Right Minister, Wrong Ministry

Performing Ministers are a rare breed. They are like an oasis in the middle of a desert. When you find water in a desert, you would be a fool to throw it away.

Back in the days prior to independence, politicians were looked up at and considered worthy role models. The politicians who fought for our independence were an educated lot. Not only did they have a clean image, but also the people’s admiration. But after nearly six decades of sleaze, their image has been damaged completely. So much so that unlike our judicial system where a person is innocent until proven guilty, our politicians are considered corrupt until proven honest. That is, if you enter politics you are labelled dishonest by default. APJ Abdul Kalam was asking a rhetorical question when he said, “Indian parents want their children to be doctors and engineers but not politicians. Why?”

This is why when you know you have got a performing minister in the cabinet, you ought to make the most of that person for the country’s development. And this is precisely what has not happened in the case of Jairam Ramesh.

IIT, Carnegie Melon and MIT educated, our Minister for Environment and Forests has attracted controversy like a flower attracts bees ever since he took office. Earlier, nobody used to take the Environment Ministry seriously. Since he has taken over he has added teeth to the ministry. But I say he has added more teeth than was necessary.

He started his tenure by rejecting the idea of the interlinking of rivers citing environmental noncompliance. This could have been a valid reason except for one little aberration – that Gujarat has already interlinked its rivers. Not only that, but it is also reaping the benefits without any facing any environmental catastrophe that Jairam Ramesh would have predicted. It is no coincidence that cotton farmers in Gujarat are competing with the Chinese products in the international market whereas just 400 kilometres down south, the cotton farmers in Vidarbha, Maharashtra are committing suicide.

Jairam Ramesh’s ministry has also issued an order suspending the ongoing work on the Maheshwar Dam on the Narmada river in Madhya Pradesh. Again the reason given was environmental damage and rehabilitation inconsistencies. Not that these issues are unimportant, they are not – but the benefits of the project far outweigh the drawbacks. The MP Chief Minister, Shivraj Singh Chauhan says, “Stoppage of the project at this juncture will result in loss of 7.2 lakhs units of power per day starting in 2010 “ This is something a power deficient state like MP can ill afford to do – if it is to progress and eliminate poverty.

Perhaps the most hearbreaking case is of the Maharashtra Hybrid Seeds Company also known as Mahyco.  Having produced hybrids of cotton, sorghum, sunflower and wheat, it is currently researching improvements to more than 30 crops. The development of genetically modified eggplant, known locally as BtBrinjal, was the latest in this string of innovations. Mahyco's scientists toiled for years to figure out how to kill the pest, Brinjal Fruit and Shoot Borer, which wipes out 30% to 40% of India's annual crop. Mahyco conducted 25 environmental bio safety studies supervised by independent and government agencies to ensure that its product had the same nutritional value and is compositionally identical to regular eggplant; finally, it did rigorous field trials in collaboration with two Indian agricultural universities.

Yet on Feb. 9, Environment and Forests Minister Jairam Ramesh stopped the seed's introduction – again privileging environmental concerns and ignoring the government's own regulatory process, the committee of scientists who had approved Bt Brinjal after nine years of intensive trials.

Where Jairam Ramesh should have acted with toughness, he chose to be soft. On his only trip to Bhopal as minister, Ramesh uttered this quote on the situation in Bhopal, a remark that defies any limits on its sheer insensitivity, “I held the toxic waste in my hand. I am still alive and not coughing. It’s 25 years after the gas tragedy. Let us move ahead.” To say such a thing for a tragedy killing nearly 20,000 and maiming over a 100,000 more, the  repercussion of which are still felt by the people living in those slums is at best entirely inappropriate and at worst downright condescending.

There is also news coming in that Ramesh has rejected the coal ministry’s demand — backed by the PMO — to increase mining areas by 30 per cent, saying only five per cent is possible. Most of India’s power need are met by coal and till the time alternatives are found, India would need to produce as much power as it can from coal – and while India is the 3^rd biggest producer of coal, it is also the 3^rd biggest importer of coal – such is the demand supply gap.

While environmental concerns should be given a top priority, India cannot afford to lag behind in the Energy race. In a global scenario where the developed countries are the ones responsible for Global Warming and are failing to take complete responsibility (USA has still not signed the Kyoto Protocol), Jairam Ramesh’s headstrong leadership in the Environment Ministry can prove to be a handicap to India’s progress.

When a performing minister in a non performing government performs so well that a country’s progress suffers, you have an irony of ironies. Which is why Jairam Ramesh is the right minister in the wrong ministry.

The Resources Paradox

                                 
Richard Auty, in his 1993 publication Sustaining Development in Mineral Economies: The Resource Curse Thesis first used the term the Resource Curse to describe how countries rich in natural resources were unable to use that wealth to boost their economies and how, counter-intuitively, these countries had lower economic growth than countries without an abundance of natural resources.

The term "resource curse" refers to an economic phenomenon in which a dependence on natural resources can skew a country's political, investment, and education priorities, so that everything revolves around who controls those resources and who gets how much money from them and not on productivity and innovation that are essential for a country to maintain its competitive edge.

I have often found this phenomenon unexpectedly true. A great example is the one of Japan and Africa. Africa is the world’s most resource rich continent. It has a large quantity of natural resources including diamonds, gold, iron, cobalt, uranium, copper, bauxite, silver and most importantly oil and petroleum. On paper this looks like the dream scenario for wealth generation, yet Africa is the most underdeveloped and the poorest of all the continents in the world. In contrast Japan, a mountainous, volcanic island country, has very few  resources and is the world’s second largest economy.

