Street power has its limits
The Lokpal Bill needs wider, calmer debate
Civil Society News
New Delhi
Two months after the Union government appointed a committee of five ministers and five activists chosen by Anna Hazare to draft a bill on the institution of a Lokpal to fight corruption, deep differences persisted on what powers should be bestowed on such an ombudsman.
The committee was given a 30 June deadline. But till 20 June it could make little progress on substantive issues. It was agreed to disagree and put up to the Union Cabinet a draft bill with the views of both sides. The government on its part sought an all-party meeting. And Hazare threatened to go on one of his hunger-strikes again if Parliament does not produce a law by 15 August.
But by now thinking people were somewhat weary of such developments. Several questions presented themselves: Is the use of random street power the way to finding solutions to national issues? Did the Hazare group really represent civil society or had many other points of view been left out? Should an arbitrarily chosen committee have been drafting a complex law or should there have been a wider, more inclusive debate with buy-ins from different power centres and shades of opinion?
An agitation which had seemed to work so successfully at Jantar Mantar sputtered when it came to consultation and debate.
The Hazare group – consisting of Arvind Kejriwal, Prashant Bhushan, his father Shanti Bhushan and Santosh Hedge – didn't just have problems with the government. The group's methods and its definition of a hugely empowered Lokpal were not endorsed by a large number of well-intentioned people either.
The result was that the key sticking points remained:
* Should the Prime Minister come under the purview of the Lokpal?
* Should the higher judiciary come under the purview of the Lokpal?
* Would the Hazare group's demand of an elaborate investigative machinery adding up to 15,000 people, including a vigilance officer in every district of the country to report corruption, be a workable mechanism?
* Was concentration of power in the Lokpal's office a safe thing and to whom would it in practical terms be accountable?
GRANDSTANDING: The UPA government has to take its share of the blame for the spread of corruption. But there is concern that civil society had been trivialised by demanding instant laws on matters of national concern and seeking to dictate terms to Parliament. The Hazare group wants the Lokpal Bill passed by 16 August. It is felt that the role of civil society is to suggest and influence and be the space in which more voices can be heard. It cannot seek to replace the political class much less Parliament itself.
Any number of ex-judges, lawyers and bureaucrats known for their integrity felt that the Hazare group's suggestions involved changes in the Indian Constitution that would not deliver results and may even do a lot of harm because they sought to disturb the current framework without adequate discussion.
The National Campaign for the People's Right to Information (NCPRI) is drafting a Lokpal Bill. The NCPRI sees the Lokpal dealing with grand corruption. But for the rest it is looking at a basket of measures that include judicial accountability, protection of whistleblowers and so on. The idea is to create processes which can deal with corruption at various levels by improving existing institutions.
But with the Hazare group holding centrestage and the media hoping to cash in on middle-class sentiments, there has been little room for other voices.
It also didn't go down well that members of the Hazare group berated Parliament and used intemperate language against the government and its ministers. It made many people feel that democracy itself was being dented by such an agitation. After all, the bill would have to be passed by elected representatives in Parliament. The support of the political class was important, particularly in the states.
As expected, an efficient and honest chief minister, Nitish Kumar in Bihar, refused to be part of rushing through a law. Mayawati in Uttar Pradesh told the campaigners to get elected first and then implement their ideas. Sheila Dikshit in Delhi said there was no need for a Lokpal. It would be better to strengthen existing institutions.
CONSTITUENCY MATTERS: Part of the problem seemed to be the Hazare group's lack of a well-defined and demanding constituency. Corruption affects everyone. But the Hazare group's support has been from the middle-class, film stars and so on – people who make whimsical choices and have little staying power. There was also support from godmen, the RSS and BJP front organisations. However, none of these elements made up a committed constituency. They either had instructions to be present or were there to enjoy the tamasha.
Ashok Chaudhury of the National Forum of Forest People and Forest Workers (NFFPFW) says the manner in which activists negotiate is determined by the constituency they represent. Activists working with marginalised groups don't have the luxury of returning to their constituency empty handed. The people they represent, who don't have access to health, education, food, jobs or even basic dignity place their faith in them, expect them to at least bring them some relief from Delhi. For them it's a question of survival.
“When we meet the government it is to achieve results because our constituency wants us to come back with something. Hazare and his followers have no real constituency except a vacillating middle-class and upper middle-class. They don't have to show results,” says Chaudhury.
Chaudhury, who worked hard to get the historic Scheduled Tribes and Other Forest Workers (Right to Forests) Act, 2006, passed, says negotiations require give and take. There is a need to sit and talk. It is not about confrontation. “When we go to Jantar Mantar in Delhi it is come to an understanding and not to confront and belittle the government,” he says. “When you call everyone, including the Prime Minister corrupt, what space have you left for negotiations.”
The NFFPFW made innumerable presentations to Parliamentarians, lobbied with every political party big and small and did whatever it took to convince them about their draft law which would give land and community forest rights to tribals and forest people. It was not easy. There were powerful interests, like the wildlife lobby and the forest department bureaucracy, working against them.
Ravi Chopra of the People's Science Institute says: “Consultations should take place at the widest feasible level. No one likes to take to the streets. But governments are sometimes so obdurate and unwilling to listen that one is forced to do so. However, convincing people is the critical test.”
Chopra played an important role in the campaign that led to the dismantling of dams on the Ganga. Elderly Dr G.D. Agarwal, a venerable environmental scientist, had to go on a hungerstrike during that campaign to make the government take note of the damage the dams would do.
But the hungerstrike would have been of little use if serious efforts hadn't been made to engage with the government and place scientific evidence against the dams before it. Solid research plays an important part in convincing the government.
The central law on right to information (RTI) came out of a long process. Activists examined the working of RTI in the states, collected evidence from the grassroots. The National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) went through a similar exercise.
Nikhil Dey of the Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan (MKSS) says: “Nothing is open and shut. You can't cut back on the consultation process. Laws like the ones on right to information and rural employment were passed with a lot of give and take. As activists we didn't always have our way.”
Kavita Srivastava, general secretary of the People's Union for Civil Liberties and a right to food activist says: “What the media finds sexy gets projected. Anna Hazare's fast gets coverage but there have been so many fasts which have been ignored. In 2007 when 200,000 people gathered in Jagdalpur to protest against Salwa Judum, there was no one to cover them.”
“The agitation against corruption has caught the mood of the country, but its leaders have not succeeded in going beyond that. Corruption has to be dealt with at various levels. There can't be any single solution to it like having a Lokpal. Nor can there be only one point of view. The fight against corruption has to be seen in the larger context of globalisation and privatisation.”
Like Chaudhury, she believes the constituency makes a difference: “For the poor, corruption is a right to life issue. But for the middle-class it is not. It is important to have the support of the middle-class on an issue. I work with the middle-class. But the middle-class has to also realise that complex issues don't have simplistic solutions. There is a lot of corruption within the middle-class.”
She believes that street power is important. Without it no one listens to you. “But it is simultaneously necessary to create the space for dialogue and negotiation. In the right to food movement we have found that it is not enough to agitate. It is as important to meet MPs and ministers and get one's point of view across.”
Ravi Agarwal of Toxics Links says: “There is obviously great anger amongst people about a sense of injustice of having been betrayed by the political establishment for years on end. Those guilty of corruption have hardly ever been punished and carry on regardless. However changing this situation needs a cool head and rational thinking, and not mere television grandstanding.”
“No one disagrees with the need for systemic reform to reduce corruption. The question is how,” says Agarwal. “Holding a government to ransom, especially one which we have elected as ours, cannot be the way forward. Tinkering with basic Constitutional checks and balances needs great caution else the consequences can be far too serious. We must broaden the Lokpal debate to include the variety of opinions and expertise which already exists on the issue. It is the only way.”
A.V. Balasubramanian of the Centre for Indian Knowledge Systems in Chennai agrees. He says one of India's strengths is its political stability – that elections are free and fair and held regularly. It is this stability which has created space for civil society groups and they would do well to look at other countries in the Asian region and value what India has.
“We know that if we don't like a government we can remove it,” he says. “Nevertheless street power is justified. It is merely a means of applying pressure so as to bring something to the notice of the government and influence policy. Companies and industry lobbies use advertising to the same end.”
LACK OF DIALOGUE: Civil society gets its legitimacy from the issues it raises. But it also has to accommodate different shades of opinion and be pragmatic about the ways in which it seeks to connect.
Members of Hazare's group, like Kejriwal and Prashant Bhushan, have instead delivered hammer blow after hammer blow. They have been strident in their views and insisted on their version of the Lokpal Bill.
