snoopiest' country: Google Transparency Report.The GOI have requested Google to censor the internet contents/opinions of many users who speak against the Indian government. Even dictatorship countries haven't placed such a number of censor requests to the Google. So its clear that the government of India is keeping an eye on its internet users and with the help of Google, GOI have accquired the internet users privacy details to intimidate them. The important fact is that the Indian government seek censorship to political views,hate speech,Government Criticism etc.It is clear that We the Indians don’t have freedom of speech here in India when it comes to government criticism in key issues.

DISCLOSURE:

Hence I hereby declare that the above article is My personal opinion and it is not being copied from any other Internet/anti-India websites. The excerpts of the Supreme Court Judgments are taken from The HINDU news paper.

On Suicides of Dalit Students in India's Premier Educational Institutions

noreply@blogger.com (Admin) — Mon, 20 Jun 2011 13:50:00 +0000

I am writing this post in response to alarming raise in suicides of many dalit students studying in various premier institutes in India. Dalit students are also fellow human being so what is the need for discriminating them! Dalit students are subjected to discrimination in various forms at many educational institutions.

Many students and teachers stamp Dalit students as reserved or quota student. Quota is not an offer or an election time freebies given to dalits it is given to them in response to the century old slave like treatment meted out to them by the upper castes of India. Dalits got this reservation rights by several protests and fight.

The only way to bring social upliftment of dalits is to give them access to jobs and education hence the reservation policy has come. India alone is not the first country to offer reservation to the oppressed, countries like USA (red Indians, African black), Australia (Aborigines) offer reservation to the oppressed community. If a student get seat by money we don’t dare to discriminate him/her but the students coming through reservation alone is discriminated by upper caste students and teachers.

So friends, I request you to lend your support to the dalit students facing discrimination at your educational institution or work place.

Also I appeal to all the dalit students not to take the extreme step of suicide. If you come across any discrimination from the student or faculty side face them boldly you have nothing to lose.....!

Link:

http://www.countercurrents.org/insight300411.htm

IMPORTANT NOTE:

India third 'snoopiest' country: Google Transparency Report.The GOI have requested Google to censor the internet contents/opinions of many users who speak against the Indian government. Even dictatorship countries haven't placed such a number of censor requests to the Google. So its clear that the government of India is keeping an eye on its internet users and with the help of Google, GOI have accquired the internet users privacy details to intimidate them. The important fact is that the Indian government seek censorship to political views,hate speech,Government Criticism etc.It is clear that We don’t have freedom of speech here in India when it comes to government criticism in key issues.

DISCLOSURE:

Hence I hereby declare that the above article is My personal opinion and it is not being copied from any other Internet/anti-India websites.

Whose steel? Who’s stealing?

noreply@blogger.com (Admin) — Fri, 04 Feb 2011 16:11:00 +0000

The Rs. 52,000 crore POSCO project has the figures to dazzle, but who’s going to profit from it? TUSHA MITTAL finds it is not going to be Odisha’s villagers

Crossroads Displaced people await their fate at the POSCO transit camp

PHOTOS : VIJAY PANDEY

IN A season of scams, this is another. But the story of India’s largest foreign direct investment (FDI) is a scam of an entirely different scale; it cannot be measured only in currency. This scam is in the spin that makes private profit look like development; that makes FDI look like the only measure of a healthy economy, and gives global markets precedence over the domestic. This is the story of why the world’s third largest steel producer — Pohang Steel Corporation (POSCO) — really wants to invest in India. Of how this Rs. 52,000 crore project — India’s six largest steel plants combined — got clearance despite internal objections at every stage. Of how data has been concocted, facts misrepresented, vital information withheld, official minutes manipulated, site inspections conducted from a helicopter so India can have its largest FDI. Environmentalists believe Brazil and China have rejected POSCO’s proposal. Yet India has welcomed it with open arms.

The POSCO story is now at its most critical stage. How long POSCO’s welcome will last depends on crucial choices, on the politics of environment, development and diplomacy, on what India chooses to define as its priorities. It depends on psychology — the notion of power that comes from global linkages; of investment and development as holy cows, of any regulation as a leap backward, the myth that the magic letters — FDI — are the harbinger of prosperity.

