Salaam India, despite the memory lapse

The mailed fist was opened in May and was taken in stride. The power of 8220;thethousand suns8221; was with the country even when the fist was closed and was there when it was opened. India shrugged it off, because it knew that there was a long way to go.

Perhaps some of this understanding has dawned on those who 8220;sanction8221; the stopping of finance for commerce and capital flow with India, for at the end of the year, they were quietly retracting their steps.

Some other major achievements were there. We won the Asiad Hockey gold. India became the largest milk producing country in the world just as the Dudhwala announced his retirement from his home in Anand. The Tata Ener-gy Research Institute and the Department of Bio-technology gave to the world the largest collection of tissue culture plantlets for tree crops. And electricity went from the Himalayas to Kanya Kumari. In a world where trade fell by 5 percent India8217;s software phalanx battered home with a 40 percent increase in exports toting up a billion dollars additional. For the eleventh year, the Met boys accurately predicted themonsoon. An Indian company marketed a Hepatitis B8217; vaccine, engineered in an Indian biotechnology lab, conforming to international standards and at much lower than the world price.We also produced the first really Indian car and our scientists successfully installed coolan tubes in the old Rana Pratap Sagar Atomic Power Plant. The capacity utilisation of the nuclear power plants was close to design levels and even before the Russians sent the cryogenic engine, our scientists at Mahendragiri had tested it successfully in stationary conditions for over four minutes. Kamini, the Kalpakkam experimental fast breeder reactor, was working and the design of a 500 mw FBR power plant started in right earnest, placing India seriously on the path of a practical completion of the mastery of the nuclear fuel cycle, based on its abundant thorium reserves.

In 1998, India showed that its bad habit of not living within its means has become worse. The dissonance between the achievers and the Mai Baap sarkar continued. TheCentral government gave Rs. 3,000 crore for basic minimum services. In more than half states, the money went down the drain. In one state money meant for education, health and drinking water, was spent on saris distributed by a popular leader to his loyal and needy supporters. There were more glaring cases of dissonance. A chief of a multinational corporation and the conservative editors of The Economic Times said that exclusive marketing rights need not be given in the patent legislation. Whatever the merits of the argument when 8220;transition8221; time was needed, now we should negotiate directly the iniquitous product patents since, given the international power balance, there is no other go. But we would rather do this and give additionally monopoly marketing rights to foreign companies at the expense of those producing in India 8212; MNCs or local.

The Government, together with its selected supporters in other parties, successfully throttled the debate. The government finally released data on social indicatorsfor recent years even though we had argued in this column, and later this newspaper demanded editorially, for alertness by our people in global bodies. Action in time could have avoided a lot of misplaced comment on India8217;s social status in the world press and at home. The focus would have been on real issues rather than dubious global comparisons. The government did well in keeping up the focus on approving large power projects, but since June this year, it has slipped badly in running the existing plants. No action is there in rehabilitation and modernisation of old plants. The same story is there for other infrastructure and while we congratulated the FM for announcing a good Annual Plan, he has now announced a ten-percent cut in the Plan.

The government implementation of irrigation has slackened and our needs are in millions of hectares. It is the third year and our politics has seen to it that we don8217;t have a plan. We are the only large country which may enter the next century without a business-likesense of perspective. It is not enough to say you want to be an economic superpower. We need at least a few major steps spelt out in that direction. It was a year of enjoying ourselves. The needs of the next year were forgotten. Hopefully we will enter YK2 getting real.