At a convention held in Delhi by The Foundation for Media Professionals to hear activists' views on the Lokpal, Kejriwal brought along his supporters who cheered as he spoke and left with him even before activists with another point of view had spoken.
However, several substantial points were made. On bringing the judiciary under the Lokpal, Justice AP Shah said the office of ombudsman exists in 129 countries but the judiciary does not come under it. He said it was unfair to say the judiciary is wracked with corruption. Action against those responsible for the 2G scam has been taken by the Supreme Court. Many notable orders had been issued in other cases too. The judiciary was also sensitive to the issue of corruption in its ranks. He agreed that the judiciary needs to be made accountable but not to the Lokpal. It should be accountable to itself.
He felt that the Judicial Standards and Accountability Bill pending in Parliament needed to be strengthened, but bringing the judiciary under the Lokpal was unwise.
Usha Ramanathan, the civil rights lawyer, said India's democracy has done well due to a clear separation of powers between the executive, legislature and judiciary. This arrangement should not be tampered with in any way. There was no absolute certainty that the Lokpal would be completely insulated from the executive or the legislature so it is safer to leave the judiciary out of its purview.
The Hazare group proposes that the judiciary could investigate complaints against the Lokpal. And the Lokpal could order an FIR to be filed against a judge accused of corruption. But Justice Shah said this circuitous arrangement could create a conflict of interest – supposing a judge was called upon to investigate the Lokpal who in turn was giving orders to investigate the very same judge?
On putting the Prime Minister under the Lokpal there has been rough consensus, but this is a sensitive issue. Justice Shah suggested a two-third majority of members in the Lokpal decide if an inquiry should be initiated. The Prime Minister would not need to resign and the President of India should be the person who can give sanction for an investigation. There are other views as well.
The Hazare group wants a Lokpal with 11 people with impeccable reputations found through a search committee. The Lokpal will enforce the Prevention of Corruption Act and have a nation wide staff strength of 15,000. At district level there would be a Vigilance Officer to act against complaints of corruption. Every department will have a Citizens' Charter and if work is not done within a specified time, it will be assumed delays were due to corruption.
Former bureaucrat, Satyananda Mishra, pointed out that it is difficult to get 11 people of unimpeachable character so finding 15,000 people would be even tougher. Who would see to it that this entire staff did their jobs honestly?
The same ills which beset existing institutions could befall this one, it was felt. At the grassroots people face problems in getting their entitlements or may be a ration card or passport. Nobody goes to the police because they are corrupt and they have a stick. “Now we are saying lets give another body a bigger stick and it will sort things out. Will it?” asked Nikhil Dey.
Also read : ‘Let Lokpal deal with grand corruption' - Aruna Roy
Thursday, August 4, 2011
Civil Society in India A Necessary Corrective in a Representative Democracy
Civil Society in India
A Necessary Corrective in a Representative Democracy
Patralekha Chatterjee
India is the largest democracy in the world. But without its lively NGO scene, many ills in society would continue unchallenged. Civil society derives its strength from the Gandhian tradition of volunteerism, but today, it expresses itself in many different forms of activism.
It was dark, around midnight. The place - on the outskirts of the Indian capital, New Delhi. There was no house or car or road to be seen - only dark mounds that turned out to be excavated rock when one went near. Next to each mound was a near vertical pit - about 20 meters deep on the average. That was where the rock had been dug out from - the rock that went into making the big houses of the political leaders and bureaucrats and rich citizens of New Delhi.
Stepping carefully around the pits and mounds, four men approached the only source of light to be seen - a small kerosene lantern burning inside a mud and grass hut. There were four residents inside - a couple and their two children, ten and eight. They dug the pits, cut the rock and hauled it to the trucks, all without salary. They were bonded labourers, bonded for life and for generations to the owner of the pit because some ancestor sometime had borrowed money and had been unable to pay it back.
Two of the four men who visited the hut that night in 1985 were from a non-governmental organization called Bandhua Mukti Morcha (Bonded Labour Liberation Front). The other two were journalists brought by the NGO to prove that bonded labour - a form of slavery - did exist right in the nation’s capital. After the visit, the men from the NGO went to the police station to lodge a complaint, because bonded labour is illegal in India, and so is child labour in a profession as hazardous as this. The complaints, and the articles written by the journalists after the visit, were part of the NGO campaign to make the government implement the law.
Every day, different NGOs all over India are doing things like this. Sometime it may be taking a sample of water from a well that has been polluted by a nearby factory, getting the water analysed and then filing a “public interest petition” in a court to force the factory to follow anti-pollution laws. Another time, it may be a heated debate with a bureaucrat on why all citizens should have the right to be informed about all government decisions that affect their lives.
Though the term NGO became popular in India only in the 1980s, the voluntary sector has an older tradition. Since independence from the British in 1947, the voluntary sector had a lot of respect in the minds of people - first, because the father of the nation Mahatma Gandhi was an active participant; and second because India has always had the tradition of honouring those who have made some sacrifice to help others.
In independent India, the initial role played by the voluntary organizations started by Gandhi and his disciples was to fill in the gaps left by the government in the development process. The volunteers organized handloom weavers in villages to form cooperatives through which they could market their products directly in the cities, and thus get a better price. Similar cooperatives were later set up in areas like marketing of dairy products and fish. In almost all these cases, the volunteers helped in other areas of development - running literacy classes for adults at night, for example.
In the 1980s, however, the groups who were now known as NGOs became more specialized, and the voluntary movement was, in a way, fragmented into three major groups. There were those considered the traditional development NGOs, who went into a village or a group of villages and ran literacy programmes, crËches for children and clinics, encouraged farmers to experiment with new crops and livestock breeds that would bring more money, helped the weavers and other village artisans market their products and so on - in short became almost a part of the community in their chosen area (usually in rural India) and tried to fill all the gaps left in the development process by the government. There are many examples of voluntary organizations of this kind running very successfully in India for the last five decades. Perhaps the most celebrated example would be the treatment centre for leprosy patients run by Baba Amte in central India.
The second group of NGOs were those who researched a particular subject in depth, and then lobbied with the government or with industry or petitioned the courts for improvements in the lives of the citizens, as far as that particular subject was concerned. A well-known example of an NGO of this type is the Centre for Science and Environment. It was a CSE who picked up that sample of well water and then submitted the results of the chemical analysis to a court because the organization had not been able to get the factory to change its polluting practices in any other way.
In the third group were those volunteers who saw themselves more as activists than other NGOs did. Of course, all NGOs undertook a certain amount of activism to get their points across - they petitioned the bureaucrats, they alerted the media whenever they found something wrong and so on. But this third group of NGOs saw activism as their primary means of reaching their goals, because they did not believe they could get the authorities to move in any other way. Perhaps the best-known example of an NGO in this category is the Narmada Bachao Andolan (Save Narmada Campaign), an organisation that opposed the construction of a series of large dams in a large river valley of central India. The members of this NGO believe that large dams worsen water scarcity for the majority of the people in the long run rather than solve the problem, and they oppose the displacement it entails upstream of the dam. When the NBA found that it could not persuade the planners in India to agree to its point of view, the NBA members put up pickets, held demonstrations and tried every other way they could think of to oppose the construction of the first of the big dams. Most of the NBA member went to jail a number of times as a result. Right now, some of them - including celebrated novelist Arundhati Roy - face the prospect of being jailed again, because they criticized the Supreme Court of India when the court’s decision on dam construction did not go in their favour.
There is no strict boundary between these three groups of NGOs - in fact, Baba Amte is now an important member of the Narmada Bachao Andolan. And whatever be the category a particular NGO falls into, all of them play an important role in modern India - they hold the politicians accountable to the people.
India is a representative rather than a participatory democracy. Once the elections are over, the politicians who run the federal and state governments do not really need to go back to the electorate for every major decision - there is no tradition of referendums in India, as there is in Switzerland or Denmark. So, in the five years between on election and another, the NGOs - and parts of the media, to some extent - are often the only means available to the citizens to voice their opinions on any decision taken by a government.
In a large developing country like India, there are numerous gaps left by the government in the development process - sometimes by intention, sometimes due to lack of funds, sometimes due to lack of awareness. These are the gaps that many NGOs try to fill in modern India. Some of them may work in areas that the government does not want to get into - like fighting discrimination on the basis of caste. Most Indian politicians do not really want to upset the existing caste hierarchy in his or her constituency, because the politician is dependent for votes on the dominant castes of that particular constituency. In the process, laws prohibiting discrimination on the basis of caste are often ignored unless there is an NGO working in the area that is willing to take up the cause of those being discriminated against.
