| April 20, 2003 | Sunday | Safar 17, 1424 |
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Why these delays?
Power tariff cut
IN a surprise move on Friday, while speaking at a public meeting in Srinagar, Indian Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee offered talks to Pakistan on “all issues.” Within hours, Prime Minister Mir Zafarullah Khan Jamali responded positively, saying Pakistan welcomed and appreciated the offer. The Indian prime minister said guns alone could not solve any issue and offered talks to Kashmiri groups as well. Most significantly, he did not refer to “cross-border terrorism,” which has been India’s favourite refrain in recent times and an excuse for avoiding talks with Pakistan. In fact, taking advantage of the international climate created after 9/11, India has used the bogey of “cross-border terrorism” to harden its stance toward Pakistan. The prospects for talks worsened and tensions reached new heights when India massed its troops on Pakistan’s border in the wake of the terrorist attack on the Indian parliament building in December 2001. Thanks to intense diplomatic efforts by friendly countries, including the US, a war was averted, but India did nothing to follow it up with any moves that could break the impasse. The summit meeting of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation could not be held earlier this year in Islamabad because of India’s refusal to attend it. Recently, following the American attack on Iraq, Indian Foreign Minister Yashwant Sinha added a new and dangerous element to the South Asian situation by repeatedly referring to Pakistan as a fit case for a pre-emptive strike. This he kept on doing in spite of strong rebuttals from Washington discounting any parallel between Iraq and Pakistan.
Against this background, Mr Vajpayee’s speech seems to hold out some hope that a new process of constructive talks between the two countries could begin again. Pakistan’s position during this nerve-racking period has been consistent and constructive. It has repeatedly offered talks to India anywhere, any time. At the last SAARC summit in Kathmandu in January 2002, President Musharraf went out of his way to offer his hand of friendship to Mr Vajpayee — literally and figuratively. However, Mr Vajpayee’s response was cool and aloof. Now that both sides seem willing to start a new phase of talks, there is no reason why — without being overly optimistic — one should not look forward to a thaw in frosty Indo-Pakistan relations.
One must, of course, be realistic. No one should expect a miracle. But the very fact that the Indian side is willing to re-start negotiations should have a positive impact on the geopolitical climate in the subcontinent. At the same time, there is an urgent need for restoring the road, rail and air links between the two countries disrupted since December 2001 along with the mobilization of troops on the common border. This has entailed a great deal of hardship and inconvenience for the nationals of the two countries wanting to visit families and friends on the other side. In the absence of direct links, they have to fly to a third country to be able to travel to their destinations in the other country.
The confrontational situation between Pakistan and India has done enormous harm to the people of the two countries. It has also militated against regional cooperation. As President Musharraf said some time ago, South Asia is the one region in the world which is not focussing on economic development. Instead, as the two countries’ nuclear and missile programmes show, too much money is being spent on defence. This invariably happens at the cost of the social sector and is responsible for the widespread problems of poverty, low literacy rates, poor health standards and environmental degradation in both countries. The Indo-Pakistan tensions and military rivalry are also responsible for SAARC’s failure to become a dynamic regional grouping that — like the Association of South East Asian Nations — could act as a catalyst for collective progress.
ACCORDING to reports, students in a number of cities, including Islamabad, Rawalpindi, Peshawar and Sialkot, have been facing severe problems getting textbooks for the new academic year that has recently started. Book bazars in these cities have run out of textbooks, with some shopkeepers saying that they have yet to receive even the first shipment from the provincial textbook boards. The longer the delay, the greater will be the academic losses for hundreds of thousands of students in various parts of the country. Regrettably, this is not the first time that something like this has happened, and neither are such shortages confined only to students living in certain areas. The problem happens every year, generally all over the country, though in varying degrees of severity, and it is time that the respective textbook boards took measures to ensure that it comes to an end.
The problem has to do with the bureaucratic mode of operation of the textbook boards and the manner in which their management hands out contracts for printing books. Often, it has been seen that tenders are awarded not on the basis of a publisher’s printing capacity or his ability to deliver on time but on considerations other than objective, including bribes, ‘commissions’, recommendations by high-ups and so forth. Certain publishing houses make it a point to keep themselves in the good books of the textbook boards and because of this connection manage to get printing orders repeatedly. The education departments must intervene and stop the textbook boards from handing out printing orders to parties that are unable to handle the large print volumes usually involved. The bidding process through which publishers are assigned orders for the coming academic session must be made transparent and, equally importantly, planned well in advance to avoid a time squeeze for printers and the resultant delays and poor printing and binding. It makes infinitely more sense to give printing contracts to a large number of firms rather than to a handful because in the latter case delays and uncertainties invariably occur involving loss of precious academic time for students for no fault of theirs.
THE electricity tariff has been reduced for farmers using tubewells for the coming kharif season by Prime Minister Zafarullah Jamali. The burden of the 33 per cent tariff cut thus provided will be shared equally by the federal and provincial governments and Wapda. Benefiting from the subsidy will be owners of over half a million tubewells that irrigate more than fifty per cent of the country’s cultivated area. The tariff cut is a partial departure from the IMF conditionality that provides for the phased withdrawal of all forms of subsidy. It is, however, a one-time tariff cut for a brief period spanning the next kharif season. In fact, it is a temporary government intervention needed as a breather for the country’s none too buoyant farm sector — the kind of intervention that is often supported by multilateral donors in case of exigencies. The relief is called for in these difficult times of slow economic growth, rising unemployment and growing poverty in Pakistan and in the absence of a meaningful safety net for the vulnerable segment of the population.
It is abundantly clear that the pace of withdrawal of subsidies set by the World Bank and the IMF do not conform to the prevailing socio-economic conditions. The Fund-supported reforms, their pace and sequence should be so designed as not to increase joblessness, poverty and human distress. The present stabilization programme involves heavy social costs. Official committees set up by the federal government are now looking at the possibility of reducing gas and electricity prices. If the electricity tariff is competitively priced, it would facilitate mechanisation of agriculture to raise low farm per acre yields, enhance incomes and reduce poverty. The IMF is likely to be consulted on this sensitive tariff issue and, hopefully, the Fund’s response will be positive and not rigid.