India Political Blog

It is quite clear that Taslima Nasreen is a person from whom most politicians want to stay away from. So, while the Prime Minister feels for a terrorist’s family suspected of involvement in a terrorist attack in Britain, he is absolutely quiet about the hounding of a writer all over India. This whole attitude is what leads to hardening of majority opinion against the kind of secularism practised in India.
I consider myself a moderate Hindu, not very religious, but aware to a large extent about what happens all around. And one keeps on watching what the Government does when faced with a ticklish issue, and invariably the Government keeps on failing to remain even-handed when dealing with the same issues but across different scenarios.

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When Arun Shourie as disinvestment minister was selling off Government assets, there was a lot of protest as to why the Government is selling off its assets. But the fact of the matter is, the Government is not the best person to run things such as hotels, airlines, mills, and other such manufacturing and service sectors. Overall, the PSU’s are in a bad state, and it is quite clear that the Government is not exactly very responsive to needs of customer care. For example, when MTNL was the only telecom in Delhi, service levels were real bad; it is only when other telecom companies came on board that service levels improved. Here is another example of a sector that the Government is into, and is doing a pretty bad job in taking care of passengers:

NEW DELHI: At least five Air India flights were delayed by several hours at the Indira Gandhi International airport here on Sunday due to technical problems, causing hardships to about a thousand passengers.
Earlier, peeved over the long delay, the passengers protested at the airport and demanded explanations from the authorities. However, no senior Air India official was present at the airport to pacify the agitating passengers.

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AIIMS is the premier medical institute of India, and although many private hospitals have great doctors and excellent facilities, AIIMS is still seen as the best medical institution of the country. But just as a measure of how even the great ones have to pay for their mistakes, the Delhi State Consumer Court has ordered it to pay Rs. 1 lakh as compensation to the heirs of a man who lost his voice during an operation six years ago. It was alleged that the doctors at AIIMS botched up and cut a major nerve that resulted in speech loss during surgery to remove a tumour.

NEW DELHI: Holding All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) guilty of ‘‘gross medical negligence’’, the State Consumer Commission has asked it to pay Rs 1-lakh compensation to legal heirs of a patient who lost his voice after undergoing an operation there.

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Not in India. Due to not much movement in the past towards revamping its laws to add more teeth (enabling punishment of manufacturers for making sub-standard items), Indian customers are frequently short-charged. So, for example, you read about manufacturers in the Western countries and Japan recalling products when there are safety issues or health issues, you will find it hard to find similar examples in India. If the intentions of the Government are any guide, such a situation will not last for much longer. The Government is planning steps to modify laws such that consumers get a higher degree of protection against sub-standard goods, including a critical measure called as ‘product liability clause’, making manufacturers liable to pay punitive damages (punitive damages are fines that are meant to punish, and typically of such a level that they hurt the manufacturer). Read the article:

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In a continuing chain of consumer redressal forums ordering payment of compensation where banks have used coercive means to distress loan defaulters, a Pune Consumer Redressal Forum ordered the payment of Rs. 1 lakh compensation to a lady whose car was seized by agents of ICICI Bank. The interesting part in this case is that the lady had given instructions to the bank to recover the loan installments from her savings account. However, her allegation is that the bank did not follow these instructions and got its recovery agents to seize her car. She had to go to court to get her car back, and it was returned in a damaged condition. The Pune Consumer Court ordered the Bank to pay Rs. 1 lakh compensation to her for the mental distress caused.

PUNE: A consumer disputes redressal forum here has ordered a private bank to pay a compensation of Rs one lakh to a woman whose car was seized by its recovery agents for an alleged default in repayment of Rs 4 lakh loan.

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How many times has it happened that you saw somebody throwing garbage on the streets and wondered as to why they did it ? Did you sometimes throw a wrapper on the street and felt guilty about it, or not even feel a twinge of guilt ? Take all these individual acts, put them together and you end up with a city (and this is about each and every city in India) full of garbage. Sometimes it is easily noticeable, for example, when the weather is humid, the smell of garbage is all around. But mostly, we criticize the municipal corporation (and rightly so) for the mess.
Surat, after the plague had gone, went through a government enforced cleanliness program with a lot of public support. That program was a good example of how a city can be made clean and kept clean. There are numerous other examples on a smaller scale that show how cleanliness can be kept. Private offices are a good example, where there are adequate facilities such as garbage bins and moral pressure to ensure cleanliness. The Delhi Metro is another example of cleanliness where the Metro ensures that people do not litter, and they also ensure that the facilities are always kept clean such that if anybody tries to litter, they will be seen as the first people doing the littering.

