The twin cities’ twin woes: water and power

SMACK in the midst of summer when many taps run dry, the city authorities invariably unveil plans of building new dams and new water supply schemes, or announce the boring of new tube-wells and the repair of old ones. Similarly when the load rises on the power distribution system in summer causing frequent “unscheduled” power breakdowns, that is the time when the civic agencies get down to active repair and maintenance work, torturing residents even further for hours on end with their “scheduled” shutdown of electricity supply.

The water shortages and power breakdowns in parts of the twin cities have become worse this summer, particularly in Rawalpindi. Given the numerous new water supply schemes and the amount of repair and maintenance work being done on the power distribution system — there were at least eight notices in May and April in the twin cities of power suspension for reasons of repair and maintenance — one wonders why the city authorities and civic agencies have not been able to solve the water shortages and power breakdowns once and for all.

Especially since there is no dearth of the civic agencies that are supposed to ensure the provision of water and electricity supply in one way or the other. There is the Capital Development Authority, the Rawalpindi Development Authority, the Rawalpindi Tehsil Municipal Administration (TMA) and the Rawalpindi Cantonment Board. Then there is the Water and Power Development Authority, the Islamabad Electric Supply Company and the Water and Sanitation Authority.

One would have thought that the combined minds and resources of these “seven sister” civic agencies could easily have combated the growing twin problems of water shortage and power breakdowns. Instead, residents find that the supply of these two utilities have only been growing shorter and more and more unreliable in the past few years. Ironically, they have also had to pay more for this increasingly unsatisfactory utility provision service as the government increased the power and water rates manifold.

Soon, residents may find they have to pay for these shortages with nothing less than their lives. Last week, four patients at the District Headquarters Hospital in Rawalpindi nearly did just that when the power supply from both feeders serving the hospital was cut off while they were having surgery on the operating table and the hospital’s generator failed to switch on immediately because of battery failure.

In fact, many residents have already paid with their lives for drinking contaminated water. Last month a report by the Rawalpindi Medical College revealed that gastro-intestinal and liver diseases account for a quarter of the deaths in the city’s teaching hospitals during the past four years.

As if going for hours without power supply and for days without water supply is not enough nuisance, residents are being treated to the spectacle of rows between and among the “seven sisters”. The issue: non-payment of outstanding dues to each other.

The row between Iesco and the Rawalpindi TMA even descended into a childish tit-for-tat kind of thing when in retaliation for Iesco disconnecting its electricity supply over non-payment of Rs40 million in power dues, the TMA dumped several trolleys of foul- smelling garbage at the gates of three Iesco offices in Rawalpindi.

Iesco had disconnected electricity supply to the main TMA office in Raja Bazaar, all its 33 municipal schools, dispensaries, mother and child care centres, TMA workshop, municipal sports complex, municipal library, tube-wells and all streetlights. This act only had the effect of adding to the power and water woes of the residents. Electricity was restored to the TMA a few days later, on the intervention of the district Nazim, when the TMA paid Iesco Rs20 million with the promise that the other half would be paid soon.

In the case of the CDA versus the Iesco, power disconnection was averted when the federal government released a Rs348 million grant to the CDA, out of which the latter was supposed to pay Iesco Rs242 in power dues apparently owed since 1996. And now, the RCB is the latest to be given a final warning notice of power disconnection if it fails to pay Iesco Rs140 million in arrears, reportedly accumulated since 1994.

The lack of coordination and rapport amongst the “seven sisters” is not the only factor responsible for the power and water woes of the residents. Public funds have been squandered on new water supply schemes, e.g. 6,500 feet pipe from the Rehmatabad water supply scheme in Rawalpindi was stolen, resulting in the non-materialization of the scheme.

An even graver problem is ill-conceived projects that actually worsen the public’s utility woes in the long run. For reasons better known, the authorities have been slow to implement projects to increase the water storage capacity for the twin cities, just as it has been slow to react to concerns about the fast-depleting water table.

Thus it has been approving water supply schemes that involve new and deeper tube-wells, while it has not been enforcing the ban on residential tube-well boring, which the CDA had introduced in the capital city as early as 1994. The obvious result has been a very fast depletion of the water-table. And for a city like Rawalpindi, which at the moment depends twice as much on tube-wells for its water supply (15MGD) as it does on Rawal and Khanpur dams (7MGD), the consequences of a blind tube-well boring policy is going to be disastrous.

