OUR RIGHT TO KNOW IS NOT NEGOTIABLE

      These last few weeks have had a bizarre quality to them, almost a Kafkaesque experience, with doses of Lewis Carol, Ian Fleming, Spy vs Spy, John Le Carre and George Orwell thrown in. The two high profile cases with the Supreme Court- Rafale and CBI- are testing the patience of both the Supreme Court and the citizens of a country waiting with bated breath for some Daniels to finally come to judgment. Rafale is clearly headed nowhere, notwithstanding the judicial sound and fury, and will soon be lost in the cumulonimbus clouds of defense secrecy, Official Secrets Act, technicalities over weaponry, government filibustering and the residual blame game over Bofors. We will hear no more of it till the sonic boom heralding the arrival of the first of the 36 planes next year.

    The CBI case, however, is much closer to our hearts because these are the guys who can walk into your house tomorrow and arrest you for having doodled on a file fifteen years ago. And so we want to, and are fully entitled to, know exactly what is happening in that famous cage carpeted with sleuths owing allegiance to all kinds of shady political and dubious entities. The CBI at the moment most resembles a Mafia organisation, with different groups reporting to their own capos, keeping surveillance over each other, planting and destroying evidence, plunging knives into each other's backs and doing the other things that promote organisational ethos and bonding. India has not seen this kind of internecine blood- letting since the time of the Mughals, and therefore we naturally want to know more of this synthesis of Mughale Azam II and Godfather III. And we certainly don't want the Supreme Court to play the spoil sport with our right to know.

   On the 20th of November the Court took umbrage at media reports revealing the gist of the charges made by Manish Sinha, DIG in the CBI, against a Minister and a whole host of senior officers, alleging bribery, coercion, interference etc. in sensitive cases. It was also livid at the leaking of Mr.Alok Verma's reply to the CVC's show cause notice to him. So outraged was the Chief Justice, in fact, that he carpet bombed everyone in the court, refused to allow any lawyer to speak, abruptly adjourned the case without assigning any reason, and retreated to his chambers. With all due respect and deference, one cannot agree with this line of action.

   In the first place, it's been almost a month since Mr. Verma was removed unceremoniously in a midnight coup by the central govt.: he immediately filed a petition in the SC against this. Even a kid in a Bihar nursery school could see that his sacking ( it was no less) was illegal, it violated the amended provision of the Delhi Special Police Establishment Act and a Supreme Court order: he could have been divested of his position only by the collegium of the PM, CJI and Leader of the Opposition. A month later and there is still no decision on his petition, and one month of his remaining tenure of three months has already been lopped off. Instead, the Court has busied itself with investigating tangential matters such as the charges against him and his replies to them. The petitioner has been put in the dock! These issues could surely have been examined AFTER  settling the legality of his removal. The government appears to be slowly achieving through the back door what it should not have been allowed to do through the front. 

   The developments of 20th November, culminating in the CJI's angry outburst- " You don't deserve a hearing"- are even more disturbing and disappointing because they are legitimising what SC advocate Gautam Bhatia in a brilliant article in the 29th October issue of the Hindustan Times calls " the jurisprudence of the 'sealed cover.' " Mr. Bhatia's piece was penned in the context of the Rafale case but is equally pertinent here, because the Court is insisting on the same confidentiality here. He points out that the "sealed cover" is being resorted to time and again by the court- Rafale, NRC case, Judge Loya case, and now the CBI case. He is critical of this process because it is "a court driven opaque and secret process" and because it " involves the court in a secret dialogue with( in most cases) the state."

   One has to agree with Mr. Mr. Bhatia. Why should there be a kind of gag order in the CBI case? Here is a premier organisation investigating the most important economic and criminal cases in the country, its senior most officers are at war with each other, its politicisation is nearly complete, it is subverting justice on a regular basis, its functionaries appear to be indulging in large scale corruption, investigations are being fixed. Why should the public not be told about this fecal state of affairs, all being carried out on the tax payers' moneys? Why should we not be told what the charges against various officers of the CBI are, and what their responses are? Why should we not be informed of the names of corrupt bureaucrats and politicians named by Mr. Sinha in his petition? This is not a matter that concerns the judiciary alone, the ordinary citizen is even more concerned because it impacts his life more than it does the judges who still have a degree of defense against crooked and rampaging policemen, which the Joe in the street does not have. It is the same Joe who probably votes for that politician, pays the salaries of these bureaucrats, has to deal with these policemen on a daily basis.

