Chicken & egg: Crisis and Redemption

Chicken & egg: Crisis and Redemption

We have learned Rapid Deployment, Crisis Management, Organisational Responsiveness, things like this, from the military and management theory. And sometimes, like right now, the government can make a breathtakingly good job of showing how well they’ve learned their lessons. Accompanied, of course, by the Indian media, print, radio and electronic, all desi clones of CNN, adept at getting rapidly to “ground zero” and “breaking news.”

The combined onslaught of the culling and the front-page news was so intense and immense that it must have destroyed the dreaded H5N1 virus if it ever had the temerity to come to India in the first place. We’ve seen this kind of germicidal hesitation before- when the “plague” came to Surat in 1994. First, the “bubonic” plague, notorious from medieval times, managed just 3 infections (all victims recovered fully), before switching to its more contagious “pneumonic” version, eventually killing 56 after creating a general panic with a quarter of Surat’s population (600,000 people), running away before a quarantine was put in place. In Navapur this time, by way of contrast, movements in and out were controlled at first information. With regard to Surat, the prevailing consensus was that in 1994, plague, confronted by Tetracycline, had absolutely no scope to play Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Besides, it must be understood by the WHO and the world, our standard issue Surati diamond worker was accustomed to living amongst mountains of municipal refuse and not averse to using a passing rat as a side pillow. In the aftermath, Surat became the cleanest municipality in the country, winning awards for the achievement several years running. The next outbreak of pneumonic plague, at Himachal Pradesh in 2002, barely rated a passing mention, armed as we were with Tetracycline, rat poison and past experience.

During the current “avian” attempt, the authorities have done us proud. Take the statistics revealed by one Mr B. Gagrani, the Maharashtra government spokesman, from his perch at the Secretariat in Mumbai: culled chicken in Navapur and a 10 km. radius between Saturday 18th and Wednesday 22nd February 2006 - 1,94,124 poultry farm birds and another 14,669 of the walkabout type from the backyard co-operatives. Also destroyed: 3,66,000 eggs in the same time-frame.

In addition, Mr. Gagrani said, a house-to-house search of Navapur district revealed 237 persons with low-grade fever cowering in their homes but none were deemed “serious”. Further, blood samples from 151 persons who came into “direct contact” with the “infected” birds were sent to The National Institute of Virology at Pune and The National Institute of Communicable Diseases in New Delhi for sophisticated analyses. Of this number, 12 persons were placed in the isolation ward at Navapur Hospital suspected of being infected with something out of the ordinary. Happily, the media reports of Friday 24th February, 2006 have revealed that none of the persons isolated, or indeed the long list of 151, have bird flu. One person in the isolation ward does have something strange but it doesn’t look like “avian influenza” anyhow.

Meanwhile, The Secretary, Union Ministry of Health, Mr. P.K.Hota, said in New Delhi that an additional 73,157 birds had been destroyed at unspecified locations in Gujarat. The total number culled in Maharashtra, including the Navapur region, is 2,08,892.With a blindingly rare prescience, Mr Hota opined, on the self-same Wednesday 22nd, when all was by no means clear, that, he expected any persons that tested positive for bird flu, to only develop “mild” symptoms.

The only ones unhappy with how things have turned out are some poultry industry personnel in the eye of the Navapur storm lamenting the “murder” of their “healthy” fowl and insurers wearing a grim look, kicking themselves for not having included “avian influenza” amongst the exceptions not qualifying for compensation.

The Indian Poultry Sector overall has been doing very well both domestically and in the export market. It is the 4th largest producer of eggs in the world – an estimated 3,000 crore eggs per annum. India ranks 8th in broiler production with an output of 100 crore birds tantamount to 7,50,000 tonnes of chicken. The poultry sector employs 100 million people, between the organized and desi sectors and accounts for about 2% of the GDP. At present, just four states: Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra, Punjab and Tamilnadu account for more than 50% of our poultry industry.

There’s a tremendous growth trajectory as well but it will have to be defended with better practices and precautions to prevent future outbreaks. In the meantime, with “Tamiflu” and friends at the ready, the industry is planning the great big Tandoori and Butter Chicken extravaganza, complete with lashings of Bollywood. It’s so feelgood for once that it reminds me of the gala banquet at the end of an Asterisk adventure.

(800 words)

Friday, 24th February 2006
Also published in The Pioneer, Sunday 26th February, 2006 www.dailypioneer.com

By Gautam Mukherjee
CEO, Indus Overseas

Sieg Heiling the Judiciary!

Roy Lichtenstein- Blam!

Opinion


“If you cry ‘forward’ you must be sure to make clear the direction in which to go. Don’t you see that if you fail to do that and simply call out the word to a monk and a revolutionary, they will go in precisely different directions.”

Anton Chekhov

“The good old rule sufficeth them, the simple plan
That they should take, who have the power,
And they should keep who can.”

William Wordsworth in “Rob Roy’s Grave”

Sieg Heiling the Judiciary!

My father spent his childhood in a mud house in rural East Bengal. Every monsoon the rivers swelled and walls melted away. The only brick and mortar “dalanbari” in the area belonged to the zamindar. I have listened to fascinating accounts of all kinds of Huck Finn style happiness from him. Simple pleasures – plentiful, but, they did have to suffice. This is my genetic memory: deeper and more telling than all my relative affluence, sophistication and rationale of present times.

So pardon me if I cringe when the Supreme Court orders bulldozers to knock down perfectly good malls built on Lal Dora land. These malls are designed by some of our best architects and built to the finest specifications, by class one contractors. Anyone can see this plain as daylight: Madame Mercedes Butterfly, working-man Sachdev and turban urban alike. And all can be justifiably proud. These are buildings clad, not highlighted, with veined Carrara marble and inch-thick plate glass. These malls could have adorned London or Paris, doing credit to these centres of civilisation and modernity. But because they’ve been born, immovable, on the edge of Sultanpur village, they’ve been ravaged by reluctant rapists trying to digest the profligate ways of Delhi “justice”.

