This is another great article from DNB. I know many don't like to hear the truth about the rampant corruption GMC and ASEB, but DNB has not been forthright about it, but is also showing what the future would look like if the 'public' were to just close their eyes and let things slide by.
--Ram
The meek shall be homeless -II
WITH EYES WIDE OPEN
D. N. Bezboruah
Last week I had ended by saying that if we let the anti-social and criminal elements in our society have their way for ten more years they will dispossess all law-abiding citizens of their hearths and homes and banish the law for good. I was perhaps wrong about the ten years. Having started the process of selling Assam to Bangladesh already, they are in a tearing hurry to quit the scene of their treachery and disappear before anyone can get to them. So the process may take much less than we imagine.
The first thing to bear in mind is that Assam is too full of people who cannot make a decent living out of their education, their skills or their wits. They certainly cannot make a living out of their manual labour. This is not to say that everyone here falls in that category. What I wish to convey is that a majority of the people who are in politics or in any kind of political management belong to this class who must make a living out of crooked practices alone. The only problem is they think that this is what politics is all about. So they sincerely believe that hoodwinking the people and living off them like overgrown parasites is perfectly legitimate activity in a democratic society. And therein lies the danger to the law-abiding citizen. So if we do not have our eyes wide open to look into our tomorrows, we are going to be outwitted by people who are less educated, less honest and less industrious than we are. And they are going to win against good people because they are more determined, more united in crime and far more desperate. They have nothing else to depend on except their crookedness.
There are umpteen organizations that we can take up as examples to show how the crooked have always managed to defraud the honest and the law-abiding citizens. For the time being, we shall look at just two of them (or what were two organizations but have become six now). One is the Guwahati Municipal Corporation (GMC) and the other the former Assam State Electricity Board (ASEB) that has now been broken up into five organizations, the names of which I cannot remember. I do not have to tell anyone that the GMC is not exactly an organization full of saintly souls. Had it been so, the commercial wards of Fancy Bazar, Pan Bazar and Athgaon would not have managed to get away with paying a fraction of the municipal taxes that they owe to the GMC, they would not have managed to get by on the old absurd rates even after increasing the size of their holdings several times, they would not have managed to flout all the building bye-laws and they would not have escaped punishment for regularly pumping water from the water mains. We know all these activities that cause severe losses to the GMC are possible because there are more people within the GMC who think of their own pockets before they think of the GMC that has employed them. I salute the minority in the GMC who can claim, hand on heart, that they are not guilty, but I maintain that they have been undone by too many errant brothers. The GMC also has hundreds of conservancy staff who have drawn their salaries for years without doing any work at all. They have even managed to increase their salaries and allowances. And because they do not work and because the garbage of the city must be cleaned, the GMC has had to entrust the task of garbage clearance to contractors who must be paid separately even though the GMC is already paying its conservancy staff. This is an anti-national crime on the part of both the conservancy staff who draw their salaries without working as well on the part of the officers who allow this to happen. And in a democracy, an anti-national crime is an anti-people crime. In other words, those guilty of this crime are enemies of the people. And what are these enemies of the people up to now? They are very anxious to get all the Asian Development Bank and World Bank development loans that are being extended to the GMC. But they have no intentions of treating these loans as loans. They would rather treat them as grants and siphon out whatever is possible into their own coffers. But the ADB and the WB are not as lenient customers as the Central Government. They know how to arm-twist beneficiaries into returning loans. And when this happens, the GMC will start hiking taxes eight, nine or even ten times for no development work whatsoever. Middle-class taxpayers will be in no position to pay such taxes (and should not pay such taxes to subsidize pay without work) and will soon find that they will have to sell their property to pay municipal taxes! And those who have always got away with paying a fraction of their legitimate taxes will be the ones to buy up such property. This is the scenario that stares us in the face unless we wake up now to prevent what is on the agenda of the crooked ones. We must insist on the dismissal of those who draw salaries without work and the proper calculation and collection of taxes in the commercial wards of the city before there can be any talk of hiking taxes. We must collectively challenge unfair tax hikes in court and carry out a crusade against such tax hikes to subsidize payment of salaries without work. Incidentally, all political parties of the State will call such a crusade the handiwork of the Left, but that should not worry anyone because this is really just a complaint about the opportunities for easy money at the cost of the Assamese that would seem to have eluded them.
Then there is the Assam State Electricity Board (ASEB) or rather its five new avatars. The installed capacity of the ASEB was 514 MW, and at one time the ASEB had about 24,000 employees. Over 46 employees per MW of electricity generated and distributed must be a sort of record fit for the Guinness Book of World Records. But today the new avatars of the ASEB generate less than 120 MW. True, the number of employees has come down to about 17,000. But the number of employees per MW generated has gone up to a more adverse 141.66 or so. And what is the Assam Electricity Regulatory Commission (AERC) planning to do now? Why, it now envisages a 16 per cent return on equity for the new transmission companies of the ASEB. And yet, it was the same AERC that had turned down an appeal made by the ASEB for a three per cent return on equity made in the year 2002-03! What happens to the consumer? He ends up paying an increase of almost 50 per cent on power tariff. And he is being expected to do this when he knows that ministers in a democracy are getting free power, bureaucrats and officers getting away with paying a ridiculous pittance for the current they consume and a whole lot of power thieves are just stealing power. Some years ago, I did a report on power theft by two companies of Amingaon to the tune of Rs 2 crore. The senior officer of the ASEB who helped with this power theft was rewarded with a promotion just before he retired! And who is meekly subsidizing all this theft of power and the totally redundant number of employees? The meek, unquestioning bill-payers of course. It is the honest, regular bill-payers who end up paying for all the aberrations of the system and for everyone who gets electricity free or steals it. Should the law-abiding citizens not rise in protest to end such injustice and loot of power? They may choose to be as unheeding as they have been in the past. But in that case they are all working actively for their own funerals, and have no one else to blame.
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