There is no estimate of what India has to gain. The only cost-benefit analysis has been funded by the steel firm

TEHELKA has learnt that when the MoU was signed, the Odisha government thought it was trading revenue land. It was when Agriculture Minister Damodar Raut raised a question in the Assembly about the exact classification of it that Revenue Minister Manmohan Shyamal went back to the records. It was only then that they realised that 3,000 acres of the land promised to POSCO was forest land inhabited by 4,000 families.

In the past five years, the project has faced stiff opposition: large-scale protests, police firing, hundreds of injuries, a sarpanch with 42 cases against him, a farmer who cultivates with three bullets lodged in his body. In the past five years, it has become symptomatic of all the major faultlines of an investment-hungry India: a flawed mining policy, land acquisition woes, the question of ownership of natural resources, of public versus private, of fundamental rights and fair compensation, and of growth.

Good harvest Farmer Nakul Bera wants to keep cultivating betel leaves

The turning point in the POSCO story is the report of a committee constituted by the Ministry of Environment and Forests (MoEF) to evaluate the project. The Meena Gupta Committee report, tabled in October, uncorked the lid off the problems spawned by the project. In a vindication of concerns raised by local residents, three members of the committee detailed gross violations of the Environment Protection Act, the Forest Rights Act and the Coastal Regulatory Zone (CRZ) notification. They recommended that all clearances be revoked.

Based on this report, the MoEF’s Forest Advisory Committee (FAC) has now recommended temporary withdrawal of POSCO’s forest clearance. Both the Environment Appraisal and the CRZ committees have asked POSCO for more data. Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh is expected to take a final decision after the sub-committees submit their reports.

There are various stakeholders in his final decision: the PMO, the steel ministry, the MEA, the Congress, the Odisha government, the BJD, the CPI, forest officers, environmentalists, 52 families driven out of their villages after a deft divide-and-rule strategy and labelled as “pro-POSCO” even though they don’t all endorse the project, thousands of farmers and fishermen who stand to lose their lands and livelihoods.

If you followed the backroom machinations of how official committees have had to dillydally on their recommendations because of pressure from the PMO, of how the FAC had to meet three times to discuss the project — something it has never done for any other project — you know this will not be an easy move for Ramesh. In that sense, POSCO is symptomatic of a new India where it is becoming increasingly impossible to do not only the right thing, but also the legal thing about the environment.

IN GOBINDPUR village, Nakula Behra, 80, is rather confused. He has never thought of himself as poor. His eyes are wide with horror at the mention of poverty, at the thought of a multi-billion dollar Korean company needing to give him employment and save him from a cursed rural life. He is self-employed in what he considers a profitable business — betel and cashew cultivation. He is so successful that he employs 10 others. He sells fish, betel leaves, drumsticks and cashew. One betel leaf sells for 60 paisa, one drumstick for Re. 1. He has an LIC policy and makes a profit of Rs. 5,000 per month. The betel vine has given him enough to marry off three daughters.

“How can you call me poor?” he asks. “Until we have the betel vine, we are selfsufficient. We earn as much as a government servant would. How are we poor? We are living with dignity.” Electricity would be nice, he says, but the only power POSCO will produce will be for itself, to run its integrated steel plant.

Reluctant Noboni and Keluri fear that POSCO will kill their livelihood

Research by a group of US-based professors and engineers has estimated that the average farmer in the project-affected area earns Rs. 40,000 per decimal of land per year. POSCO is offering the displaced a one-time cash compensation of Rs. 11,500 per decimal. They estimate the total loss by a betel vine farmer per decimal over a 30-year period would be around Rs. 12 lakh, making the current compensation package on offer less than 1 percent of their cumulative earning potential.

Meanwhile, it is estimated the extraction of iron ore alone allows POSCO Rs. 6,500 crore per year for the next 30 years. This means POSCO will recover its initial investment of Rs. 52,000 crore after eight years. From then on, it is pure profit.

While the current land demarcated for POSCO has a thriving agrarian economy sustaining 22,000 people, there is alternative barren land available 5-7 km from the current site. POSCO has refused to consider it. Sources say it is because POSCO’s costs would go up by about Rs. 4,000 crore. The former site is abundant in natural sand — the essential raw material for construction. In the latter site, POSCO would have to bear additional costs for construction and transporting sand. The spin says otherwise but this is maybe India’s deadliest scam — unbridled private profit in the name of development.