Working in health and education
Then there are many NGOs who work in areas where the government effort proves inadequate. Two well-known examples are the areas of education and healthcare. In the area of education, there are often not enough government-run schools, especially in rural regions. Or there may be schools without adequate facilities, because a particular state government does not have the necessary money. There are many situations where the government runs a co-educational school, but the girls do not go there because their conservative parents (the overwhelming majority) refuse to send their daughters where they may meet boys. Then there are many cases where the government runs a largely-empty school, because most of the boys and girls are out working during school hours. NGOs have played an important role in all these cases - running special classes at night for children whose parents send them out to work, running special classes for girls and so on. By and large, governments have been supportive of such initiatives by NGOs, and the only problem is that there are not enough NGOs to educate all the uneducated people in India. The mammoth NGO called Kerala Sastra Sahitya Parishad is largely credited for the hundred percent literacy in that state in the south-western corner of India.
In the area of healthcare, too, NGOs play a stellar role in modern India - by supplementing the government effort to provide health care to citizens, and by raising awareness in society about issues like child and maternal malnutrition, which is perhaps more important than adding a few more clinics. Again, in modern India it is the NGOs who have battled social evils in the area of healthcare, like the neglect of the girl child, which can sometimes take the extreme form of female foeticide or infanticide. It is largely through the lobbying by NGOs through the media that many state governments have now passed laws banning sex-determination tests of foetuses, as such tests were often leading to the abortion of female foetuses.
In the last 20 years or so, a very large number of NGOs in India have been active in the area of environmental protection. They have been in the forefront of reforestation campaigns, they have lobbied against deforestation or overuse of pesticides in agriculture, and they have taken polluting industries to task. In this sustained campaign, the NGOs have often been helped by the judiciary whenever the government of the day has proved unresponsive. For this, NGOs in India have almost developed into a fine art a device called public interest litigation, by which any citizen can petition a court to intervene where (s)he feels it is in the public interest for the court to intervene.
Another field in which certain Indian NGOs have been active, especially in urban areas, is in trying to turn the right to shelter into a reality. This is an area where constructive work and activism have intermingled most often, as NGOs such as YUVA and SPARC in cities like Mumbai (Bombay) repeatedly oppose the demolition of hutments even as they try to improve the quality of life in the sprawling slum clusters.
The struggle by NGOs to make governments more accountable to citizens is an ongoing struggle in India. For years now, NGOs have been lobbying for the right to information to become a legal right, and it now appears that the federal Parliament may soon pass a bill to this effect.
The ‘80s were the hey days of activist journalism in India. NGOs became the media’s key allies in exposing injustice and clear violations of rules. Today, human rights reportage has to fight for column space with a myriad other issues and NGOs have to speak louder to be heard by the public but their influence in public affairs is growing. But with that, has come corruption. Several NGOs have come under a cloud because of alleged misappropriation of public funds. The jet-set life-style of some Ngo representatives in the country spurred one keen observer of the NGO in Delhi to quip that today there is a new category of NGOs - “airport NGOs” - who flit from one international airport to another, hopping from one cause to another, all in the name of the poor and grassroots activism.
Apart from this, there are many NGOs in India to represent special interest groups, ranging from the disabled to women to children to the aged to refugees and to people in specific professions. In the course of their work, almost all NGOs come up against an unfeeling or even hostile bureaucracy sometime or the other. It is part of the strength of Indian democracy that the state is by no means the winner in all these confrontations.
Patralekha Chatterjee is an Indian journalist based in New Delhi specialising in development issues
A Necessary Corrective in a Representative Democracy
Patralekha Chatterjee
India is the largest democracy in the world. But without its lively NGO scene, many ills in society would continue unchallenged. Civil society derives its strength from the Gandhian tradition of volunteerism, but today, it expresses itself in many different forms of activism.
It was dark, around midnight. The place - on the outskirts of the Indian capital, New Delhi. There was no house or car or road to be seen - only dark mounds that turned out to be excavated rock when one went near. Next to each mound was a near vertical pit - about 20 meters deep on the average. That was where the rock had been dug out from - the rock that went into making the big houses of the political leaders and bureaucrats and rich citizens of New Delhi.
Stepping carefully around the pits and mounds, four men approached the only source of light to be seen - a small kerosene lantern burning inside a mud and grass hut. There were four residents inside - a couple and their two children, ten and eight. They dug the pits, cut the rock and hauled it to the trucks, all without salary. They were bonded labourers, bonded for life and for generations to the owner of the pit because some ancestor sometime had borrowed money and had been unable to pay it back.
Two of the four men who visited the hut that night in 1985 were from a non-governmental organization called Bandhua Mukti Morcha (Bonded Labour Liberation Front). The other two were journalists brought by the NGO to prove that bonded labour - a form of slavery - did exist right in the nation’s capital. After the visit, the men from the NGO went to the police station to lodge a complaint, because bonded labour is illegal in India, and so is child labour in a profession as hazardous as this. The complaints, and the articles written by the journalists after the visit, were part of the NGO campaign to make the government implement the law.
Every day, different NGOs all over India are doing things like this. Sometime it may be taking a sample of water from a well that has been polluted by a nearby factory, getting the water analysed and then filing a “public interest petition” in a court to force the factory to follow anti-pollution laws. Another time, it may be a heated debate with a bureaucrat on why all citizens should have the right to be informed about all government decisions that affect their lives.
Though the term NGO became popular in India only in the 1980s, the voluntary sector has an older tradition. Since independence from the British in 1947, the voluntary sector had a lot of respect in the minds of people - first, because the father of the nation Mahatma Gandhi was an active participant; and second because India has always had the tradition of honouring those who have made some sacrifice to help others.
In independent India, the initial role played by the voluntary organizations started by Gandhi and his disciples was to fill in the gaps left by the government in the development process. The volunteers organized handloom weavers in villages to form cooperatives through which they could market their products directly in the cities, and thus get a better price. Similar cooperatives were later set up in areas like marketing of dairy products and fish. In almost all these cases, the volunteers helped in other areas of development - running literacy classes for adults at night, for example.
In the 1980s, however, the groups who were now known as NGOs became more specialized, and the voluntary movement was, in a way, fragmented into three major groups. There were those considered the traditional development NGOs, who went into a village or a group of villages and ran literacy programmes, crËches for children and clinics, encouraged farmers to experiment with new crops and livestock breeds that would bring more money, helped the weavers and other village artisans market their products and so on - in short became almost a part of the community in their chosen area (usually in rural India) and tried to fill all the gaps left in the development process by the government. There are many examples of voluntary organizations of this kind running very successfully in India for the last five decades. Perhaps the most celebrated example would be the treatment centre for leprosy patients run by Baba Amte in central India.
The second group of NGOs were those who researched a particular subject in depth, and then lobbied with the government or with industry or petitioned the courts for improvements in the lives of the citizens, as far as that particular subject was concerned. A well-known example of an NGO of this type is the Centre for Science and Environment. It was a CSE who picked up that sample of well water and then submitted the results of the chemical analysis to a court because the organization had not been able to get the factory to change its polluting practices in any other way.
In the third group were those volunteers who saw themselves more as activists than other NGOs did. Of course, all NGOs undertook a certain amount of activism to get their points across - they petitioned the bureaucrats, they alerted the media whenever they found something wrong and so on. But this third group of NGOs saw activism as their primary means of reaching their goals, because they did not believe they could get the authorities to move in any other way. Perhaps the best-known example of an NGO in this category is the Narmada Bachao Andolan (Save Narmada Campaign), an organisation that opposed the construction of a series of large dams in a large river valley of central India. The members of this NGO believe that large dams worsen water scarcity for the majority of the people in the long run rather than solve the problem, and they oppose the displacement it entails upstream of the dam. When the NBA found that it could not persuade the planners in India to agree to its point of view, the NBA members put up pickets, held demonstrations and tried every other way they could think of to oppose the construction of the first of the big dams. Most of the NBA member went to jail a number of times as a result. Right now, some of them - including celebrated novelist Arundhati Roy - face the prospect of being jailed again, because they criticized the Supreme Court of India when the court’s decision on dam construction did not go in their favour.
There is no strict boundary between these three groups of NGOs - in fact, Baba Amte is now an important member of the Narmada Bachao Andolan. And whatever be the category a particular NGO falls into, all of them play an important role in modern India - they hold the politicians accountable to the people.
India is a representative rather than a participatory democracy. Once the elections are over, the politicians who run the federal and state governments do not really need to go back to the electorate for every major decision - there is no tradition of referendums in India, as there is in Switzerland or Denmark. So, in the five years between on election and another, the NGOs - and parts of the media, to some extent - are often the only means available to the citizens to voice their opinions on any decision taken by a government.