Residents cannot but view with concern the report last week that the Rawalpindi district government is planning to invite tenders for a Rs25 million project to install 14 new tube-wells in the city. The soundness of this project is questionable, specially when recent expert studies by the Water and Sanitation Agency and the Asian Development Bank had apparently concluded that there was no more potential for drilling new tube-wells or even deepening the existing ones in the city because the water-table had already dropped significantly in the last three years.

The civic agencies cannot simply wait for the rains to solve the water shortage, or dig and dig deeper for more water. Neither can they can hope to solve the water problem by simply plugging the leakages or penalizing individual consumers for wasting water in retail, while the precious monsoon rainwater is being wasted wholesale for want of a better/advanced drainage flow and improved storage capacity system that can divert potentially devastating seasonal floodwaters into the taps of the residents perennially.

So also the power breakdowns cannot be solved by the countless “repair and maintenance” work on the existing power distribution system being carried out by Wapda and Iesco. The system needs to be upgraded and the capacity increased with a longer perspective spectrum, keeping in mind the increasing consumer demand and, therefore, increasing load.

Until and unless the civic agencies are able to considerably improve on their ability to supply both water and power in the twin cities, any further increase in the rates of these two utilities, specially electricity, even in the name of the increasingly pervasive GST, would neither be logical nor justifiable. If the government is seeking to turn the provision of these two utilities into major revenue earners, the least it should do first is to upgrade its efficiency in supplying them to the people.

In this respect, the report last week that the CDA is planning to introduce beginning next month for the first time in the capital city, a sewerage tax amounting to 40 per cent of the water tax is disturbing news. A sewerage tax, and even then the amount is debatable, is justified only if residents are fully confident that they are being provided a water supply that is free from sewerage contamination. Imposing the sewerage tax first, on the excuse that the CDA will then be using it to improve the sewerage system, and that too with the generous aid of a Rs913 million French loan, is a slap on the face for the scores of citizens who have fallen sick and who will be falling sick because of the consumption of contaminated water.

A pliable, militarist president to fulfil India’s rightwing agenda

A PAKISTANI colleague was rather miffed and also possibly somewhat amused when I recently tested him with my shorthand history of the subcontinent. I put it to him that in several ways it was tempting to conclude that the Congress Party had caused the creation of Pakistan, and Pakistan had created the Jan Sangh, the original name for today’s rightwing Hindu BJP. The problem of course is that today the hitherto centrist, if erratically secular, Congress and the patently communal BJP have both joined hands to target Pakistan, though not for the first time and not with equal venom.

There’s hardly any other explanation for the two rivals, who otherwise would daily fight like cats and dogs in and outside the parliament, to come together on the proposed election of APJ Abdul Kalam as India’s next head of state. Neither party is going to be getting Muslim votes if that is their calculation. What is axiomatic is that the move to have a missile-making militarist as head of state is bound to boost the country’s rightward lurch, forcing the presidency to play easily into the hands of the neo- fascist Hindutva’s agenda of poisonous militarism and rabid communalism.

But what does the Congress get in reward? A tight slap on the face, one guesses, after describing the very people it has aligned with as fascists — only to quickly forget the sting if history has any lessons at all left to teach the original handmaiden of narrow nationalism. Some of these lessons are too obvious to miss.

Who can forget the nefarious role a head of state can play in India’s fragile and overstated democracy? It was prime minister Indira Gandhi who showed the way most dramatically in 1975 when she asked President Fakhruddin Ali Ahmad (another Muslim!) to bend, and he crawled. Her Congress Party’s emergency rule did not last even two years, but that was not due to any great efforts by the opposition, whether from the left or the right. Mrs Gandhi was heady enough with power and cavalier enough with spurious intelligence to hold and lose the election of 1977.

The role a president or a state governor, or a speaker of parliament or of India’s numerous legislative assemblies can be that of a crucial institutional cover for subverting the system from within. Why else does a change in a government in New Delhi so often result in the change of governors in the states? So speakers are in a qualitatively different league. Sometimes it would seem that it is more useful to have the speaker of the assembly or parliament on your side even if the rest of the house has deserted you.

Recently the rightwing alliance of Shiv Sena and BJP were at the receiving end of this politically lethal institution — the speaker of the Maharashtra state assembly bluntly changed the equation in a fragile assembly by suspending half dozen deputies, thereby enabling the Congress-Nationalist Congress Party coalition to survive a close call in a trust vote.

