A tale of two ministries

India’s population is currently expected to stabilise at anything between 1.5 and 1.8 billion, depending on which fertility rate one selects. But hidden in this macro statistic are other disturbing trends. Most people who believe that this runaway population growth will affect the availability of land and food are wrong. During the last 20 years the world’s agricultural produce has outpaced the rate of population growth considerably. In India, the density of people per hectare of cultivable land will go up from 4.2 in 2000 to 4.4 in 2050, which is hardly alarming. But what these figures conceal is the huge migration taking place from villages to cities. In India, it is likely that almost all of the population growth will be reflected in the urban areas only. India already heads the group of countries with the largest number of megacities, Surat and Ahmedabad having joined the list. Managing this huge migration will require extensive retraining of the population as people dump agriculture and small industries to join the city based service industry’s work force. Instead of giving the education pattern in the country a new focus, with newer technical curricula, polytechnics and vocational training institutes, the education ministry has focused on absurd priorities like rewriting the history books of class six and seven students.

A recent survey on corruption has thrown up the startling fact that in the mind of the common man, his attempt to get his children into school forces him to confront the worst form of corruption. Among the many ways in which India’s exploding population can make the country ungovernable, the most worrying are the huge numbers of 19-25 year old males in the northern states, who are uneducated, untrained and unemployable. Instead of grappling with these giant problems we see this ministry caught up in silly attempts to proclaim that the Aryans lived in Mohenjodaro. Education, both formal and vocational, is increasingly being run through private enterprise. Colleges (other than IITs) have mostly collapsed, and foreign universities maintain permanent offices in India to recruit students who are willing to pay and have nowhere to go. In all this mismanagement, shouldn’t the education minister also go?

The home ministry in a well run state should have little to do. The sub-continent unfortunately is caught between two giant terror networks, the Al-Qaeda and the Jemmah Islamiah and the home ministry has its hands full. So, while the British boasted that India was a peaceful country governed by no more than 30,000 British personnel at any one time, today the home ministry alone has roughly 520 battalions of para-military forces to keep the country together. Backing this gigantic force are the state police forces. The question is, what kind of leadership does the ministry provide to this huge uniformed armed force? Three years ago when the Indian Airlines plane was hijacked, it landed in Amritsar, was refused permission to land in Lahore and eventually landed in Kandahar. On the way, an Indian was murdered in flight. The question then came up as to who should have prevented the hijack, who should have registered the FIR on the murder, who was accountable for stopping the aircraft at Amritsar, who controlled the NSG, and who ran the control room to co-ordinate an operation that spanned four sovereign countries and four Indian states. No answer ever came out of the establishment, except that a senior bureaucrat who couldn’t have differentiated a control room from a powder room had tried to manage things centrally during the crisis.

The country cannot fight international terror without an all-India police force, technically competent in surveillance and forensics, like the FBI. The days of controlling riotous mobs with bamboo sticks are over. The FBI is willing to give any amount of training and technical support, but the report of five police commissions on restructuring the police and retraining them lies unattended in the ministry. There is hardly a crime that does not have interstate ramifications. Why can’t crimes with interstate connections be prevented and investigated by a single federal police organisation? Clearly the Intelligence Bureau is an anachronism. Formed solely to protect the British government from the people, it must be merged with the CBI and made subordinate to it so that ‘gathering’ intelligence does not gain primacy over making arrests and investigating crime. Anyone who has served long enough in the government knows that ‘intelligence warnings’ are put out roughly once a week, 52 times a year. There are adequate recommendations on all these matters lying with the home ministry, on which no action has been taken for the last 20 years. The difference now is that the threat has become severe and the price of inaction is that large numbers of civilians are killed.

It is not enough for the home minister to say that cross-border terrorism must stop. Stopping it is the task of the defence and foreign ministries. How does the home ministry intend to fight it in the country, when the IB is more concerned with ‘political’ intelligence (read gossip), does not arrest people and does not investigate its own leads. When are we going to produce policemen who know something of the criminal code, are familiar with the laws and are not used to line VIP routes holding single shot rifles?