In a large developing country like India, there are numerous gaps left by the government in the development process - sometimes by intention, sometimes due to lack of funds, sometimes due to lack of awareness. These are the gaps that many NGOs try to fill in modern India. Some of them may work in areas that the government does not want to get into - like fighting discrimination on the basis of caste. Most Indian politicians do not really want to upset the existing caste hierarchy in his or her constituency, because the politician is dependent for votes on the dominant castes of that particular constituency. In the process, laws prohibiting discrimination on the basis of caste are often ignored unless there is an NGO working in the area that is willing to take up the cause of those being discriminated against.
Working in health and education
Then there are many NGOs who work in areas where the government effort proves inadequate. Two well-known examples are the areas of education and healthcare. In the area of education, there are often not enough government-run schools, especially in rural regions. Or there may be schools without adequate facilities, because a particular state government does not have the necessary money. There are many situations where the government runs a co-educational school, but the girls do not go there because their conservative parents (the overwhelming majority) refuse to send their daughters where they may meet boys. Then there are many cases where the government runs a largely-empty school, because most of the boys and girls are out working during school hours. NGOs have played an important role in all these cases - running special classes at night for children whose parents send them out to work, running special classes for girls and so on. By and large, governments have been supportive of such initiatives by NGOs, and the only problem is that there are not enough NGOs to educate all the uneducated people in India. The mammoth NGO called Kerala Sastra Sahitya Parishad is largely credited for the hundred percent literacy in that state in the south-western corner of India.
In the area of healthcare, too, NGOs play a stellar role in modern India - by supplementing the government effort to provide health care to citizens, and by raising awareness in society about issues like child and maternal malnutrition, which is perhaps more important than adding a few more clinics. Again, in modern India it is the NGOs who have battled social evils in the area of healthcare, like the neglect of the girl child, which can sometimes take the extreme form of female foeticide or infanticide. It is largely through the lobbying by NGOs through the media that many state governments have now passed laws banning sex-determination tests of foetuses, as such tests were often leading to the abortion of female foetuses.
In the last 20 years or so, a very large number of NGOs in India have been active in the area of environmental protection. They have been in the forefront of reforestation campaigns, they have lobbied against deforestation or overuse of pesticides in agriculture, and they have taken polluting industries to task. In this sustained campaign, the NGOs have often been helped by the judiciary whenever the government of the day has proved unresponsive. For this, NGOs in India have almost developed into a fine art a device called public interest litigation, by which any citizen can petition a court to intervene where (s)he feels it is in the public interest for the court to intervene.
Another field in which certain Indian NGOs have been active, especially in urban areas, is in trying to turn the right to shelter into a reality. This is an area where constructive work and activism have intermingled most often, as NGOs such as YUVA and SPARC in cities like Mumbai (Bombay) repeatedly oppose the demolition of hutments even as they try to improve the quality of life in the sprawling slum clusters.
The struggle by NGOs to make governments more accountable to citizens is an ongoing struggle in India. For years now, NGOs have been lobbying for the right to information to become a legal right, and it now appears that the federal Parliament may soon pass a bill to this effect.
The ‘80s were the hey days of activist journalism in India. NGOs became the media’s key allies in exposing injustice and clear violations of rules. Today, human rights reportage has to fight for column space with a myriad other issues and NGOs have to speak louder to be heard by the public but their influence in public affairs is growing. But with that, has come corruption. Several NGOs have come under a cloud because of alleged misappropriation of public funds. The jet-set life-style of some Ngo representatives in the country spurred one keen observer of the NGO in Delhi to quip that today there is a new category of NGOs - “airport NGOs” - who flit from one international airport to another, hopping from one cause to another, all in the name of the poor and grassroots activism.
Apart from this, there are many NGOs in India to represent special interest groups, ranging from the disabled to women to children to the aged to refugees and to people in specific professions. In the course of their work, almost all NGOs come up against an unfeeling or even hostile bureaucracy sometime or the other. It is part of the strength of Indian democracy that the state is by no means the winner in all these confrontations.
Patralekha Chatterjee is an Indian journalist based in New Delhi specialising in development issues
The Rise of Civil Society
The Rise of Civil Society
India Table of Contents
Political participation in India has been transformed in many ways since the 1960s. New social groups have entered the political arena and begun to use their political resources to shape the political process. Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, previously excluded from politics because of their position at the bottom of India's social hierarchy, have begun to take full advantage of the opportunities presented by India's democracy. Women and environmentalists constitute new political categories that transcend traditional distinctions. The spread of social movements and voluntary organizations has shown that despite the difficulties of India's political parties and state institutions, India's democratic tendency continues to thrive.
An important aspect of the rise of civil society is the proliferation of voluntary or nongovernmental organizations. Estimates of their number ranged from 50,000 to 100,000 in 1993. To some extent, the rise of voluntary organizations has been sponsored by the Indian state. For instance, the central government's Seventh Five-Year Plan of fiscal years (FY--see Glossary) 1985-89 recognized the contributions of voluntary organizations in accelerating development and substantially increased their funding. A 1987 survey of 1,273 voluntary agencies reported that 47 percent received some form of funding from the central government. Voluntary organizations also have thrived on foreign donations, which in 1991-92 contributed more than US$400 million to some 15,000 organizations. Some nongovernmental organizations cooperate with the central government in a manner that augments its capacity to implement public policy, such as poverty alleviation, for example, in a decentralized manner. Other nongovernmental organizations also serve as watchdogs, attempting to pressure government agencies to uphold the spirit of the state's laws and implement policies in accord with their stated objectives. Nongovernmental organizations also endeavor to raise the political consciousness of various social groups, encouraging them to demand their rights and challenge social inequities. Finally, some social groups serve as innovators, experimenting with new approaches to solving social problems.
Beginning in the 1970s, activists began to form broad-based social movements, which proved powerful advocates for interests that they perceived as neglected by the state and political parties. Perhaps the most powerful has been the farmers' movement, which has organized hundreds of thousands of demonstrators in New Delhi and has pressured the government for higher prices on agricultural commodities and more investment in rural areas. Members of Scheduled Castes led by the Dalit Panthers have moved to rearticulate the identity of former Untouchables. Women from an array of diverse organizations now interact in conferences and exchange ideas in order to define and promote women's issues. Simultaneously, an environmental movement has developed that has attempted to compel the government to be more responsive to environmental concerns and has attempted to redefine the concept of "development" to include respect for indigenous cultures and environmental sustainability.
With its highly competitive elections, relatively independent judiciary, boisterous media, and thriving civil society, India continues to possess one of the most democratic political systems of all developing countries. Nevertheless, Indian democracy is under stress. Political power within the Indian state has become increasingly centralized at a time when India's civil society has become mobilized along lines that reflect the country's remarkable social diversity. The country's political parties, which might aggregate the country's diverse social interests in a way that would ensure the responsiveness of state authority, are in crisis. The Congress (I) has been in a state of decline, as reflected in the erosion of its traditional coalition of support and the implication of Congress (I) governments in a series of scandals. The party has failed to generate an enlightened leadership that might rejuvenate it and replace the increasingly discredited Nehruvian socialism with a novel programmatic appeal. The Congress (I)'s split in May 1995 added a new impediment to efforts to reinvigorate the party.
The BJP, although it has a stronger party organization, in 1995 had yet to find a way to transcend the limits of its militant Hindu nationalism and fashion a program that would appeal to diverse social groups and enable it to build a majority coalition in India. The Janata Dal continued to suffer from lack of leadership, inadequate resources, and incessant factionalism. As its bases of power shrink, it stood in danger of being reduced to a party with only a few regional strongholds. As regional groupings and members of the lower echelons of India's caste system become more assertive, regional and caste parties may play a more prominent role in India's political system. At this point, however, it is difficult to envision how they might stabilize India's political system.
The unresponsiveness of India's political parties and government has encouraged the Indian public to mobilize through nongovernmental organizations and social movements. The consequent development of India's civil society has made Indians less confident of the transformative power of the state and more confident of the power of the individual and local community. This development is shifting a larger share of the initiative for resolving India's social problems from the state to society. Fashioning party and state institutions that will accommodate the diverse interests that are now mobilized in Indian society is the major challenge confronting the Indian polity in the 1990s.
India Table of Contents
Political participation in India has been transformed in many ways since the 1960s. New social groups have entered the political arena and begun to use their political resources to shape the political process. Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, previously excluded from politics because of their position at the bottom of India's social hierarchy, have begun to take full advantage of the opportunities presented by India's democracy. Women and environmentalists constitute new political categories that transcend traditional distinctions. The spread of social movements and voluntary organizations has shown that despite the difficulties of India's political parties and state institutions, India's democratic tendency continues to thrive.