That is why reading the Meena Gupta Committee report is like holding a mirror to a cracked face and asking uncomfortable questions. There are ideological and economic questions: How do we want to use our scare resources? How do we define ‘optimal’ allocation of resources? India is already among the top 10 countries in the world with highest foreign reserves. Is there any analysis of what net impact this FDI will have? Is it worth it? What if the environmental and social costs of the project outweigh the benefit?

POSCO will displace 22,000 people, fell 3 lakh trees, and could destroy the nesting grounds of the Olive Ridley turtles

Nearly 22,000 people displaced, another 20,000 fishermen with no access to the waters, nearly 3 lakh trees felled, waterfalls red with iron, entire fisheries disrupted, forests turned into concrete, coastlines eroded, vanishing beaches, elephants left with no migratory pattern, and the possibility of destroying the world’s largest nesting grounds for the endangered Olive Ridley turtles — how far are we willing to go? Who is bearing the costs and who is getting the benefits?

But the POSCO story is not only about the development verus environment debate. It is about something more rudimentary: about development versus law, about how many laws we are willing to subvert for the great Indian Dream.

To understand the horror, consider this: Since all clearances have been obtained piecemeal, that too for only the initial 4 million tonne (MT) plant, there has been no comprehensive appraisal of the combined environmental impact of the entire project. Though POSCO’s steel plant will have an integrated township, a railway line and a 86 km pipeline — POSCO has applied for clearance for only the plant itself.

Three years after it got environmental clearance no one actually knows exactly what impact the project will have on the region — on the coastal ecology, on the water availability, on the possibility of a large-scale natural disaster.

AN INDEPENDENT review of the Environment Impact Assessment (EIA) made by an American green law alliance notes: “The EIA fails to asses the impacts of a worse-case spill and direct POSCO to use double-hulled tankers,” as is mandatory by international guidelines. India and South Korea are members of the International Maritime Organisation. Yet no one has made it mandatory for POSCO to follow the rules.

An MoEF committee has itself noted that ‘marine ecological status’ was not covered in the environment assessment. It concludes that the “the methodology used by the agency which prepared the EIA for POSCO is woefully deficient.” The port was given environment clearance based on a rapid assessment made during the monsoon months — something that the EIA notification forbids.

The Government of Odisha has agreed to build police stations for POSCO. It is a sign of that deeper malaise

In the five years since the project was proposed, the POSCO saga has become indicative of a much deeper malaise — that of the State giving up its responsibility as a regulator and acting as a private agent of corporate interests. In many ways, POSCO is symptomatic of the problems of India’s mining policy. The industry has seen unprecedented profits in recent years, with the price of iron ore going from Rs. 300 per tonne in 2002 to between Rs. 5,000-7,000 at present. The prices are expected to reach Rs. 10,000 next year.

World over, companies pay fair-market rates for the iron ore reserves they mine. India is one of the rare exceptions that has offered mining leases on a royalty basis. Until last year, it was 27 per tonne. This year, a revised policy has increased the royalty to 10 percent of the pre-shipping price. In June 2005, bypassing nearly 200 companies, including PSUs, who applied for access to the mines, the Odisha government signed an MoU with POSCO. India’s total iron ore reserves stand at 18 BT of which 4.5 BT are in Odisha. This is what the MoU allowed POSCO: 600 MT of the highest-grade iron ore available in India, an integrated 12 MT plant, a hydel plant, a railway line, a township, a pipeline that will supply water from Cuttack’s drinking water source, and most significantly, its own port — unprecedented in India so far.

THE MOU also allows access to another 400 MT of iron ore that POSCO can export for use in its South Korean plants. Of the 600 MT designated for the production of steel, the MoU allows POSCO to swap 30 percent of Odisha’s high-grade iron ore with a lower-grade quality from Brazil. posco says this will make better steel. However, research shows that the low phosphorous content in Odisha’s iron ore makes it far more profitable to sell.

The private port is of concern too. The Central government policy itself says that there can’t be two ports within 25 km. POSCO’s port is about 10 km from an existing major Paradip port. POSCO classifies it as a ‘minor’ port but the data shows its depth is actually greater than Paradip. The port is going to be constructed on sand dunes that had once protected surrounding villages from the super cyclone in 1991. Hundreds had died.

But POSCO says that Paradip port will not be able to bear the additional traffic. The acting chairman of Paradip Port has himself challenged this. Even Shipping Minister TR Baalu opposed the idea. When questioned, POSCO Senior General Manager Saroj Mahapatra said: “POSCO is known for operating port-based steel plants. It is our specialisation.”

