Passionate About India

Recently, a much awaited bill with respect to our honorable members of Parliament was given a nod! The bill seeking a three-fold hike in MPs’ salaries from Rs 16,000 to Rs 50,000 and increase of 200 per cent in their allowances was passed. Besides this, the daily allowance of every MP when he or she attended Parliament during session was doubled; constituency allowance and office expense allowance also saw a two-fold growth; and conveyance allowance saw a four-fold growth. In all, this hike entails an annual expenditure of Rs 146 crores and an expenditure of Rs 118 crore on payment of arrears! However, a lot has been deliberated and written on this issue, and many arguments and counter arguments have been put forth with respect to this bill. Without getting into that argument, what I found most interesting was the manner in which the MPs built their consensus on this particular bill. It was amazing to observe how everyone got united, seemingly forgetting their personal and political di...

At least the apex court felt the need to slam the administration over clubbing housewives and women engaged in domestic work along with the categories containing prostitutes, beggars and prisoners within the Census; the court stated that such categorisation of women is totally irrational and insensitive. I kept wondering that in an era where even the slightest of gender discrimination is a highly inflammable and potent fuel for the media, activists and the civil society alike, how was it that such a slap on the face of the housewife (the Census categorization) had gone unnoticed – or should I say deliberately overlooked? Is it that in our progressive society today, the housewife has lost her identity or is it that her definition has been reduced to the manner in which she gets portrayed in TRP hungry daily soaps? Is it that she is being taken too much for granted? According to the Census, the logic behind clubbing housewives along with beggars and prostitutes stems from the fact that n...

When over 3,200 tourists were left stranded in Leh after a major cloudburst, a few private airline companies were planning to capitalise on the opportunity! Taking advantage of the situation, these airlines not only jacked up their fares for almost all flights flying out of Leh, but also viewed this crisis as an opportunity to squeeze the maximum from the already troubled tourists. What can be more shameful for a country that boasts about its service sector and weaves dreams around it? Airline companies knew it very well that there was no way out for these stranded people other than to accept their offer if they wanted to escape the deadly fury of nature. The flash floods had already killed around 150 people and over 500 had gone missing. Leave aside providing medical aid and discounted tickets (for those who couldn’t afford them), these airlines adopted a reverse method and demanded a higher fare holding the tourists at ransom! Going by media reports, two specific airlines jacked up t...

Recently, in terms of Gross Domestic Product (GDP), China toppled Japan to secure the second position globally, after US. In fact, China was very close to achieving this feat the last year itself, but fell short at the last moment. As per reports, if China keeps growing at its current pace, then by 2025, it should topple the US to become the largest economy of the world. Who could have imagined that an economy, which was languishing till about three decades back, has put itself in such formidable position? What is even more amazing is the fact that at a point in time when the world economy is still recovering from the global recession, China kept on growing. The growth has been such that in 2005, it first overtook Britain and France; then in 2007, it surpassed Germany to secure the position of the third largest economy of the world. It is not that the growth did not bring in iniquitous distribution of wealth; but then, at the same time, China has managed to pull out a staggering 600 mi...

Though a couple of months back I did write on this topic of Right to Food Act (refer April 18th, 2010 issue of TSI), I thought that one column could not have done justice to such a vast topic! Similar to what I wrote in my earlier column, there’s no doubt that the National Food Security Bill would come as a blessing for millions of families who sleep on empty stomachs; but the real question is, how will our authorities manage to mobilize this huge quantity of grains. Distribution in itself is a huge bottleneck, which I covered in detail in my previous column. But more than that, the other impediments are procurement and storage! Going by Food Security Bill recommendations, if the government has to distribute 420 kilograms of food grains to each of the 830 lakh BPL families every year, the government would require 350 lakh tonnes of grain every year! My skepticism behind the ‘success’ of this bill revolves around the current state of our Food Corporation of India (FCI) godowns! The obsc...

Since the past two weeks, insurance companies proffering health insurance (18 major ones, including four public sector entities) have announced their decision to discontinue the cashless facility. Their argument – the bills from the bigger hospitals are inflated, which in turn is hitting their bottom lines! Reports indicate that the annual premium collected by the health insurers is around Rs. 8,000 crores whereas the outflow in terms of settlements is around Rs. 12,000 crores. Their biggest contention is that certain hospitals do not subscribe to the package rates provided by the insuring companies. And so, as a result, insurance companies have de-listed almost 150 hospitals in Delhi and NCR alone from their list and have also stopped giving cashless facilities to the insured, as of now. In fact, there are four key stakeholders to this current imbroglio. The first is the group of insurance companies; the second are the large hospitals; the third are the state governments (as health is...

When I was growing up in one of the better schools of Delhi, it was most common to see teachers slapping students. Scales being broken on our knuckles was as common a sight too, and as early as in class fifth, though luckily I always escaped. When I reached class sixth, I wasn’t that lucky. In one of the sculpture classes, an assistant came around and with his hard hands, slapped me hard on my head, because in all my creative excitement, I was engaged in talking to my friend Partho Saha, who was someone I looked up to when it came to creativity (I still do; and today he heads most of our technology projects at Planman, along with being a Dean at IIPM). I was furious. I wanted to hit back. I controlled myself, but went back home and told my father that he must do something about it. He was from the same school of thought as mine – rather, I had inherited his points of view. So the next day, my father took me to the principal of our school – a legendary name in education those days, R S ...