An important aspect of the rise of civil society is the proliferation of voluntary or nongovernmental organizations. Estimates of their number ranged from 50,000 to 100,000 in 1993. To some extent, the rise of voluntary organizations has been sponsored by the Indian state. For instance, the central government's Seventh Five-Year Plan of fiscal years (FY--see Glossary) 1985-89 recognized the contributions of voluntary organizations in accelerating development and substantially increased their funding. A 1987 survey of 1,273 voluntary agencies reported that 47 percent received some form of funding from the central government. Voluntary organizations also have thrived on foreign donations, which in 1991-92 contributed more than US$400 million to some 15,000 organizations. Some nongovernmental organizations cooperate with the central government in a manner that augments its capacity to implement public policy, such as poverty alleviation, for example, in a decentralized manner. Other nongovernmental organizations also serve as watchdogs, attempting to pressure government agencies to uphold the spirit of the state's laws and implement policies in accord with their stated objectives. Nongovernmental organizations also endeavor to raise the political consciousness of various social groups, encouraging them to demand their rights and challenge social inequities. Finally, some social groups serve as innovators, experimenting with new approaches to solving social problems.
Beginning in the 1970s, activists began to form broad-based social movements, which proved powerful advocates for interests that they perceived as neglected by the state and political parties. Perhaps the most powerful has been the farmers' movement, which has organized hundreds of thousands of demonstrators in New Delhi and has pressured the government for higher prices on agricultural commodities and more investment in rural areas. Members of Scheduled Castes led by the Dalit Panthers have moved to rearticulate the identity of former Untouchables. Women from an array of diverse organizations now interact in conferences and exchange ideas in order to define and promote women's issues. Simultaneously, an environmental movement has developed that has attempted to compel the government to be more responsive to environmental concerns and has attempted to redefine the concept of "development" to include respect for indigenous cultures and environmental sustainability.
With its highly competitive elections, relatively independent judiciary, boisterous media, and thriving civil society, India continues to possess one of the most democratic political systems of all developing countries. Nevertheless, Indian democracy is under stress. Political power within the Indian state has become increasingly centralized at a time when India's civil society has become mobilized along lines that reflect the country's remarkable social diversity. The country's political parties, which might aggregate the country's diverse social interests in a way that would ensure the responsiveness of state authority, are in crisis. The Congress (I) has been in a state of decline, as reflected in the erosion of its traditional coalition of support and the implication of Congress (I) governments in a series of scandals. The party has failed to generate an enlightened leadership that might rejuvenate it and replace the increasingly discredited Nehruvian socialism with a novel programmatic appeal. The Congress (I)'s split in May 1995 added a new impediment to efforts to reinvigorate the party.
The BJP, although it has a stronger party organization, in 1995 had yet to find a way to transcend the limits of its militant Hindu nationalism and fashion a program that would appeal to diverse social groups and enable it to build a majority coalition in India. The Janata Dal continued to suffer from lack of leadership, inadequate resources, and incessant factionalism. As its bases of power shrink, it stood in danger of being reduced to a party with only a few regional strongholds. As regional groupings and members of the lower echelons of India's caste system become more assertive, regional and caste parties may play a more prominent role in India's political system. At this point, however, it is difficult to envision how they might stabilize India's political system.
The unresponsiveness of India's political parties and government has encouraged the Indian public to mobilize through nongovernmental organizations and social movements. The consequent development of India's civil society has made Indians less confident of the transformative power of the state and more confident of the power of the individual and local community. This development is shifting a larger share of the initiative for resolving India's social problems from the state to society. Fashioning party and state institutions that will accommodate the diverse interests that are now mobilized in Indian society is the major challenge confronting the Indian polity in the 1990s.
Nasa reports first evidence of flowing water on Mars-Aug 5, 2011
Nasa reports first evidence of flowing water on Mars
AFP | Aug 5, 2011, 01.52AM IST
WASHINGTON: Nasa scientists announced on Thursday that they had found the first evidence of flowing water on Mars.
If confirmed, the evidence gathered by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter would be the first discovery of active liquid water in the ground on the red planet.
"We have found repeated and predictable evidence suggesting water flowing on Mars," Michael Meyer, lead scientist for the Mars Exploration program, told reporters.
The US space agency said the orbiter circling Mars since 2006 had monitored numerous instances of what appeared to be water flows occuring in several locations during the Martian spring and summer.
Time-sequence imagery of the Newton crater in the southern mid-latitude region showed finger-like markings spreading along several steep slopes and then fading again once colder temperatures move in.
"The best explanation we have for these observations so far is flow of briny water, although this study does not prove that," said Alfred McEwen of the University of Arizona's Lunar and Planetary Laboratory.
"It's a mystery now, but I think it's a solvable mystery with further observations and experiments," said McEwen, lead author of a study explaining the findings in the journal Science.
Nasa experts are still not sure if what they have witnessed is actually water flowing on Mars, where no liquid water has been found to date.
"By comparison with Earth, it's hard to imagine they are formed by anything other than fluid seeping down slopes," said Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter project scientist Richard Zurek of Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
"The question is whether this is happening on Mars and, if so, why just in these particular places."
McEwen, principal investigator for the orbiter's High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) that captured the images, said the orbiter recorded "thousands" of the flows over the past three years at seven locations.
It had identified 20 other possible sites of similar flows, he said.
McEwen cautioned that the water flows remained "circumstantial," and said scientists "lack that direct confirmation of water" from other instruments studying the planet, but hope it will be confirmed in future missions and experiments.
In any case, it does not appear that scientists are seeing anything akin to a gushing river on Mars, but more likely a subterranean movement.
"The flows are not dark because of being wet," McEwen said. "They are dark for some other reason," possibly because the briny water runs below the surface and is altering the land's appearance in a way that makes it look dark.
Frozen water has been detected in some of Mars's higher latitudes, and other evidence has suggested that water interacted with the Martian surface throughout the planet's history.
Nasa has placed a renewed focus on Mars, with the 30-year space shuttle program now over and efforts under way to build a spacecraft capable of carrying humans to the red planet by 2030.
The space agency's unmanned Curiosity rover, also known as the Mars Science Laboratory, is due to explore a mountain inside the Gale Crater on Mars that should reveal whether signs of life ever existed on the red planet.
The largest US rover ever, built at a cost of $2.5 billion dollars, it is set to launch later this year and land in August 2012.
AFP | Aug 5, 2011, 01.52AM IST
WASHINGTON: Nasa scientists announced on Thursday that they had found the first evidence of flowing water on Mars.
If confirmed, the evidence gathered by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter would be the first discovery of active liquid water in the ground on the red planet.
"We have found repeated and predictable evidence suggesting water flowing on Mars," Michael Meyer, lead scientist for the Mars Exploration program, told reporters.
The US space agency said the orbiter circling Mars since 2006 had monitored numerous instances of what appeared to be water flows occuring in several locations during the Martian spring and summer.
Time-sequence imagery of the Newton crater in the southern mid-latitude region showed finger-like markings spreading along several steep slopes and then fading again once colder temperatures move in.
"The best explanation we have for these observations so far is flow of briny water, although this study does not prove that," said Alfred McEwen of the University of Arizona's Lunar and Planetary Laboratory.
"It's a mystery now, but I think it's a solvable mystery with further observations and experiments," said McEwen, lead author of a study explaining the findings in the journal Science.
Nasa experts are still not sure if what they have witnessed is actually water flowing on Mars, where no liquid water has been found to date.
"By comparison with Earth, it's hard to imagine they are formed by anything other than fluid seeping down slopes," said Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter project scientist Richard Zurek of Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
"The question is whether this is happening on Mars and, if so, why just in these particular places."
McEwen, principal investigator for the orbiter's High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) that captured the images, said the orbiter recorded "thousands" of the flows over the past three years at seven locations.
It had identified 20 other possible sites of similar flows, he said.
McEwen cautioned that the water flows remained "circumstantial," and said scientists "lack that direct confirmation of water" from other instruments studying the planet, but hope it will be confirmed in future missions and experiments.
In any case, it does not appear that scientists are seeing anything akin to a gushing river on Mars, but more likely a subterranean movement.
"The flows are not dark because of being wet," McEwen said. "They are dark for some other reason," possibly because the briny water runs below the surface and is altering the land's appearance in a way that makes it look dark.
Frozen water has been detected in some of Mars's higher latitudes, and other evidence has suggested that water interacted with the Martian surface throughout the planet's history.
Nasa has placed a renewed focus on Mars, with the 30-year space shuttle program now over and efforts under way to build a spacecraft capable of carrying humans to the red planet by 2030.
The space agency's unmanned Curiosity rover, also known as the Mars Science Laboratory, is due to explore a mountain inside the Gale Crater on Mars that should reveal whether signs of life ever existed on the red planet.
