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Railways Caught in Vortex of Troubles

Published on 23 July 2018
 (Image courtesy: narendramodi.in)
 
The Railways’ cup of financial woes is brimming. It does not expect turnaround in the situation over a couple of years. The merger of Rail budget into Union Budget has not facilitated any operational improvement in its working. 
Missed revenue targets, expenditure overshoots and revenue leakages, including digital payment of salaries to ghost employees, have put the Railways Ministry on the edge. 
It is also rattled by pension backlogs & excess payments, accounting discrepancies, digital slippages and GST accounting errors. The list of challenges is long and daunting. 
Today, even the Railway Board (RB) does not have full grasp over the magnitude and diversity of the problems. Such irritants flow & grow seamlessly through Railways’ gargantuan network.  In the current financial year, RB has thus embarked on a journey to discover true picture of State of Railways.
To facilitate “truthful reporting of asset failures & train punctuality” by 17 zonal railways (ZRs), RB is treating current financial year as “Zero Year”. It means RB would make no comparison of any ZR’s performance in 2018-19 with past record of failure indicators such as diesel loco failure, wagon detachment and signal failure. Such failures & safety indicators are specified in the annual memorandum of understanding between RB and ZRs. 
As put by RB in an internal communication, “this move should encourage zonal railways to report truthfully and not worry about adverse comparisons with last year’s figures. It may be appreciated that until and unless an honest and realistic picture of the present state of affairs prevailing on the system is generated, any kind of improvement will not be possible”. 
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Farmer Strike: Arousing India’s Collective Conscience

Published on 16 July 2018
Farming and farmers’protests are as intertwined as oxygen and hydrogen atoms in the water molecule. This is because the road to agriculture is paved with potholes and ditches of policy failures; inadvertent and some deliberate. Friction, jerks and, at time, big jolts in form of mass agitations seem inevitable.

India’s latest tryst with a farmers’ strike was far more significant: it was about taking the voice of the farmer to the people, not to political leaders or policy makers; it was about exposing the core of a critical crisis that will hit the aam aadmi, even if it leaves the politician unscathed, save at the hustings perhaps.
Farmers in Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat,Maharashtra, Rajasthan, Punjab and Haryana put together a united front for a 10-day “gaon bandh” starting Friday, June 1, sending a message to urban India about what it would be like not to have their supplies of essential items like milk and vegetables. Their demands were many, from loan waiver to right price for their crops and the implementation of the Swaminathan Commission recommendations. In Madhya Pradesh, the farmers declared a complete shutdown of supplies to cities.
Farmers wage periodic fights for their rights across the world. The struggle ranges over the right to get inputs including water; to the right to save crops and livestock, farmland and life. No wonder certain states such as Michigan in the United States have enacted the Right to Farm Act to protect farming and farms. Modern and medieval histories are replete with instances of farmers’ resentment that at times have exploded into uprisings. In current times, one witnesses more of agrarian grudges venting themselves in frequent street protests.
                                                                                 Click for full story in pdf format
 
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Drumming Strong Fundamentals with ‘Missing Fundamentals’

Published on 08 July 2018
 (Image courtesy: narendramodi.in)
 
“India’s macro fundamentals strong, asserts Modi at AIIB meet”. “India’s macroeconomic fundamentals remain strong: Arun Jaitley”.
Should such headlines be accepted at the face value? No. Put chest-thumping claims through prism of multi-dimensionalism. And one would see patches of opacity and blur for want of clarity on fundamentals.
This jarring image is due to the fact that definitions, that form basis of flaunted statistics, are either missing or are outdated/nebulous.It is a fundamental problem with Government’s fundamental claims. 
It exists in several domains extending from lack of definition of black money to shell companies. ‘Poverty’ and ‘out of school children’ (OOSC) also suffer from want of functional/standard definitions. Similar is the case with certain other aspects of economy such as varying definitions of formal worker followed by official agencies.
Add to this limitation the fact that Government does not collect statistics on certain aspects of economy such as how citizens’ use time. This is important indicator for unemployment, underemployment and ease of living in certain countries notably the United States. 
Reckon also the fact that certain data are mere calculations/estimates made on paper work with certain assumptions. 
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Revisit Hazardous Industries’ fate in wake of Vedanta Gridlock

Published on 08 July 2018

 (Edited Image courtesy: Youtube & Vedanta)

1) Is a preventive maintenance system in place, including review thereof? 2) Is Identification and prioritization done for all equipment / system requiring preventive maintenance based on criticality? 3) Is there an established procedure for capturing maintenance needs based on condition of each equipment? 4) Are responsibilities assigned and frequencies established? 5) Is there a system in place to report in writing, on a day-to-day basis, all observed substandard actions or hazard conditions?

Many more such questions would have been fired by chemicals safety regulator at the police and other government officials, who currently control Vedanta’s copper-cum-chemicals complex (formerly Sterlite) at Tuticorin inTamil Nadu This would have happened only if we had a statutory, preventive chemical safety statutory framework.

The five questions are verbatim production from the 59-pages‘Chemical Plant Safety & Security Rating System’ drafted by UPA Government in September 2013.

Neither this proposal nor the proposed safety regulator named Chemical Standard Development Organisation (CSDO) envisioned by the draft National Chemical Policy (NCP-2012) have been finalized & implemented.

Would latest litigation over safety of Tuticorin Complex arisen, if the two proposals had been put in action? How long can India avoid the need for a regulator on the lines of US Chemical Safety Board (CSB)? CSB enjoys statutory protection from interference from any executive arm or other regulators.

Modi Government’s failure on policy-cum-regulatory front has thus made Indian chemical industry vulnerable to belligerent activism. This has resulted in bizarre governance & tight-rope justice on account of many public interest litigations (PILs) from anti-Vedanta camp over a decade.

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