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EDITORIALS
Race Against Redundancy
The Durban Conference is the UN's struggle against its
own irrelevance
 It
was a grand vision, born out of the international union of peace and friendship.
Truly, a child of post-War romance, a necessary one, of let's-make-peace-not-war.
But the United Nations has come a long way since 1945. And the world too
has changed, though not as envisioned in the UN Charter. It's still a
nasty place where war and hate are not items found in the glossary of
ancient history alone. Still, it is a better world, and it is not because
of the UN, but in spite of the UN. That is not what the UN thinks. It
wants a much better world, and the cause at the moment is not the ozone
layer or Bosnia but a race-free world of optimum tolerance. The grandiosely
titled World Conference Against Racism in the symbolically rich Durban,
South Africa, is the latest, and certainly not the last, UN-sponsored
indulgence in irrelevance, an expensive irrelevance, where words like
caste, ethnicity, race, holocaust, zionism, slavery and discrimination
are used to identify New Age violators of human dignity.
Something that should have ideally been an academic
paper has become a global morality script. So anti-Semitic self-righteousness
is the morally right position. So apartheid is alive in varying forms,
not only in "Zionist" Israel but in "casteist" India
as well.The very premises of this conference are ludicrous, for it is
all about resorting to redundant historical facts-and lies-to formulate
a new social class system among nations. It is not the UN's struggle against
an intolerant world, it is the UN's struggle against its own redundancy.
This monstrous bureaucracy, sustained by global donations, lost the peace
long ago. Now, in the name of social peace-keeping, it is busy inventing
new wars, mostly leftist and liberal, to legitimise its bloated existence,
like the world's most privileged NGO. Hence the pretence of Durban: seek
out the underprivileged to keep the privileged intact.
Poverty Of Action
With or without starvation deaths, the need to overhaul
the PDS is urgent
 The
claims of starvation deaths in Orissa have brought into focus the wide
gulf between availability and accessibility of foodgrain. The gap explains
the co-existence of 60 million tonnes of foodgrain stocks and 200 million
underfed Indians. Despite running a PDS for 30 years, the country has
only graduated from the ship-to-mouth existence of the 1960s to a soil-to-mouth
existence today. Attempts to target the PDS to the poor have yielded a
bloated food subsidy bill which stands at Rs 10,000 crore. The experiment
of bifurcating the PDS into people above poverty line and people below
poverty line (BPL) has been a failure. The flaw is in the design. The
BPL families are entitled to buy wheat and rice at 50 per cent of the
cost at which Food Corporation of India (FCI) supplies foodgrain to the
PDS. The current average price of wheat and rice for BPL families is Rs
4.15 and Rs 5.65 a kg-too expensive for people on the verge of starvation.
The solution is not to increase subsidy, but
to cut the cost of FCI's food. The Central Government must be more discreet
in raising the price that FCI pays to farmers for their foodgrain. The
taxes levied on FCI must also be moderated. But a larger agenda rests
with the states. They not only have to ensure that food allocated for
BPL families doesn't get diverted, but also play a key role in more direct
means of fighting destitution. Like the food for work programme and the
newly launched Antyodaya Scheme under which up to 25 kg of foodgrain is
given to the poor every month at prices lower than under the BPL scheme.
But change in polices can only succeed change in philosophy. The Government
should stop bothering about adequacy of food production and concentrate
only on efficiency of food distribution. But isn't that the essence of
economic reforms in India?
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