I am sooo sorry that I made hasty comments expressing my
disappointments. Glad though that things are laid out in the right
perspective.
>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.
** Yes, yes. It is ground breaking no doubt. Particularly to all
those who have been sleeping.
>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.
*** How true! These Assamese folks know only how to go on blaming
the world for their woes, while they should know the enemy is
themselves. All they need to do is take the RIGHT ACTIONS.
Now a word of caution here: There is no need to get antsy ( like
yours truly) on what those "right actions" might be. People
ought to use their imaginations. There is no single right answer to
each and every act of corruption after all. Just because DNB alluded
to sharing these, we cannot expect to be spoon-fed. He might have
gotten carried away by the outrages at ASEB and GMC, forgetting all
about the prescriptions. We ought have patience. After all
"bhukute kol-tw nopoke nohoy" ( Rome was not built in a day,
was it?)
>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.
*** It is my bad that I missed out on the main idea. Thanks for
pointing it out. I would be more careful next time.
But as a 'prayosittwa for my paap' ( penalty for my sins) I
hereby attempt to explain what I learnt, schoolboy fashion:
Of all the above, this Odhom's guess is that ALL of the above has
been practised by various segments of people in Assam. The only method
that is rare is the very last one.
Why is that so? Is it because of lax Assamese laws, lazy and
corrupt Assamese judges, or money-hungry and unethical Assamese
lawyers, or corrupt Assam IAS officers serving as DCs, magistrates,
commissioners and so forth?
The answer to this must be a deep dark, intellectually
unfathomable mystery. Why else would so many of these bright Assam
Netters get stumped by it every time?
Tsk, tsk!
At 7:18 PM -0500 4/24/05, Barua25 wrote:
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 -----
From: Ram SarangapaniTo: [email protected]Sent: Sunday, April 24, 2005 2:03 AMSubject: [Assam] Another great article from DNB - The SentinelThis 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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