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When we are driving on the roads of our wonderfully congested cities, there are so many things you see that make one angry. You are driving on a crowded road, inching along, and see two-wheelers and three-wheelers darting among traffic with nary a care in the world; you give them some criticism, strive to control your road rage and brake or swerve to avoid hitting them, and so on. All of us must have seen such things happen often enough that they are not worth writing about. More scary is the concept of a big bus screeching right next to you, or chasing another bus and you are driving in the vicinity, and it is worth it to waste a couple of minutes and let these buses go on the way.
But these pale in comparison to what I saw one day. I was flabbergasted to say the least, and the road was crowded enough that I could not do anything about it. And what did I see ? It was a buy driving a small car, wearing a seat belt, and driving perfectly normally. And what was scary ? Well, this guy had no other co-passenger except for one - his infant. Now, one really does not expect people in this great country to have too much concern about a car seat or other such requirement for a baby, but in this case, the baby was sitting on this guy’s lap, right between the steering wheel and the guy.

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At a time when there is widespread condemnation of the going-ons in Nandigram over the last few days, there is a High Court direction to the West Bengal Government over the police firing on March 14th. That police firing was a widely condemned incident, and led to shockwaves through the country. The Left Front of course does not approve of anybody condemning any action of theirs, and so it was then. The Left Front claimed that this action was necessary to ensure the rule of law (sounds very familiar to the current series of incidents where the CPM sent in its goons to take control of the Nandigram area back to the hands of the CPM); and that is a normal policy of the Left. They claim to be conscience keepers of the nation, and are always ready to criticize the actions of others, but are totally unwilling to tolerate anybody else commenting on things they may have done.
In the incident of March 14th, a judicial line was breached that has not been breached before. Normally a CBI enquiry has to happen with the consent of the State Government, but in this case, the High Court ordered the CBI to start an enquiry; there was no way that the CPM would have ever agreed to such an enquiry (such enquiries only happen in other states and with other parties). Now, the High Court has given a further direction to the CBI for investigation and also ordered the State Government to pay compensation for an unjustifiable police action:

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From time to time, we come across cases where an insurance company will deny medical insurance to a person desperately needing the insurance; and why do they do so ? Well, obviously for an insurance company, the less claims that they can pay out, the more their profits. And in the case of medical insurance, using an excuse such as diabetes or hyper-tension gives an easy way to avoid making the insurance payment. If the concerned patient has either of these 2 modern diseases (that are very prevalent), then the insurance company can claim that these are pre-existing diseases and hence the claim can be rejected. This gambit must have succeeded in a number of cases, till this gentleman filed a case in the consumer forum against the insurance company and the consumer court rejected the contention of the insurance company:

The National Consumer Disputes Redressal Commission has ruled that the claim for a particular ailment cannot be rejected merely because the insured person is suffering from some other disease, say for instance, diabetes. Diabetes and hypertension are two of the standard dodges used by insurance companies to reject claims.

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Say you are dis-satisfied with your current mobile provider, and would really like to change to another telecom operator who has a better plan, or a better coverage where you live / work, or your current operator is hopeless at customer relations; but you find that changing your number would be a big hassle because of the fact that your number would change and that is a pain. Telling assorted friends and family about your changed number could be a big problem and a lot of effort and frankly, you continue to live with your current operator because of this headache of number changing.
For some time now, there has been talk in the air about bringing number portability into India. This is a global concept where once you have a phone number in a country, you can retain the number even when you change your operator. Once operators know that you can retain your number and yet change the telecom provider, they tend to be more customer friendly, avoiding excess charges and making sure that they present their best foot to customers. This is one reason why telecom operators in India have been resisting such a measure since they know it would force them to be more customer-friendly. But now it looks like India will get the number portability system next year:

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