This paradoxical phenomenon is true even in the case of India. The majority of our resources are in states like Jharkhand, Chattishgarh, Orissa, Bihar and MP. But these are the worst performing and most backward states in India – forming a part of BIMARU – (the term economic analyst Ashish Bose coined in the late 80’s to highlight the never ending ‘sickness’ of economic development in these states.) A state like Gujarat which has no resources to speak of is the biggest and fastest growing state in India while Maharashtra, Karnataka and Tamil Nadu are not far behind. This is a classic case where India’s resources are in the east and centre while her wealth is in the West and South.

So what gives rise to this seemingly contradictory phenomenon?

When a country is excessively rich in a certain resource and knows it can make money off it, it stops challenging itself to innovate new products and as such a staleness sets in. This staleness is fine as long as the resource exists, but once it runs out – and there are no alternatives in place - BAM! You have a crisis in your hands. What also happens is that the energy of the citizens is then spent in getting hold of the resources instead of building a knowledge base – and as a result the country’s educational, scientific and democratic systems falter.

Japan knew exactly that it had no oil wells to dig – so instead its people dug in their own brains – and came up with world beating companies such as Sony and Toyota. Likewise, Facebook was not created because a large mine of diamond was unearthed, but because Mark Zuckerberg unearthed a large mine of new ideas in his brain. On every such occasion, people came up with new ideas because they had to – that is, the market dictated that something new and innovative be found – whereas in the case of oil rich countries all you had to do was dig and sell.

This is also why it is no coincidence that the most petrol rich states are also the least democratic states. Oil-backed regimes that do not have to tax their people for revenue—because they can just drill an oil well and sell the oil abroad—also do not have to listen to their people or represent their wishes. Because the money is being pumped in from the oil exports, they do not feel the pressure to reform their systems and make themselves more accountable. Bahrain was the first Persian Gulf country to discover oil and also the first country to start running out of it. Consequently, Bahrain reformed its political system and was the first Gulf country to hold a free and fair parliamentary election, in which women could run and vote.

While the Resource Curse thesis has no proof, and there are definitely countries out there that are exceptions (most notably USA), it nonetheless offers food for thought to countries that do not have much resources as well as those that have plenty – for what truly are the pre-requisites for economic development.

No the WMDs aren't in Iraq, they're on Twitter!

When George W Bush ransacked Iraq back in 2003, it was on the pretext that the country had acquired Weapons of Mass Destruction - otherwise known as WMDs. While the country was destroyed and America secured its oil supplies, no WMDs were eventually found.  So what became of those WMDs? Well thanks to Lalit Modi, we now know that you need not be in Iraq to find WMDs, you just have to be on twitter.

Twitter? What is that? For those that may be slightly challenged in this age of online social networking, twitter is an online community where you get to send and read tweets of different people. And what are tweets? Well in short, they are 140 characters 'long' messages that were originally started as a way of keeping one’s friends and family informed about ‘what you were upto’

Just how powerful can a 140 character long tweet be?

Consider this tweet that Lalit Modi posted in reply to a certain xxxDEVxxx on the 11th of April at 4:31 PM:

"I was told by him not to get into who owns rendezvous.Specially Sunanda Pushkar.Why?The same has been minuted in my records”

What followed this seemingly harmless tweet was complete mayhem. This is how the events panned out:

The opposition, keen on picking up any issue that could hurt the government, publicly pillored Shashi Tharoor. Tharoor himself gave an invalid excuse saying Sunanda Pushkar got the sweat equity in the franchisee for her role as a marketing executive, forgetting that, as MJ Akbar puts, “You do not get sweat equity in perpetuity, which means free and forever, with a starting value of Rs 70 crore, for being an unknown executive of a Dubai company.” The opposition did not buy this argument and the government was forced to accept Tharoor’s resignation –  thereby this becoming the first instance where a minister in the government had to resign for alleged corruption ever since the UPA came into power in 2004.

Having cleaned its own house, the government then trained its guns on Lalit Modi, going through every financial transaction of his. Meanwhile, nationwide raids were carried out on the IPL franchisees to let the public know the government was acting tough. The IPL Commissioner was eventually suspended and the UPA’s ally partner the NCP was brought into the equation as well. Charges were levelled against Sharad Pawar and Praful Patel, and it was just a reminder from the Congress to the NCP as to just who was the boss.

But it did not end there. Somehow it was leaked to the media that Sharad Pawar's phone was tapped at the height of the IPL controversy, including his “conversation” with Lalit Modi. Further reports that followed suggested that this was just the tip of the iceberg and that there was a much wider phone tapping excercise that was going on. This got the opposition united and a cut motion was introduced in the parliament. But during the cut motion, the BJP’s ally in Jharkhand, the JMM voted for the government. This got the BJP worked up and it then decided to withdraw support to the Jharkhand government. The JMM realizing its mistake apologized to the BJP and begged for forgiveness, to which the BJP has said it will consider. And so, as things stand today, the fate of the Jharkhand government hangs in balance.

There is no doubt that had Lalit Modi foreseen what was to follow his tweet he would not have tweeted in the first place. But it’s too late for him now and nothing can be done. This is just the price you pay when you try to become bigger than the system. Lalit Modi thought he could get away by splashing mud on the Kochi franchisee's face, instead he ended up splashing mud on everyone's faces including his own. As for Mr. Tharoor, well it can be now said that he lived by the tweet and died by it.

No one has come out of this episode in shining light – not him, not the government, not the opposition, not the franchisees, not the BCCI, not the IPL and not even the game of cricket. It’s a gloomy episode and a sad state of affairs.

When a tweet from a BCCI vice president can topple a government in Jharkhand, you know the tweet can cause mass destruction. Now only if George Bush knew.

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On a lighter note -

Question: If Mayawati owned an IPL team, who would it be led by?

Answer: Dalit Modi!