The Maharashtra speaker had obviously learnt his lesson from a similar event a few years earlier when the BJP’s presiding officer in Uttar Pradesh had brazenly helped break up the Dalit party of BSP leader Mayawati by suspending a number of deputies to ensure that she would lose the majority. I am not sure what happened to the legal tangle that followed in the Supreme Court.

Suffice it to say that Mayawati is back in a new assembly as chief minister with the BJP’s support and her tormentor is back also as the BJP’s speaker no less.

To be fair to Mrs Gandhi and to the BJP, the presiding officer’s importance in subverting democracy is not an Indian phenomenon. It was first spotted by Adolf Hitler. In fact, it remains a moot point whether the Nazis would have succeeded in capturing power in Germany at all had they not first installed Herman Goering as the president (speaker) of the Reichstag on Aug 30, 1932.

The five months leading up to Jan 30, 1933, when Hitler was grudgingly inaugurated as chancellor by the aging German president Paul von Hindenburg, were fraught with perils for the arriving Fuehrer.

William L. Shirer in his celebrated masterpiece on the history of Nazi Germany — The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich — gives an insightful account of how Goering as speaker of the Reichstag had actually saved the situation for Hitler at a highly critical juncture of his thrust to capture power.

The description of the clownish rightward-leaning but Hitler- baiting chancellor Frantz von Papen and his bid to outmanoeuvre the Nazis in a fateful Reichstag vote need to be recalled here.

According to Shirer, when the chamber convened on Aug 30, 1932, “the Centrists joined the Nazis in electing Goering president of the Reichstag. For the first time, then a National Socialist was in the chair when the Reichstag convened on Sept 12 to begin its working session. Goering made the most of the opportunity.

Now chancellor von Papen had obtained in advance from president Hindenburg a decree for the dissolution of the chamber — the first time that the death warrant of the Reichstag had been signed before it met to transact business. But for the first working session he forgot to bring it along. He had instead with him a speech outlining the programme of his government, having been assured that one of the Nationalist deputies, in agreement with most other parties, would object to a vote on the expected Communist censure of the government. In this case a single objection from any one of the 600-odd members was enough to postpone a vote.

When Ernst Torgler, the Communist leader, introduced his motion as an amendment to the order of the day, however, neither a Nationalist deputy nor any other rose to object.

“The situation was now serious,” Papen says in his memoirs. He sent a messenger post-haste to the chancellery to fetch the dissolution order.

In the meantime, Hitler conferred with his parliamentary party group in the Reichstag president’s palace across the street. He decided to swallow the unsavoury pill and join the Communists in a censure of the government and ordered his deputies to vote for the communist-led censure and overthrow Papen before the chancellor could dissolve the Reichstag!

To accomplish this, of course, Goering, as presiding officer, would have to pull some fast and neat tricks of parliamentary procedure. The former air ace (for missiles had not yet been invented as we know them today), a man of daring and of many abilities, as he was to prove on a larger stage later, was equal to the occasion.

Here comes the punch, something India’s myriad rightwingers must have absorbed and digested many times over. Says Shirer:

“When the session reconvened, Papen appeared with the familiar red dispatch case which, by tradition, carried the dissolution order he had so hastily retrieved. But when he requested the floor to read it, the president of the Reichstag managed not to see him, though Papen, by now red-faced, was on his feet brandishing the paper for all in the assembly to see. All but Goering. His smiling face was turned the other way. He called for an immediate vote. By now Papen’s countenance, according to eyewitnesses, had turned from red to white with anger. He strode up to the president’s rostrum and plunked the dissolution order on his desk. Goering took no notice of it and ordered the vote to proceed. Papen, followed by his ministers, none of whom were members of the chambers (another familiar old trick), stalked out.

“The deputies voted: 513 to 32 against the government. Only then did Goering notice the piece of paper which had been thrust so angrily on his desk. He read it to the assembly and ruled that since it had been counter-signed by a chancellor who had already been voted out of office by a constitutional majority, it had no validity!” Dr Abdul Kalam has many good attributes; among them he has an ear for music, which would appear to make him a far less dangerous person than Cassius, with no interest in music, was for Julius Caesar.

Under the given scenario there are various ways in which a pliable president could help the BJP. Citing an external emergency, as Mrs Gandhi did with an internal situation, and with an emasculated, divided and confused opposition, he could help declare a state of emergency. The Nazis used the enabling act to fix their political opponents. In India, the so-called anti- terrorist POTA, extracted out of another parliamentary footsy by convening a joint session of the two houses, is much more lethal than any enabling act ever was.