From a broader perspective, perhaps the phenomenon is no more than fate on a timer. This is, after all, the 8th historical city of Delhi: “self-destruct” is built into it’s genes. It’s telling that the most abiding modern sight is a new bit of Delhi being dug up always in the shadow of an eternally patient Mughal tomb.

The courts, emboldened perhaps by past successes (such as the introduction of CNG in public transport and no public broadcast mikery after 10.00 p.m.), seem to have ingested a whole strip of judicial Viagra before getting to work this time. Like a modern day Madame De Farge gleefully counting heads as they fall from the guillotine to the tumbrel, judicial activism has taken upon itself the task of remaking Delhi. This means calling for the destruction of every “misused” shop, “flagrant violation” of a showroom, “rampant commercialism” of an office in the wrong place and “encroachment” prone and overbuilt home. At an estimate it will involve 294 of Delhi’s 300 districts because they all contain numerous such violations of the law.

The stridency is called for, say the courts, to stem the rot. Previous directives to crack down have been flouted by an uncooperative Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD), a Delhi Development Authority (DDA), and the New Delhi Municipal Corporation (NDMC) alike. It’s corruption and collusion, says the judiciary, ignoring the payola and sleaze in its own house. To the observer it’s classic pot calling the kettle black but without a trace of self consciousness and manic vigour. The orders are to “raze” every illegal structure to the “ground” and prosecute all the colluders. Just so that there is no mistaking of judicial “will,” the Supreme Court is rumoured to be working on ways to strengthen the provisions of the contempt of court law! Mohammad of Ghazni couldn’t have asked for more.

But why such sudden and uncharacteristic zeal? Is this the unseen hand of the “legal” mall builders lobby and the international retailers waiting in the wings? Or do we innocently believe the slogans that say we’re going from the “walled city” to a “world city” before the Commonwealth Games get here in 2010? Or is this a kind of judicial coup brought on by extreme lassitude on the part of the executive? Are we witnessing a corrective “enforcement” of our laws or a sinister subversion of our constitution? Or is this really very clever - as in the politico firing his gun from the shoulder of an acquiescent judge? Are the traders going to riot? Are urban villagers going to stop traffic? Is the government going to fall? Is somebody going to point out the mote in the judiciary’s eye and take them on?

The Chinese find this sort of thing very unfunny, ranking “interesting times” in cursed territory. They have a point, having lost over 30 million of their number in peace time experimentation (The Cultural Revolution), under Mao. For the Indian judiciary, with 30 million cases pending adjudication, feeling “above” the law has some surreal and decidedly perverse aspects to it.

Meanwhile, picture Delhi’s estimated 3 million slum dwellers relieving themselves in open nullahs and meditating upon progress, capital ishtyle. This is now a city in which enforcement of zoning and building byelaws translate into self-inflicted slash and burn, not fines and rents and reinforcements of infrastructure. What will the courts do about the filching of 50% of our electricity should they decide to usurp the task next? Maybe the “ultimate solution” lies in lowering camouflaged high tension wiring into the nullahs at dawn…

Is this jack-booted harshness actually in the natural air these days? Certainly politics everywhere: local, state, national, global, even revolutionary and racketeer politics - has been drifting right. Take the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) stage setting. This is a very significant fortnight coming up. A fortnight in which we expect to sign treaties to import all sorts of “peaceful” nuclear reactors, know-how, accessories and fuel from both Jacques Chirac’s France and George W Bush’s America. King Abdullah’s already been, in January, executing his very first foreign visit as King, and has assured us fulsome supplies of petroleum lest we think we can’t do without Iran.

But, most significantly, over the coming days, we can look forward to nuclear legitimacy; the anticipated treaties will act as documents of club membership. It has taken just 7 years of finessing and brazening it out to come to the head table. It was on a hot May day in 1998 (Buddha Jayanti), that the right-wing prime minister Vajpayee took his most courageous political decision within a scarce 90 days of coming to power. That set of underground detonations at Pokhran marked our “arrival” on the world stage. And here we are, in February 2006, all set to have the presidents of the US and France come over to “regularise” our clandestine gate crash.

Certainly America (read the world), is being more generous with us as also chief “proliferator” Pakistan. America can also live with sometimes menacing “undeclared” nuclear states like Israel and South Africa. And also with the barbs and provocations from international nuclear treaty violators like North Korea and China. These are the realities of geo-politics after all and strategic considerations outweigh all other. But then why is America so very against the prospect of Iran with nuclear weapons? Are the Iranians any more of a risk than any other nuclear weapons state? Perhaps, as many are starting to realise, the objections being raised have no more to do with Iran’s nuclear weapons programme than the invasion of Iraq was about their weapons of mass destruction (WMDs). The consensus is veering around to the notion that the temptation of adding the 4th largest producer of oil in the world to the kitty alongside Iraq and Saudi Arabia, albeit by proxy, is very compelling for America. The prize, as it happens, is concentrated enticingly with 90% of Iran’s oil in the single province of Khuzestan, bordering Iraq…

Well that explains that, but who, or what, is stirring up our judicial pot about reworking the face of Delhi and to what end? There must be a buck or two in it as the price of integrity.

(1,347 words)

By Ghatotkach
Sunday 19th February, 2006


This and all original essays on GHATOTKACHSERIES are copyright 2005-2006 by Gautam Mukherjee. All Rights Reserved.