The largest US rover ever, built at a cost of $2.5 billion dollars, it is set to launch later this year and land in August 2012.
Why sarkari Lokpal is a big dud-Aug 5, 2011
Why sarkari Lokpal is a big dud
(WE HAVE HEARD ANNAJI AND HIS TEAM,WHY THIS SARKARI LOKPAL IS A DUD AND A JOKEPAL.LETS HEAR GOVERNMENT'S COMMENT AND POINTS WHY THEY WANT TO KEEP OUT EACH AND EVERY AUTHORITY WHICH ARE PRONE TO BRIBRY,SCAMS AND CORRUPTION OUT OF LOKPAL AMBIT!! WHY JANLOKPAL IS NOT ACCEPTABLE???...VT)
TNN | Aug 5, 2011, 07.55AM IST
NEW DELHI: Unlike other legislations, the proposed Lokpal law is different. It concerns the conduct of politicians and bureaucrats - the very people who are claiming the right to give the law its final shape. It's an obvious conflict of interest. That is why TOI has lent support to Team Anna and tried to create a public debate on the Lokpal's office, writes Manoj Mitta. The debate is still not over. In fact, it will not be until we have an effective law that checks corruption. So, even as the Lokpal Bill is introduced in Parliament, TOI takes a close look at the draft - and finds it weak and riddled with loopholes. The government's decision to go ahead with it without meeting Team Anna's objections is a cause for worry. The changes in the latest draft, cleared by the Cabinet last week, have not yet addressed the conflict of interest underlying the Bill meant to create a robust anti-corruption regime. The country is exercised like never before over probity issues. And, if the Bill goes through in its present form, it will be an opportunity lost to set things right. The current legislation remains fraught with deficiencies that could defeat the very objective of this important legislation. Here are the key deficiencies
Hearing before FIR
Civil society has demanded that the Lokpal should not be required to take anybody's sanction for initiating an investigation or filing a charge sheet against any public servant. The Bill allows this but while doing so skews the process of investigation heavily in favour of the accused.
In a radical innovation, the Bill forbids the Lokpal to register any FIR without first giving a hearing to the accused. This is contrary to the general criminal law under which the police are obliged to register a case simply on the basis of information suggesting the commission of a cognizable offence.
As if its additional requirement of giving a hearing to the accused at the pre-FIR stage is not bad enough, the Bill stipulates that the Lokpal, on completing the investigation, should give another hearing to the accused before filing a charge sheet in court. This is again a gratuitous safeguard.
In its anxiety to allay the fears of crooked babus and netas, the legislation spares no thought for the increased risk to whistleblowers on account of such premature disclosure of evidence to the accused. Worse, the Bill provides that a cross case could be filed against the complainant and he would be liable to be punished severely if the complaint was found "false and frivolous or vexatious". The supreme irony lies in the provision that the minimum jail term for a "false or frivolous" complaint is two years, while the public servant in the event of conviction for corruption could get as little as six months.
In fact, such provisions make you wonder whether the Lokpal envisaged by the government can be effective at all. For starters, this entire provision must be re-opened and debated.
Too many exemptions
Reference to India's recent ratification of the United Nations Convention against Corruption (UNCAC) has been removed from the Bill's preamble. According to a note accompanying the legislation, this was meant to prevent the courts from widening the Lokpal's scope. After all, the Bill containing various exemptions falls far short of standards set by UNCAC, which envisions a uniform anti-corruption regime for public servants of all categories (ministers, bureaucrats, judges, legislators). Besides keeping judges out of the Lokpal's remit, it exempts allegations of corruptions against MPs for their conduct in Parliament. And out of the country's 1.2 crore government servants, it covers only 65,000 (0.5%) as Lokpal has been provided jurisdiction only over Group-A Central government employees.
Removal of chairperson and members
The proposal by the five ministers on the joint drafting committee was that the chairperson and Lokpal members were liable to be removed on the basis of a Supreme Court inquiry following a reference made by the President. This has since been amended so that such references can be made by the President not just at the instance of the government but also on a petition signed by at least 100 MPs or on a petition submitted by a citizen where a prima facie case is made out. Since the President's consent remains a pre-condition for the Supreme Court inquiry, this effectively means that no member of the Lokpal can ever be held accountable without the government's nod. Not exactly a recipe for fostering the independence of the institution.
Hitting back at civil society
One of the most astounding features of the earlier draft was to bring NGOs, societies and trusts under the Lokpal's original jurisdiction. This meant that, in a departure from norm, a corruption case could be made out by the Lokpal even when there was no involvement of a public servant. The accused could simply be private persons accused of embezzling NGO funds, irrespective of whether they were funded by the government or registered or not. The latest draft mitigates this controversial provision to some extent by clarifying that smaller NGOs having annual income below the minimum limit prescribed by the government would be exempt from the Lokpal's ambit. Playing it safe, the Bill adds that Lokpal cannot touch bodies established for religious purposes.
Jurisdiction of investigation wing
Given its devious intent to bring NGOs too under its ambit, the latest Bill makes provision for the Centre to obtain the consent of the states so that the Lokpal's investigation wing can have jurisdiction over private citizens across the country. The note accompanying the Bill says, "As police is a state subject, it was felt that we should provide for a consent mechanism to extend the jurisdiction of the investigation officers to the state concerned." Given that state government employees can come only under their own Lok Ayukta, the unmistakable target of this amendment is the lakhs of people associated with those NGOs, societies and trusts covered by the latest draft of the Bill.
Divested of contempt powers
The version prepared by the five ministers in the joint drafting committee vested Lokpal with contempt powers so that it could take action against public servants who did not cooperate with its inquiry or investigation. But the draft cleared by the Cabinet a month later omits this salutary provision. The justification offered for the downgrade was that Lokpal was anyway not a court or tribunal to enjoy contempt powers.
Keeping out the PM
The most high-profile change made in its latest draft of course relates to the question whether the Prime Minister could be made accountable to Lokpal. The draft brought out by the five ministers in June said that Lokpal would have jurisdiction over "any person who is or has been a minister of the Union other than the Prime Minister". Responding to the uproar over such a blanket exemption, the government in its final draft proposed that he too come under Lokpal's oversight - but only "after he has demitted the office of the Prime Minister".
Size of Lokpal
The Bill shrinks the proposed probity body from 11 members to nine. "It was felt that an 11-member Lokpal will be too large," is all that the government offers by way of explanation. It could also have been to get away from the number that was originally proposed by Team Anna. This downsizing proposal is just another signal of the government's rather modest conception of Lokpal.
Eligibility criteria
The earlier Bill (prepared by five government members of the drafting committee) displayed courage in suggesting that the chairman of Lokpal could be an eminent person of long standing from diverse fields ("public affairs, administrative law and policy, academics, commerce and industry, law, finance or management"). But the latest Bill (cleared by the Cabinet) plays it safe stipulating that the chairman would have to be a serving or retired Supreme Court judge or Chief Justice of India. The judiciary is set to dominate Lokpal as half of its other eight members are also required to have a judicial background.
Selection committee composition
Under the earlier Bill, a 10-member selection panel was packed with authorities from within the state structure (from the Prime Minister to a high court chief justice). The only slot left in it for civil society was reserved, curiously, for the National Academy of Sciences president or the senior-most "national professor". The latest Bill provides two civil society slots in a nine-member selection committee: One for a jurist, the other an eminent person. But both are Union government nominees.
Bar on employment after tenure
On ceasing to hold office, the Lokpal chairperson and members are barred from any further employment under the government. The earlier Bill also barred them forever from contesting any election of President or Vice-President or to Parliament or state legislatures. The new Bill however reduces the restriction to five years. Reason: The government found that the permanent restriction originally proposed by five of its ministers was "not fair and reasonable".
Investigating officer needn't be a cop
While the earlier draft said the investigating officer should not be below the rank of deputy superintendent of police, the current draft extends that authority to other officers of equivalent rank. The rationale is that corruption cases could do with investigators from other disciplines such as income tax, customs and audit. This is one of the few amendments that are unexceptionable.
Accused can inspect documents
Under criminal law, an accused is not entitled to any evidence till the investigating agency files a charge sheet against him on the completion of probe. But the latest Lokpal Bill allows him to inspect documents and obtain copies right at the preliminary stage when an investigation is proposed to be initiated by the ombudsman.
Citizens' charter dropped
The earlier Bill enjoined every department to come up with a citizens' charter spelling out its commitments relating to delivery of services or fulfilment of objectives. As a corollary, every department was required to designate a public grievance redressal officer to whom any aggrieved person may file a complaint for non-compliance of the citizens' charter. Team Anna demanded that a violation of the charter should carry sanctions. But, rather than providing teeth to it, the latest Bill drops the charter altogether. The message clearly is that inefficiency cannot be equated with corruption and so there is no need to give a statutory status to the citizens' charter.