“Before the MOU, I had raised several flags,” former Odisha minister Panchanan Kanungo told TEHELKA. He was the deputy when Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik held the finance portfolio. “I raised questions about why we need a new port, how we will supply adequate water for this when our own water resources are dwindling, and where are the mountains of ash going to be dumped since this is a fertile area. I did not get a reply to any of these queries.

“Earlier the swapping ratio was higher. About 40-60 percent was being contemplated. After objections, it was reduced to 30 percent. But nobody will be able to check how much of Odisha’s iron ore will be exported or swapped by posco,” he adds. This is because the MoU has allowed POSCO both a private port and SEZ status. The premises within an SEZ are “deemed foreign land”, allowing for a few token officials, but making it nearly impossible for the government to monitor on a daily basis. The SEZ also allows tax concessions and zero export duty. (This means POSCO can export much or all of the steel it will produce at cheaper rates.)

The MOU also allows POSCO to set up its plant in three phases, beginning with a 4 MT plant and expanding every three years. Everything POSCO has asked for — land, iron ore, water — is based on the projection of a 12 MT plant. But there is nothing that binds POSCO to it. In a shocking reply to a question in the Rajya Sabha, the Ministry of Steel admitted that it has “no guideline regarding implementation of large-scale steel projects”, and that the phase-wise expansion is decided “by the investors themselves based on commercial considerations”.

What this means is POSCO could continue mining the iron ore for a 12 MT plant without necessarily expanding to produce 12 MT of steel. It presents an uncomfortable question: What is POSCO’s objective? Is it Odisha’s development? Is it steel production? Or is it exporting iron ore at a time when prices are skyrocketing? All evidence points to the latter.

It is becoming increasingly evident that mining is not really directly proportional to the upliftment or development of a state. Government data shows the number of workers employed to produce 1 MT of iron ore dropped 32 percent from 2005 to 2009. Shockingly, even the official report on Regional Imbalances shows that Odisha’s top three mining areas have actually registered a ‘downward mobility’ in terms of development.

According to labour ministry data, jobs in the mining sector per 1 lakh of output fell from 0.03 percent in 2000 to 0.009 percent in 2006. In Keonjhar, one of the prime mining areas, labourers claim that life expectancy has declined by about 50 percent, many dying before the age of 40. The trend of increasing mechanisation in the mining sector suggests that employment generation is usually much lower than projected.

The irony of the POSCO story is that India may have little to gain from its largest FDI. That the only existing costbenefit analysis that measures what India has to gain has been funded by POSCO itself. That the project may have been justified not on solid empirical data but on the symbolism of a large FDI. Much of the Rs. 52,000 crore FDI will actually end up flowing out. POSCO’s biggest expenditure will be on machinery, which as Mahapatra admitted will be “globally sourced”.

The rationale for an FDI is usually access to better technology and global markets, explains Jayati Ghosh, leading economist and member of the National Knowledge Commission set up by the prime minister. “The reason you want an FDI is because you feel as an economy that you are getting something out of it,” she says. “It is not clear what we are getting out of this one. The argument that POSCO is bringing new technology is laughable. We don’t need it. One could purchase the technology separately. That is what POSCO itself did while growing into a steel giant. “I am not against industrialisation, but it makes more sense to process raw material here than export it. This is the first project where we have agreed to export raw iron ore because the South Koreans have insisted on it. I am against this kind of export. The POSCO project is an example of how we have completely lost imagination about the project of development,” she adds.

Still Odisha and POSCO have made tall promises: 8.7 lakh jobs, 11 percent addition to the state’s GDP, unemployment wiped out of Odisha, thousands of crores in tax revenue. Put the number through scrutiny and the horror, the malaise becomes evident. In 2005, the Odisha government said the revenue from POSCO would be Rs. 89,000 crore in taxes to the Centre and Rs.22,500 crore in revenue to the state government. But these figures include sales tax, excise tax, service tax and local tax, all of which SEZ developers are exempt from.

The government did not offer any revised calculations until the ncaer report of 2007. Quoting from the National Council of Applied Economic Research (NCAER) study — funded by POSCO — the government now claims it will get Rs. 17,4970 crore as tax revenue over 35 years, of which Odisha will get Rs. 77,870 crore. How the expected tax revenue jumped from Rs. 22,500 crore in 2005 to almost three times that amount in 2007, is a mystery.

