W’end Links: Sam Pitroda, Tears of Doom & Illegal Immigrants

This weekend, three excerpts – on three very different topics – sent to me by three friends.

The first is an excerpt from a keynote speech delivered by Sh Sam Pitroda on “India in a globalized world” at Nehru Centre, Mumbai (Thanks Prashant):

…Today, education is definitely on the national agenda. I believe that this is a great window of opportunity because we have a very large young population. We are prepared to invest on education. Our economy is growing at 8 to 10%. But, at the same time, don’t have big dreams that India will become a superpower. I think that we have a lot of work related to disparity, development and poverty. On the one hand, we have this great need for education. On the other hand, we have 300 million people who are illiterate. Our cities are basically dying. We do not have the right infrastructure. We don’t have enough power, we will have water shortages. There are a whole lot of issues that we need to deal with.

But, at the same time, we do have a unique position in the world because the world is going through a crisis of a different kind. This is mainly because the US model based on consumption is being questioned. We have reached a point where that model is not scalable, sustainable or workable. You cannot go on buying things all the time. When the US data comes from retailers during Christmas or Thanksgiving, we find that the world gets all excited if the US spends a lot of money. So people in Korea, China, Taiwan, India feel good. You cannot have 300 million people driving world economy any more. It was acceptable fifty years ago when the wealth was concentrated only in one part of the world. Today, there are a billion people in China, a billion in India and almost a billion in the former Soviet Union. These three billion have the same aspirations as Americans or Europeans. They also want all of the same goods and services. As a result, the Western model of consumption cannot be sustained and this is especially true after the recession.

India will have to evolve a new model…if India has to have a place in the global world, it will, in turn, look for and ultimately evolve a new model of consumption. India has the diversity, the mass, the momentum that is needed to give a new direction to the world.

We have answers in many areas. For example, in health, we cannot go on building expensive hospitals with fancy equipment and high cost surgery rooms and still meet the needs of this country in terms of health cost. We have to go back at some time to use some of our traditional wisdom mainly because there are 12,000 herbal medicinal plants which are unique to Indian climate. Our great grandfathers and grandmothers knew some of these formulas. Some of them worked, some of them didn’t work. We need to go back and look in our tradition and evolve low-cost models.

…Let’s start with education. Education, as we understand it today, essentially implies duster, blackboard, chalk, teacher, classroom, textbook, examinations, grades, certificates…This is based on the way I learnt 50-60 years ago. Today, to learn, one does not need any of this…Who decided that it should take four years to get a degree? For some reason, the entire world follows that. What does a degree really mean? Do you need a degree to do a job?

…Our systems don’t allow that. Our educational systems are not designed to give that seamless flexibility. We are all wound up in trying to promote higher education. But it is all useless.

…If we focus on innovations, if we focus on new infrastructure, if we focus on young talent, I think we will definitely find our place in the globalized world. We cannot make a dent until we address our own basic challenges of disparity, demography and development with a focus on the people at the bottom of the pyramid and inclusive growth.

***

Next, excerpts from Those tears of doom (Thanks Sanjay):

…As I write this, legislators in Karnataka are rushing to declare their bank statement and property to Justice Nitte Santosh Hegde, the state’s ombudsman against corruption. By Tuesday, more than 80 of 224 members of the legislative assembly, including the chief minister, had filed statements of their wealth. The rest were scrambling to do so. If they didn’t, warned the 70-year-old Justice Hegde, a former hockey player, he would not hesitate to recommend a six-month jail term for defaulters.

Don’t get too excited. Justice Hegde resigned last week, partly because the government won’t let him do anymore than recommend.

…When he was appointed as a watchdog against official corruption nearly four years ago, Hegde appeared to have impeccable credentials in a state where one coalition partner was the right-wing BJP, which now runs Karnataka with its old slogan, a ‘party with a difference’. As a Kannadiga, previously a judge of the Supreme Court — as was his father, who made an unusual journey from India’s highest court to Speaker of the sixth Lok Sabha — and a family history tied to the Sangh parivar, Hegde could have made that difference.

Instead, Hegde plunged Bangalore and Karnataka into shock last week as he made a vocal and highly publicised exit as Lokayukta…

The immediate provocation for Hegde’s resignation was a fiddle brazen even by Karnataka’s grand standards: the clandestine shipping of half a million tonnes of impounded iron ore from Belekeri port, 520 km northwest of Bangalore. On Hegde’s orders, Deputy Conservator of Forests R. Gokul had captured the ore in June, along with 40 sacks of forged documents, indicating official connivance and a revenue loss of about Rs 250 crore. Hegde quit when, instead of supporting Gokul, the government tried to stop him. “If I had not resigned, Gokul would have been suspended,” said Hegde. Larger issues frustrated Hegde. None of the officials he charged with corruption ever stood trial. Some are back on the job. No government, state or central, allows Lokayuktas the freedom to go beyond investigation. Permission to prosecute officials and politicians caught with their hand in the till must come from the government. It rarely does.

***

And finally, excerpt from a news-report on “Six Bangladeshis held with fake documents” – not on the border but in far-away Pune, at least 2000 kms from the border (Thanks Vasu-ji):

Pune: Six Bangladeshi nationals have been arrested by the special operations wing (SoW) of the Pune crime branch for staying in India illegally. An Indian national, who helped them forge documents and obtain Indian PAN cards, has also been arrested. (http://epaper.timesofindia.com, date: 1.7.10)

…The police..recovered a fake school leaving certificate…and a pan card…

Gholap had allegedly taken Rs 500 each from the Bangladeshi nationals to provide them with fake documents.

Assistant public prosecutor D L More told the court that custodial interrogation of the suspects was required to find out how they travelled to Pune, who their associates were and how they had come in possession of fake documents.

More asked for time to conduct investigations in West Bengal and to find out whether the suspects were linked with terror organisations.

Try not to worry too much…Enjoy the weekend and please do join the Live Chat tomorrow on News, Mainstream Media and Prejudices (430pm IST). I’m looking forward to chatting with many of you online.

Some Weekend Readings from the past:

Some links for weekend reading – IV (June 2008)

Links and extracts for weekend reading (July 2008)