Since the BJP will never be 100 per cent certain of Kalam’s attitude to something as grave as tinkering with the Constitution, it already is planning a standby arrangement by considering a Hindutva acolyte, possibly Bhairon Singh Shekhawat, the former chief minister of Rajasthan, as its candidate for the vice president. As for the speaker of the Lok Sabha, it has already named Shiv Sena’s Manohar Joshi as its chosen nominee.

But how does all this slide towards the right account for the collective hostility towards Pakistan, both by the BJP and the Congress? Pakistan, by kindling various layers of jingoism among the mainstream parties, assures the survival of some degree of competition in politics. But there is no perfect competition in real life. Therefore, for the Congress, there is something to be culled from the disappearance of the centrists in Germany, after they joined hands with the National Socialists to elect Goering as the Reichstag speaker.

Asylum-seekers are not flooding Fortress Europe

FORGET crashing global financial markets and third world poverty. Forget also the Middle East crisis, Kashmir and more immediately, dangers facing the European Union’s planned eastward enlargement as governments in the 15 nation bloc feud over future eastern European members’ access to EU farm subsidies.

The EUs summit in Seville on June 21-22 will focus instead on fighting illegal immigration, with leaders using a city renowned for its mix of Jewish, Christian and Islamic cultures to fire the first salvos in a war against what an increasing number of the continent’s governments view as barbaric foreigners, ruthless refugees and bogus asylum-seekers threatening the security and prosperity of Europe.

Seville summit host and Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar and his foreign minister Josep Pique have decided that combating illegal immigration is “the most important issue of the decade.” Not to be outdone, Britain’s Tony Blair, Italian Premier Silvio Berlusconi and a host of others including Denmark’s Anders Fogh Rasmussen have bought into Aznar’s logic with unbridled enthusiasm.

With opinion polls showing that security fears and anti-immigrant sentiments are running high in Europe, helping boost the popularity of far-right parties across the continent, EU leaders are convinced that being macho over immigration is a vote-winner, the perfect way of showing they’re in tune with the lives and fears of common men and women.

But Aznar, Blair and friends’ anti-immigrant rhetoric is actually making things worse. Responsible leaders should be struggling to tone down the public’s ill-founded panic over foreigners, not fanning the fires of fear and racism. Messrs Aznar and co may truly believe that by espousing the far-right’s xenophobic rhetoric they can counter the power of Jean-Marie Le Pen and his clones across Europe. But they are helping to engender an even more frantic atmosphere that, among other things, encourages hostilities towards Europe’s own (legal) minorities.

The grandstanding over immigration could also end up endangering the one priority that all EU leaders seem to share, at least on paper: expanding the EU to bring in the former communist nations of central and eastern Europe, which also happen to be major suppliers of foreign labour.

As a pre-Seville appeal by Amnesty International to EU leaders points out, fear is not a good basis for making policy. “Facts dissolve, perceptions and simplifications reign, racist prejudice breeds.”

While Blair’s call to dispatch an EU armada to the Mediterranean to intercept boats carrying illegal immigrants, the use of air force plans to ensure quick deportation of people denied asylum and aid sanctions for countries which do not stop immigration make the headlines, the truth about immigration and asylum makes less spectacular reading.

Contrary to popular perceptions, there is no flood of refugees breaking down the gates of Fortress Europe. The number of asylum-seekers arriving in the EU last year was almost half of what it was in 1992. The 380,000 claiming refuge in 2001 represented only 0.1 per cent of the EU’s population. And far from being “bogus,” most of those seeking asylum are either fleeing internal conflict (in Afghanistan), countries notorious for their human rights abuses (Congo) or states suffering under the impact of international sanctions (Iraq).

EU leaders must be careful not to violate international human rights standards that they claim to promote around the world. And they must stop being hypocritical. European-made and exported guns, planes and tanks are used in wars and internal conflicts which force people to flee their countries and seek shelter abroad. And while poverty and under-development are a vital factor in driving people away from home, most EU leaders stayed away from the United Nation’s anti-hunger summit in Rome last week.

True, criminal gangs responsible for people-smuggling must be punished. One way of curbing their power would be for Europe to adopt a policy allowing for legal immigration. As they debate the issue in Seville, EU leaders must consider whether a frightened Fortress Europe can have the moral authority and courage to become a global power. And then decide on their future course of action.