   No, sir, the jurisprudence of the sealed cover is a deviation from the settled principles of law. It imposes an opacity in what should be a transparent process; it confers a protection on the state and its minions which can only embolden them; it " infantalises" the public ( Mr. Bhatia's apt phrase) because it assumes that they are not mature or intelligent enough to make up their own minds. It smacks of a colonial mindset which is premised on the belief that only an instrumentality of the state can be trusted with "sensitive information." It also betrays a contradiction in the Court's own stand: once it admits a petition it acknowledges that some public interest is involved in it, how then can it deny relevant information on the case to the same public?

   The right of the citizen to know what the government and its agencies are doing has to be paramount in a democracy. The courts are an instrumentality to enforce this right, not to deny it. 

HOW TO CONSERVE TIGERS, MAHARASHTRA STYLE .

   Whatever one may think of Mrs. Maneka Gandhi's politics one cannot but admire and commend her commitment to the welfare of animals, both wild and domesticated. Her passion for their protection overrides her political compulsions, as is being evinced these days by her taking up cudgels against both the Maharashtra and Odisha governments ( the former her own BJP entity) over the killing of the tigress Avni by the Forest Department, and seven elephants by electrocution in these states respectively. I have experienced her fierce loyalty for these mute creatures at first hand, in an encounter I am not likely to forget in a hurry.

   It was sometime in 2001 or 2002: she was a Minister in Mr. Vajpayee's cabinet and I was heading the Forest Department in Himachal. A crisis of sorts erupted when a Himalayan brown bear in Gopalpur Zoo caught some infection and in spite of all the attentions of our wild life veterinarians, its condition worsened, and it seemed to be slipping away. One day I received a direct call from Mrs. Maneka Gandhi; she herself was on the line, no protective shield of PS or PA. And boy! was she hopping mad! For the first few minutes she let me know exactly what she thought of me, the HP Forest department, and its vets.- and her opinions do not bear recounting. She wanted an immediate update on the bear's condition, and on being told of the discouraging prognosis, informed me that she was sending down two vets from the Zoo Authority of India to treat the bear; she also offered the advice that the HP vets could be assigned to treat bureaucrats! She slammed down the phone, and by next day her vets were at Gopalpur. The brown bear recovered, and we all slunk back to our respective offices, our tails demurely between our shaking legs.

   And so it is no surprise for me that, in this respect at least, she has not mellowed down in the least. And she is absolutely right, for the killing of Avni, a three year old tigress ( also known as T-I ) by the Maharashtra govt. is nothing but a cold blooded murder by the same department which was supposed to protect her. Avni's territory lay in the Yavatamal region, a scrub forest woefully lacking in a proper natural prey base. She was held responsible for the death of 13 villagers over the last two years, even though no autopsies were conducted on the dead to positively establish this charge. The Maharashtra Forest Department's [MFD] conclusion was based on " circumstantial" evidence, which in India is usually enough even to send a man to the gallows, so what chance does a poor tiger have against our bureaucracy?

   It is now clear that the MFD has been been grossly incompetent in managing this tigress and in taking the easy way out by simply killing her. And not just her- the MFD is probably guilty of the murder of three, not one, tiger: Avni's two nine month old cubs have not been since the 3rd of November; there is little hope for them for they are too young to survive without their mother. Here are some indisputable facts that have now emerged about the culpability of MFD and their favourite shikaris:

* Even though MFD was aware that the scrub forests of Yavatmal had an inadequate prey base for the big cat, and that conflict with humans was inevitable because there were many villages there, it took no steps to relocate the tigress.

* The department, according to the Forest Minister's own admission, had been "trying" to tranquilise and capture Avni for the last eighteen months, without any success! No further evidence is needed of its incompetence. To add to this, an expert team from the Madhya Pradesh forest department ( which has plenty of experience with capture and relocation of the big cats) had offered to help but was turned down.

* According to NTCA ( National Tiger Conservation Authority) protocol, even where a man eater is involved, its elimination is the last resort, when attempts to capture it have failed. As we have seen, no genuine attempt was made to capture Avni. It is not even certain that she was a man eater. A man eating predator is one which prefers a human over its natural prey ( usually because it is too old or injured to hunt other animals), actively stalks humans, and consumes the kill. None of these preconditions were met in the case of Avni.