“The government has offered misleading and false projections. The numbers seem to imply that the corporate tax that POSCO would owe the state would be higher if it has SEZ status, than if it doesn’t!” says a study by a group of US-based business professors and engineers.

The study also shows that POSCO’s employment claims are exaggerated. “A careful breakdown of the much-touted 8.7 lakh man years for 30 years shows only a 1.7 percent reduction in current unemployment levels,” the report says.

POSCO offered them a cheque. They accepted it. A few months without their land and they already want it back

Too late Tribals of Polang village regret giving up their land for POSCO

That such an MoU was signed in the first place, that the Odisha government has been bending over backwards to ensure it is implemented (appointing a nodal officer, agreeing to facilitate clearances, bear the cost of any litigation, and even build police stations for POSCO if necessary) is a troubling indicator of the Great Indian Dream.

With $2.7 billion already invested in brands such as Hyundai, Samsung and LG, South Korea is the seventh largest investor in India. South Korean President Lee Myung-bak was the Chief Guest at this year’s Republic Day celebrations. Lee had hoped his visit would coincide with the commencement of the POSCO project. When it became clear the he would not be able to visit the project site due to a ‘minor’ people’s agitation, Odisha CM Patnaik flew to New Delhi to provide the necessary assurances. The Ministry of External Affairs reaffirmed that the government was trying its best to “pave the way for the initiation of the project” and admitted that the project had not ‘evolved’ at the desired pace. “Both the Central and State governments are committed to the project. But we would like to move ahead mush faster,” said MEA Joint Secretary Gautam Bimbawale.

That both the PMO and the MEA have put their weight behind POSCO, that despite large-scale violations being reported, a proactive Environment Minister Ramesh has not yet been able to scrap the project is indicative of the murky politics of environment.

To understand the horror, follow the events that allowed POSCO to get forest clearance. It was given conditional forest clearance contingent on the Odisha government implementing the FRA — an Act that recognises that forest dwellers have a legitimate right to their land.

On 19 December 2009, Jagatsinghpur district collector NC Jena wrote to the village sarpanches to get the consent of the forest dwellers. But the letter read like an order, an instruction to implement what appears to be a formality, an impediment in the way of Rs. 52,000 crore FDI.

“Forest land is to be diverted for a construction of a mega steel plant,” Jena wrote. “As per the instruction of the Odisha chief secretary, the said proposal is to be approved by the pallisabha (gram sabha) of the panchayats concerned. You are, therefore, instructed to take immediate steps to convene the pallisabha and submit its resolution.”

As per instructions, a pallisabha was convened by sarpanches of two of the three gram panchayats. But the impediments to the country’s largest FDI chose to come alive and exercise their constitutional right.

ON 3 FEBRUARY, the Nuagaon pallisabha passed the following resolution: “It was unanimously passed not to convert the occupied forest land into non-forest land. We are protesting the POSCO plant construction at our cost. This pallisabha has unanimously passed the right not to deliver (this land) to the administration to set up the plant forcefully and illegally. We are demanding the government to issue pattas (a certificate that establishes forests rights) in order to respect the people’s mandate in this pallisabha.”

The scrawny villagers that a multi-billion dollar company was supposed to save issued a referendum that they didn’t need to be saved after all. Copies were immediately sent to the collector.

On 23 February, the collector wrote to the state government, stating the exact opposite: “Pallisabhas have been conducted in all three gram panchayats covering the POSCO project area and no claim for settlement of rights from tribals and traditional forest dwellers have been received,” he wrote. “Since no tribals or traditional forest dwellers are residing in the area, the question of settlement of rights of under the FRA does not arise.”

By July, the Odisha government began land acquisition. Potitiopavan Behra is one of the 96 families who had to comply. “They came with the police to acquire the land,” he says. “We had no choice but to accept the compensation.”

These violations were only discovered when a FRA monitoring committee happened to pick Jagatsinghpur district for its evaluation. It relayed the violations to the MOEF, which then ordered land acuquistion to stop and later constituted the Meena Gupta Committee. If this had not happened, the project would have gone through in its current format.

That is why Noboni Mallik would rather not trust the government version of development. “Our paan kheti is like our elder son and fishing is our second,” she says, tying three fish around her waist. “We will die if POSCO comes. It will be like killing both our sons.”

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