(WE HAVE HEARD ANNAJI AND HIS TEAM,WHY THIS SARKARI LOKPAL IS A DUD AND A JOKEPAL.LETS HEAR GOVERNMENT'S COMMENT AND POINTS WHY THEY WANT TO KEEP OUT EACH AND EVERY AUTHORITY WHICH ARE PRONE TO BRIBRY,SCAMS AND CORRUPTION OUT OF LOKPAL AMBIT!! WHY JANLOKPAL IS NOT ACCEPTABLE???...VT)
TNN | Aug 5, 2011, 07.55AM IST
NEW DELHI: Unlike other legislations, the proposed Lokpal law is different. It concerns the conduct of politicians and bureaucrats - the very people who are claiming the right to give the law its final shape. It's an obvious conflict of interest. That is why TOI has lent support to Team Anna and tried to create a public debate on the Lokpal's office, writes Manoj Mitta. The debate is still not over. In fact, it will not be until we have an effective law that checks corruption. So, even as the Lokpal Bill is introduced in Parliament, TOI takes a close look at the draft - and finds it weak and riddled with loopholes. The government's decision to go ahead with it without meeting Team Anna's objections is a cause for worry. The changes in the latest draft, cleared by the Cabinet last week, have not yet addressed the conflict of interest underlying the Bill meant to create a robust anti-corruption regime. The country is exercised like never before over probity issues. And, if the Bill goes through in its present form, it will be an opportunity lost to set things right. The current legislation remains fraught with deficiencies that could defeat the very objective of this important legislation. Here are the key deficiencies
Hearing before FIR
Civil society has demanded that the Lokpal should not be required to take anybody's sanction for initiating an investigation or filing a charge sheet against any public servant. The Bill allows this but while doing so skews the process of investigation heavily in favour of the accused.
In a radical innovation, the Bill forbids the Lokpal to register any FIR without first giving a hearing to the accused. This is contrary to the general criminal law under which the police are obliged to register a case simply on the basis of information suggesting the commission of a cognizable offence.
As if its additional requirement of giving a hearing to the accused at the pre-FIR stage is not bad enough, the Bill stipulates that the Lokpal, on completing the investigation, should give another hearing to the accused before filing a charge sheet in court. This is again a gratuitous safeguard.
In its anxiety to allay the fears of crooked babus and netas, the legislation spares no thought for the increased risk to whistleblowers on account of such premature disclosure of evidence to the accused. Worse, the Bill provides that a cross case could be filed against the complainant and he would be liable to be punished severely if the complaint was found "false and frivolous or vexatious". The supreme irony lies in the provision that the minimum jail term for a "false or frivolous" complaint is two years, while the public servant in the event of conviction for corruption could get as little as six months.
In fact, such provisions make you wonder whether the Lokpal envisaged by the government can be effective at all. For starters, this entire provision must be re-opened and debated.
Too many exemptions
Reference to India's recent ratification of the United Nations Convention against Corruption (UNCAC) has been removed from the Bill's preamble. According to a note accompanying the legislation, this was meant to prevent the courts from widening the Lokpal's scope. After all, the Bill containing various exemptions falls far short of standards set by UNCAC, which envisions a uniform anti-corruption regime for public servants of all categories (ministers, bureaucrats, judges, legislators). Besides keeping judges out of the Lokpal's remit, it exempts allegations of corruptions against MPs for their conduct in Parliament. And out of the country's 1.2 crore government servants, it covers only 65,000 (0.5%) as Lokpal has been provided jurisdiction only over Group-A Central government employees.
Removal of chairperson and members
The proposal by the five ministers on the joint drafting committee was that the chairperson and Lokpal members were liable to be removed on the basis of a Supreme Court inquiry following a reference made by the President. This has since been amended so that such references can be made by the President not just at the instance of the government but also on a petition signed by at least 100 MPs or on a petition submitted by a citizen where a prima facie case is made out. Since the President's consent remains a pre-condition for the Supreme Court inquiry, this effectively means that no member of the Lokpal can ever be held accountable without the government's nod. Not exactly a recipe for fostering the independence of the institution.
Hitting back at civil society
One of the most astounding features of the earlier draft was to bring NGOs, societies and trusts under the Lokpal's original jurisdiction. This meant that, in a departure from norm, a corruption case could be made out by the Lokpal even when there was no involvement of a public servant. The accused could simply be private persons accused of embezzling NGO funds, irrespective of whether they were funded by the government or registered or not. The latest draft mitigates this controversial provision to some extent by clarifying that smaller NGOs having annual income below the minimum limit prescribed by the government would be exempt from the Lokpal's ambit. Playing it safe, the Bill adds that Lokpal cannot touch bodies established for religious purposes.
Jurisdiction of investigation wing
Given its devious intent to bring NGOs too under its ambit, the latest Bill makes provision for the Centre to obtain the consent of the states so that the Lokpal's investigation wing can have jurisdiction over private citizens across the country. The note accompanying the Bill says, "As police is a state subject, it was felt that we should provide for a consent mechanism to extend the jurisdiction of the investigation officers to the state concerned." Given that state government employees can come only under their own Lok Ayukta, the unmistakable target of this amendment is the lakhs of people associated with those NGOs, societies and trusts covered by the latest draft of the Bill.
Divested of contempt powers
The version prepared by the five ministers in the joint drafting committee vested Lokpal with contempt powers so that it could take action against public servants who did not cooperate with its inquiry or investigation. But the draft cleared by the Cabinet a month later omits this salutary provision. The justification offered for the downgrade was that Lokpal was anyway not a court or tribunal to enjoy contempt powers.
Keeping out the PM
The most high-profile change made in its latest draft of course relates to the question whether the Prime Minister could be made accountable to Lokpal. The draft brought out by the five ministers in June said that Lokpal would have jurisdiction over "any person who is or has been a minister of the Union other than the Prime Minister". Responding to the uproar over such a blanket exemption, the government in its final draft proposed that he too come under Lokpal's oversight - but only "after he has demitted the office of the Prime Minister".
Size of Lokpal
The Bill shrinks the proposed probity body from 11 members to nine. "It was felt that an 11-member Lokpal will be too large," is all that the government offers by way of explanation. It could also have been to get away from the number that was originally proposed by Team Anna. This downsizing proposal is just another signal of the government's rather modest conception of Lokpal.
Eligibility criteria
The earlier Bill (prepared by five government members of the drafting committee) displayed courage in suggesting that the chairman of Lokpal could be an eminent person of long standing from diverse fields ("public affairs, administrative law and policy, academics, commerce and industry, law, finance or management"). But the latest Bill (cleared by the Cabinet) plays it safe stipulating that the chairman would have to be a serving or retired Supreme Court judge or Chief Justice of India. The judiciary is set to dominate Lokpal as half of its other eight members are also required to have a judicial background.
Selection committee composition
Under the earlier Bill, a 10-member selection panel was packed with authorities from within the state structure (from the Prime Minister to a high court chief justice). The only slot left in it for civil society was reserved, curiously, for the National Academy of Sciences president or the senior-most "national professor". The latest Bill provides two civil society slots in a nine-member selection committee: One for a jurist, the other an eminent person. But both are Union government nominees.
Bar on employment after tenure
On ceasing to hold office, the Lokpal chairperson and members are barred from any further employment under the government. The earlier Bill also barred them forever from contesting any election of President or Vice-President or to Parliament or state legislatures. The new Bill however reduces the restriction to five years. Reason: The government found that the permanent restriction originally proposed by five of its ministers was "not fair and reasonable".
Investigating officer needn't be a cop
While the earlier draft said the investigating officer should not be below the rank of deputy superintendent of police, the current draft extends that authority to other officers of equivalent rank. The rationale is that corruption cases could do with investigators from other disciplines such as income tax, customs and audit. This is one of the few amendments that are unexceptionable.
Accused can inspect documents
Under criminal law, an accused is not entitled to any evidence till the investigating agency files a charge sheet against him on the completion of probe. But the latest Lokpal Bill allows him to inspect documents and obtain copies right at the preliminary stage when an investigation is proposed to be initiated by the ombudsman.
Citizens' charter dropped
The earlier Bill enjoined every department to come up with a citizens' charter spelling out its commitments relating to delivery of services or fulfilment of objectives. As a corollary, every department was required to designate a public grievance redressal officer to whom any aggrieved person may file a complaint for non-compliance of the citizens' charter. Team Anna demanded that a violation of the charter should carry sanctions. But, rather than providing teeth to it, the latest Bill drops the charter altogether. The message clearly is that inefficiency cannot be equated with corruption and so there is no need to give a statutory status to the citizens' charter.