*  The Maharashtra FD was criminally complicit in engaging private shooters to kill the tigress without any genuine attempt to capture her. The person who finally shot her ( Asghar Ali Khan) was not even authorised to do so; it was his father, Shafath Ali Khan, who was engaged by MFD to kill the tigress. ( Incidentally, this father-son duo have terminated hundreds of wild animals- wild boar, blue bull, leopards- in similar operations).  Asghar Ali is now claiming self defence,  that the tigress had charged his team at night while they were out looking for her and he had no option but to shoot her dead. Which raises the question: what was he doing there anyway? Why was he hunting her when it was his father, not he, who had been licensed by the MFD to eliminate Avni?

* Even the claim of self defence has been disproved by the autopsy report of the tigress. According to the report reproduced in the Hindustan Times of November 10, 2018: " The bullet had pierced the lateral end of the carcass. ( If), as mentioned by the hunter that T-I was charging at them, the bullet would have pierced the upper shoulder, head, face or back if that was the case. The animal was not attacking the forest team but standing 10 meters away."

* Equally damning is another finding of the autopsy. Photographs of the dead body of the tigress show a dart sticking out of her left flank, which was used by the FD and the hunter to claim that they had first tried to tranquilise her, but the dart was ineffective. This too has been trashed by the autopsy report: " The dart only pierced the surface of the tigress's carcass, which meant that it was merely placed by the forest team to show that the tigress had been tranquillised or else the quantity would have been more." 

   It is pretty clear now that Avni was killed in cold blood, no bona- fide attempt was made to capture her, she was shot by someone who was not authorised to do so, and that the Maharashtra forest department is engaged in a massive cover up. The state Forest Minister, who has been justifying the killing from day one and shielding the guilty, has amply demonstrated that he too is complicit in the matter in some way. Both the Minister and the PCCF ( Wild Life) should be immediately sacked. The two inquiries ordered will get nowhere and shall only legitimise the cover up. What is needed is an independent inquiry, not by forest officers who will protect each other, but by a team of wild life experts. Mrs. Gandhi, who is waging a lonely battle, should demand such an investigation and/ or conservationists should approach the courts. With just 2226 tigers left in the wild ( 2015 census) India certainly cannot allow bungling foresters and crassly ignorant Ministers to preside over the deliberate killing of more of these magnificent creatures. The alarm bells are already ringing: we lost 132 tigers in 2016; Maharashtra alone accounted for 23 deaths in 2017  (NTCA figures). With this level of attrition surely we should not be eliminating more of them under the garb of man-animal conflict ?

   

WHEN WILL WE RECOGNIZE THE REAL " MAKE IN INDIA" HEROES ?

   I don't know about you, but I'm not too  excited about Mr. Modi's " Make In India" jumla. And it's not just because the the Dassault transfer of technology ( to Hindustan Aeronautics Limited), worth tens of thousands of crores over the Rafale life cycle and beyond, has been consigned to the shredder by this government. It's also because all that is being made in India these days are grotesquely monstrous statues and thousands of more dollar millionaires, demonetisation notwithstanding, or perhaps because of it. Okay, so we have a few more unicorns in ByJus and PayTM and Mr. Ambani has added another 5000 crores to his net worth. But this is all business as usual, further emphasis on the business model which promotes consumerism and more rampant ravaging of the earth's resources. As someone who is not sure whether his genes will survive into the next century ( remember  Stephen Hawkings' prediction ?) precisely because of these unsustainable business models, for me the real heroes of Make In India are not guys on the Forbes 500 list but those unknown, ignored, under-the-radar entrepreneurs and innovators who are coming up with ideas that can, perhaps, save this planet from its ordained Apocalypse. And there are quite a few of them in India, though the mainstream media, brought up on a junk diet of Hindutva , rape, corruption and poll surveys, may not have the time to report about them. So this week let us learn a bit about three of these innovators, youngsters who can change the destiny of this Anthropocene age.

