Cut those telephone lines, please

And while Swaraj may try toobfuscate matters by saying that detailed guidelines and procedures must first be prepared before disconnection of telephones is allowed for non-payment of dues, this simply won8217;t wash in the Congress8217; case. The party has been a habitual offender. While MTNL rules allow for disconnecting phones if payments are outstanding for more than 40 days this, it would appear, applies only to the ordinary citizen. The Congress had outstandings of Rs 1.1 crore in January this year, but only a token attempt was made to recover this by cutting some phones. The party then promised to pay this in instalments and the phones were restored.

These instalments, however, soon stopped, and the Congress8217; outstandings refused to go below Rs 70 lakh. Now, surely with such huge outstandings incidentally, this does not include the Rs 24 lakh owed by the Youth Congress and the National Students Union of India, and over such a long period of time, MTNL was doing the correct thing by cutting off the party8217;s telephones? Given thegovernment8217;s embarrassment over doing what was clearly right, it is obvious, the officer in charge of the operation has not been rewarded for his initiative. Swaraj has, however, decided not to transfer him, as this would send a wrong signal to all MTNL officers. Thank god for small mercies.

Incidentally, this is not the only instance of the powerful not paying their bills. As reported in The Indian Express on June 18, other worthies with huge outstandings to MTNL include Ghani Khan Chowdhury with Rs 42 lakh, Chandra Shekhar with Rs 12 lakh, Vijay Raje Scindia with Rs 8 lakh, Raj Babbar with Rs 6.5 lakh, and S. Jaipal Reddy with Rs 4.5 lakh.

Swaraj8217;s pussyfooting on the Congress8217; phone bills, of course, is entirely in keeping with her party8217;s complete surrender in the face of most pressure groups. The near-complete dismantling of the major Budget proposals by Finance Minister Yashwant Sinha himself is, of course, the most eloquent testimony to this. Cases in point are the withdrawal of the proposed hikein prices of urea as well as the removal of excise and other taxes on certain goods/sectors once opposition began building up against these measures.

Equally well-known is the way pressure groups within the BJP8217;s coalition partners forced it to dilute beyond recognition the proposed Electricity Regulatory Author-ity Bill which would have forced state governments to start charging farmers realistic rates for the electricity they use over a three year period, it was hoped farmers would start paying just half of what it cost the state electricity board to generate the electricity they were using.

This, the BJP knew, was perhaps the only way that it could ensure that the state electricity boards SEBs became solvent enough to pay the Rs 10,000 crore of dues to organisations such as NTPC. This, in turn, was essential so that NTPC could build more power plants to supply power to the country. But since pressure groups prevented the BJP from doing this, the government was forced to come up with what is, in manyways, a laughable solution.

Finance Minister Yashwant Sinha proposes to come up with a mechanism to allow such outstandings to be securitised8217;. That is, financial institutions will assess what the probability of recovering the total outstandings is, and then pay NTPC a fixed amount immediately, and take these loans on to their books. So, say, they feel that half the outstandings of Rs 10,000 crore can be recovered. They will then give NTPC around Rs 5,000 crore and then try and collect all the outstandings themselves. The point is, if SEBs, who have huge outstandings, themselves don8217;t pay their dues to organisations like NTPC, surely they won8217;t pay it to financial institutions or banks who securitise8217; these outstandings. At least NTPC and organisations such as the coal companies, could armtwist the SEBs by refusing to sell them power or coal.

Incidentally, the one group of people who8217;ve emerged as the biggest losers in this entire game of pressure politics over the last fortnight are the ordinarytaxpayers. While other groups like the mithaiwalas and the namkeenwalas have managed to get the government to keep in abeyance the excise duty proposals pertaining to them, the taxpayers have managed no such concession. Surely, if taxpayers had got together into a viable union, and said that they wouldn8217;t pay any taxes until personal income tax rates were brought down to, say 20 percent, the government would have been forced to give in. It may still not be too late to do this!