Where Have All The Jobs Gone
Old jobs are being slashed and new ones have slowed down to a trickle. With corporate India shedding staff faster than ever before, the worst sufferers are freshers and middle-level managers.

Preparing For Musharraf
Administrators, securitymen and hospitality merchants gear up to ensure that it's not just the Taj that will impress the visiting
Pakistani President.

Adviser Raj
Bureaucrats don't retire. Their terms are extended or they are reappointed to counsel political mentors.

Out Of Luck Now
It will take more than voter-friendly symbolism to ensure victory in UP.

Hard Cover Up
The Government is perturbed by a cop's unreleased book on Rajkumar's kidnapping.

Connecting Bharat
It's a project to bridge the digital divide. But sources of funding are not known.

VIEWPOINT: FIFTH COLUMN

Poor Excuses

By Tavleen Singh

Among the most potent untruths that economic liberalisation has spawned is the lie that we cannot reform too quickly because it would "hurt the poor". This lie is perpetrated mainly by duplicitous politicians and dodgy leftist NGOs which too often manage to convince even the poor that they need to fear the loosening of state controls on our moribund economy. The truth is that nobody needs economic reforms more desperately than the poor and if the prime minister or the finance minister had bothered to attend the public hearing on Delhi's street vendors organised by Manushi magazine last week, they may have found that even more than big businessmen it is the poor who are demanding reforms because for them the licence-quota-permit raj is brutally alive and well.

So brutally alive and well that every day they set off to earn their meagre livelihood fearing either the police or the municipality will not only stop them but destroy their wares and their pathetic little shops. To protect themselves, Delhi's five lakh street vendors pay an estimated Rs 480 crore in bribes every year. Those who cannot earn enough to bribe the police and municipal officials on a daily basis are quite simply unable to earn a living. In the past 10 years in which the licence-quota-permit raj was meant to have been abolished the only change these vendors have seen is the rise and rise in the ghoos rate, or bribe. Politicians hesitate to widen the tax net because they do not want to "hurt the poor" without realising that the money that would have gone to the state-and possibly towards development-goes directly into the pockets of corrupt policemen and officials. Proof of this massive extortion racket lies in the fact that there continue to be more than 5,00,000 street vendors in Delhi though only 5,000 licences have been issued. Would the Delhi Government or the city's multitudinous municipal authorities care to explain this anomaly?

No, because they would then also need to explain why they have been unable to provide more licences despite a Supreme Court order more than 10 years ago saying that "street trading is an age-old vocation adopted by human beings to earn a living ... (and) comes within the protection guaranteed under Article 19(1) (g) of the Indian Constitution which guarantees (the) right to earn a living as a fundamental right". This judgement came as a result of a case filed against the New Delhi Municipal Corporation by a street vendor, Sodhan Singh. The city of Delhi was ordered to set up hawker zones to make it easier for people like Singh to earn a living legitimately but nothing has happened so far. Technically, the Delhi Government is guilty of contempt but as it is dealing with "the poor" it could not care less. Indian officials are masters at repressing the poor in the name of the poor and they always get the help of the police for whom "the poor" are not human beings but lathi fodder.

If we had real economic reforms instead of a few cosmetic changes to keep big business happy, then Delhi's street vendors would not even need licences. Central Vigilance Commissioner N. Vittal, who presided over last week's public hearing, said one way to end the corruption street vendors face was to abolish licences. When you consider the pace at which the Delhi Government hands them out this is an eminently reasonable suggestion. But then the policemen and officials who live off extortion would be personally hit in the pocket. So why should they allow it?

Hundreds of street vendors attended the public hearing. They all said they were victims of a brutal police raj for no fault of theirs. To give you some of the comments they made: "If we can't earn an honest living what should we do? Pick up a gun?" "When a leader dies he needs 50 acres in Delhi for his samadhi but they cannot give a poor man even 4 sq ft of a pavement to earn his livelihood."

Their tales of daily brutality and repression are even more horrific, as many pointed out, when you consider that this is happening in India's capital under the nose of the President and the prime minister. Is it not time for the prime minister to intervene? The Delhi Government is sitting on a plan that suggests there is enough room in the streets of the city for hawker zones to be set up at intervals of 500 m. Would Mr Atal Bihari Vajpayee like to find out why nothing is being done about it?

There is no point in telling us that this is a matter for the Delhi Government to deal with because if we could see just a small glimmer of leadership from the prime minister many of these problems would simply go away. Meanwhile, can we stop fooling ourselves that economic reforms are some kind of evil plot by the rich for the rich? Nobody will benefit more from the removal of licences, permits and quotas than the poor. Just ask your local street vendor how much.

MetroScape

Mumbai Tribal Art: Murias

Pune Multiplex:
City Pride

Long considered politically naive, the Gujarat chief minister is a wiser man now. But the shrewdness would prove worthier if employed in matters of state, writes INDIA TODAY's Special Correspondent Uday Mahurkar in
Misplaced Guile