Indian module could be involved in Mumbai blasts, says Chidambaram
New Delhi, August 4, 2011
Indian module could be involved in Mumbai blasts, says Chidambaram
PTI
Home Minister P.Chidambaram comes out after attending a discusion during monsoon session at Parliament House, in New Delhi on Thursday.
The Hindu Home Minister P.Chidambaram comes out after attending a discusion during monsoon session at Parliament House, in New Delhi on Thursday. Photo Rajeev Bhatt
Opposition, NCP slam Govt for being “soft” on terrorism BJP’s charges will be answered in Parliament, says Chidambaram
Home Minister P. Chidambaram on Thursday said there were indications of involvement of Indian module in the July 13 Mumbai blasts that killed 26 people.
It is for the first time that the government has pointed towards the involvement of a home-grown terror group for the three explosions in the metropolis.
The Home Minister also said all over the world right wing fascist forces were on the rise and India was no exception to it.
“While no conclusion has been reached, all indications point to Indian module,” Mr. Chidambaram said about the Mumbai blasts, adding that perhaps it could be the same module that carried out a blast in the German Bakery in Pune last year.
He said that while there was a finger-pointing for every terror incident towards the neighbouring country, a clear reference to Pakistan, there was also an existence of home-grown terror modules as also right wing fascist forces.
“We cannot live in denial. We cannot close our eyes to facts. There are home-grown modules. They do not belong to one religion,” Mr. Chidambaram said.
He said the Pune and Mumbai blasts were “two major blots” in the last 32 months since he assumed the charge of Home Minister. “I accept it,” he said.
Mr. Chidambaram said another mistake was to point fingers at a particular religion whenever a bomb blast took place.
Describing the period from 2002 to 2008 as the worst phase of terrorism-related violence, Mr. Chidambaram said there was a “failure to recognise” the growth of SIMI and Indian Mujahideen in these years at the political and government level.
He said the security forces had so far smashed 51 terror modules in last two years. “We have successfully busted a number of modules.”
The Minister said terrorism had taken a new dimension and it not only affected the nation's security but also the nation's survival as one entity.
He said that India lived in the most troubled and vulnerable neighbourhood in the world as the epicentre of terrorism has shifted to Afghanistan and Pakistan from West Asia. “As long as the epicentre of terrorism is in this region, we continue to be under the shadow of terror and continue to be vulnerable,” he said.
Mr. Chidambaram said that there was considerable improvement in the intelligence machinery both at the State and at the Central level.
He said the Centre was receiving cooperation from Chief Ministers of all the States.
Indian module could be involved in Mumbai blasts, says Chidambaram
PTI
Home Minister P.Chidambaram comes out after attending a discusion during monsoon session at Parliament House, in New Delhi on Thursday.
The Hindu Home Minister P.Chidambaram comes out after attending a discusion during monsoon session at Parliament House, in New Delhi on Thursday. Photo Rajeev Bhatt
Opposition, NCP slam Govt for being “soft” on terrorism BJP’s charges will be answered in Parliament, says Chidambaram
Home Minister P. Chidambaram on Thursday said there were indications of involvement of Indian module in the July 13 Mumbai blasts that killed 26 people.
It is for the first time that the government has pointed towards the involvement of a home-grown terror group for the three explosions in the metropolis.
The Home Minister also said all over the world right wing fascist forces were on the rise and India was no exception to it.
“While no conclusion has been reached, all indications point to Indian module,” Mr. Chidambaram said about the Mumbai blasts, adding that perhaps it could be the same module that carried out a blast in the German Bakery in Pune last year.
He said that while there was a finger-pointing for every terror incident towards the neighbouring country, a clear reference to Pakistan, there was also an existence of home-grown terror modules as also right wing fascist forces.
“We cannot live in denial. We cannot close our eyes to facts. There are home-grown modules. They do not belong to one religion,” Mr. Chidambaram said.
He said the Pune and Mumbai blasts were “two major blots” in the last 32 months since he assumed the charge of Home Minister. “I accept it,” he said.
Mr. Chidambaram said another mistake was to point fingers at a particular religion whenever a bomb blast took place.
Describing the period from 2002 to 2008 as the worst phase of terrorism-related violence, Mr. Chidambaram said there was a “failure to recognise” the growth of SIMI and Indian Mujahideen in these years at the political and government level.
He said the security forces had so far smashed 51 terror modules in last two years. “We have successfully busted a number of modules.”
The Minister said terrorism had taken a new dimension and it not only affected the nation's security but also the nation's survival as one entity.
He said that India lived in the most troubled and vulnerable neighbourhood in the world as the epicentre of terrorism has shifted to Afghanistan and Pakistan from West Asia. “As long as the epicentre of terrorism is in this region, we continue to be under the shadow of terror and continue to be vulnerable,” he said.
Mr. Chidambaram said that there was considerable improvement in the intelligence machinery both at the State and at the Central level.
He said the Centre was receiving cooperation from Chief Ministers of all the States.
With Sonia Gandhi in the US for surgery,Sonia away, Rahul out to play/ Congress left in charge of Rahul Gandhi-04/08/2011
04/08/2011
Sonia away, Rahul(with others) out to play
GOOD WISHES TO HER.LETS SEE IN HER ABSENCE HOW RAHUL GANDHI WILL TACKLE ALL UPCOMING ISSUES--"SPECIALLY LOKPAL BILL AND PRICE RISE DISCUSSION WHICH ARE STILL GOING ON OTHER THEN 30 MORE BILLS.NATIONAL LAND AQUISITION BILL ARE IMPORTANT FOR HIS U.P ACTION AS WELL....CAN HE TACKLE IF ANY ISSUSE GO OUT OF CONTROL AND OUT OF PARLIAMENT??...LETS WAIT N WATCH!!!"
With Sonia Gandhi in the US for surgery, Congress left in charge of Rahul Gandhi
New Delhi: Congress president Sonia Gandhi was in "satisfactory" condition Thursday after undergoing surgery abroad, the party said, adding she will be out of India for two-three weeks.
She has formed a four-member group, including son and general secretary Rahul Gandhi, to look after party matters in her absence, Congress chief spokesperson Janardhan Dwivedi said.
The others are Defence Minister A.K. Antony, Dwivedi and Ahmed Patel.
"Sonia Gandhi has been recently diagnosed with a medical condition that requires surgery. On advice from her doctors, she has travelled abroad and is likely to be away for two to three weeks," Dwivedi said here.
Sonia away, Rahul out to play
Congress sources said she had an abdomen related ailment.
Dwivedi said: "We have information that the surgery was successful and her condition is satisfactory."
He said Sonia Gandhi sent a communication forming the four-member group to look after Congress affairs.
A party leader said the Congress headquarters had received reports of prayer meetings and 'havans' conducted in different parts of the country, wishing Gandhi a speedy recovery.
Source: IANS
Sonia away, Rahul(with others) out to play
GOOD WISHES TO HER.LETS SEE IN HER ABSENCE HOW RAHUL GANDHI WILL TACKLE ALL UPCOMING ISSUES--"SPECIALLY LOKPAL BILL AND PRICE RISE DISCUSSION WHICH ARE STILL GOING ON OTHER THEN 30 MORE BILLS.NATIONAL LAND AQUISITION BILL ARE IMPORTANT FOR HIS U.P ACTION AS WELL....CAN HE TACKLE IF ANY ISSUSE GO OUT OF CONTROL AND OUT OF PARLIAMENT??...LETS WAIT N WATCH!!!"
With Sonia Gandhi in the US for surgery, Congress left in charge of Rahul Gandhi
New Delhi: Congress president Sonia Gandhi was in "satisfactory" condition Thursday after undergoing surgery abroad, the party said, adding she will be out of India for two-three weeks.
She has formed a four-member group, including son and general secretary Rahul Gandhi, to look after party matters in her absence, Congress chief spokesperson Janardhan Dwivedi said.
The others are Defence Minister A.K. Antony, Dwivedi and Ahmed Patel.
"Sonia Gandhi has been recently diagnosed with a medical condition that requires surgery. On advice from her doctors, she has travelled abroad and is likely to be away for two to three weeks," Dwivedi said here.
Sonia away, Rahul out to play
Congress sources said she had an abdomen related ailment.
Dwivedi said: "We have information that the surgery was successful and her condition is satisfactory."
He said Sonia Gandhi sent a communication forming the four-member group to look after Congress affairs.
A party leader said the Congress headquarters had received reports of prayer meetings and 'havans' conducted in different parts of the country, wishing Gandhi a speedy recovery.
Source: IANS
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