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Keeping DNB's article in right
perspective:
Before we get too excited and make hasty
comments like Chandan, I would like to put DNB's article in its right
perspective from my personal view:
Please
remember that DNB ended his last article with the
following statement:
"Ten more years of inaction from
law-abiding citizens, ten more years of cowardice, and they will dispossess all
law-abiding citizens from their hearths and homes and banish the law for good.
How this will be don! e is what I want to talk about next week. But let us not
forget that long before this happens we can say goodbye to any form of civilized
living where there is even a semblance of security for
anyone."
In this second article, this is exactly
what he is trying to do. He is trying to go into more depth exactly how this
lawlessness is occurring in Assam. He is trying to show at least in two
such orgs: namely ASEB and Guwahati Municipal Corporation (GMC) how the
crooked have always managed to defraud the honest and the law-abiding citizens.
In both the cases, he is presenting a in depth reporting exactly how this is
being done. I wish in future he will come up with more instances of such
orgs like PWD and others.
Now why this is important. First, what DNB
is doing is probably the first time in last 50 years since independence
that a Newspaper is writing something in a investigating type article something
which relates to Assam.
The purpose: In my view, to bring the
Assamese public to be aware of the reality of things so that they donot go on
blaming the whole world for their problems and can try to take the right
action.
How this will be done: First understand
the problem. Take one problem at a time. Know the reality. Practice democracy.
Leran from other states. Take it to your heart that there is no miracle
like 'get rid of GOI, and the problem will be solved'. Because the problem is
outside of GOI. The problem is Assamese problem. DNB is writing about
Assam, he is not writing about Gujarat. Let us not try to generalize his
writing as problems for entire India.
One problem of the 'litikai' Assamese
media is that it is too concerned about what is happening in the rest of India
than what is happening in Assam. The Assamese media is too much interested
in Modi's Visa denial by the USA than exposing ASEB or GMC's corruption. I hope
that DNB's article will start a new trend and bring an awareness to
the Assamese media to discuss it problems in their
realities. (I find the same problem with many netters. We want to
get answers, like Chandan, without even discussing the
problems).
DNB has already given indications
about the root causes of the problems in Assam. It is the public apathy, a
hobo-diok attitude, the cowardice of the general law abiding public. He stated correctly, "...in these 57 years since Independence they (the law abiding
people) have done nothing at all to assert themselves or even to assert the
supremacy of the law.
I hope in future articles he will expose
more such orgs and would try to show how the public of Assam should try to solve
the problem.
Rajen Barua
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Sunday, April 24, 2005 2:03
AM
Subject: [Assam] Another great article
from DNB - The Sentinel
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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