   Mandar Talunkar is an engineering graduate in his early 30's who has just patented an electricity generating device that requires no fuel to produce power. All it needs is hundreds of people walking over some special flooring tiles: the pressure of their weight on the flooring creates the mechanical energy which is used to produce electricity. His system has been installed in the Nagpur railway station in a small area on a trial basis, and it seems to be working: the power generated by the tiles is used to light up four 25 LED bulbs at the station entrance, apart from powering a couple of display screens. Can you visualise the promise this technology holds out, with tens of millions pf people walking all over our public spaces, malls, airports, railway stations, even pavements? Why, we could have those wonder tiles on our treadmills at home: that 30 minute brisk walk on the apparatus every morning could generate the power needed to heat the water needed for the bath later! A DIY if ever there was one. This could, indeed, be the fabled demographic dividend that has been eluding our planners and Mr. Amitav Kant all this time!

   Next on my list is another youngster who works with that scourge of our times- plastic. Prashant Lingam of Hyderabad builds houses made exclusively from plastic! He has employed hundreds of ragpickers to collect plastic/ polythene bags from landfills, which his process turns into building blocks and tiles which go into the construction of the houses. A typical, 2 bedroom unit consumes about 2.50 tonnes of plastic ( the roof alone needs 5 million plastic bags!). These houses are better insulated from the weather than brick and mortar dwellings and therefore consume less electricity, but cost about 20% more. However, Prashant says this is all a matter of scale, and once demand picks up the unit cost will come down. The paver tiles ( 100 polybags= one tile) are a big hit with the Hyderabad City Council which is procuring them from Prashant's company for public walkways and pavements. This technology, replicated on a large scale, can be a partial solution to the problem of recycling of plastic waste. It can also offer gainful employment to thousands of the weakest sections of our populace. One crore invested by Mr. Ambani in his high profile businesses will create just one job, the same amount deployed by the humble Prashant Lingam will probably create a thousand. No prizes for guessing who India needs more here.

   The third entrepreuner, one who can give Elon Musk a run for his money, is a young Indian in California, K.R.Sridhar. His start-up, Bloom Energy, has invented a power box the size of a Bose music system which can provide enough clean power to run one American home or six Indian homes. His patented secret is a fuel cell  made of silica( beach sand) which processes clean fuels like natural gas or bio fuels and, through a chemical reaction, converts it into electricity. His invention is not a hoax or a chimera: it has inspired John Door, the venture capitalist who has invested in Netscape, Google and Amazon to put up US $100 million into the project. And it is actually working on the ground! Sridhar's power boxes have been bought by Google, EBay and Walmart and have been functioning successfully for 18 months now. They provide 15% of EBay's total power requirement in Silicon Valley headquarters and have already saved the company US $ 100,000 in fuel bills. The power is clean and off the grid.

   Why is it that we never hear of these champions of the Earth except through social media? Why is it that we never see them at all those glitzy conclaves and business summits where the same jaded personalities are paraded before a wildly clapping audience- the Chandna Kochars and Amitav Kants and Nandan Nilekenis ? Yes, they have all contributed to the economy but the time has now come to look for solutions beyond GDP, GST, Interest rates and trade deals. The Bezos, Gates, Mas and Zuckerbergs of the world have no doubt revolutionised commerce and business models and processes but their tech driven consumerism has imperiled the planet and put the future of homo sapiens in question. They have caused a tsunami of consumption and degradation of the natural environment that is the hallmark of the current Anthropocene age, which may be the last for us. We now need minds and entrepreneurs who can reverse this trend and find unconventional answers to these excesses. This is what this young group of inventors is doing, and this is precisely why they need to be recognised and applauded by governments and societies. They might just make it possible for homo sapiens to walk into the next century. That's why, for me at least, they are the real heroes.
   [ And oh! have I told you about my good wife, Neerja and her friend Mrs. Minu Sood ? They run a tiny NGO called ABHI in Shimla which works with mentally/ physically disadvantaged kids who have completely dropped through the chinks in the govt.'s welfare programmes and are more or less left to fend for themselves. ABHI's centre provides much needed counselling for their parents, physiotherapy, medical check-ups, basic vocational training, and social skills. Most important of all, perhaps, it gives them a place where they can mingle with others and escape six days a week from their lonely existence at home. And Neerja and Minu do this without any charge whatsoever, with minimal assistance from the government, which has even reduced the paltry grant they are entitled to under the Sarv Shiksha Abhiyan. They manage with a smile and help from a few friends and volunteers and well wishers. They remain unsung but they have made the world a slightly better place for those whom society has forgotten- a business model which has gone out of fashion.]