Tackling the stray dog menace

Recent newspaper reports describe the predicament faced by residents of Srinagar in Jammu & Kashmir over the increasing stray dog population. The stray dog population of the city has been rising alarmingly to cross the one lakh mark within a period of four years.

A public interest litigation was moved in the Jammu & Kashmir High Court seeking directions for the State Government to handle the growing population of stray dogs in the city. The government reportedly pleaded before the Court that the dog population of the city would be sterilized within a stipulated time period.

A lawyer who was keenly following the case had asked the government counsel whether the dogs would stop biting after it was sterilized! This problem of stray dogs appears to be new for Srinagar and if they need to learn a lesson or two on stray dog mismanagement, they must refer to Goa!

They will learn exactly what must not be done for controlling the stray dog menace, because in Goa, in spite of having a very vast government funded sterilization programme, we have failed miserably.

The Government of India provides funds to NGOs and animal welfare organizations a sizable amount of money for sterilization of stray dogs. Under this programme, the NGOs have flourished and so has the dog population!

The Ministry of Social Welfare provides money for each dog sterilized; a higher rate for female dogs than male dogs. Animal welfare organizations sterilize an average of ten dogs per day and they have been at this job for the last ten years and more.

In spite of this, the stray dog menace in our towns has not reduced. Earlier, each municipal council had a designated dog shooter whose job it was to kill rabid and diseased stray dogs.

But with animal rights activists raising a hue and cry, killing of stray dogs are now termed illegal. With the government now clueless on how to handle the menace of stray dog population in our streets, people now expect the animal rights activists to provide th solution.

Apparently their suggestion of sterilization has been beneficial only for their own financial stability, for the people of Goa continue to suffer from a menace that never existed in the first place.

Need for truck terminus in Goa

While parking of cars has been a major problem in our towns and city, another problem related to vehicles in the offing is the parking and unloading of goods from trucks. Goa is dependent on its neighbouring states for most of its consumable goods including vegetables and grains while at the same time is host to a number of industrial units.

As such a lot of raw materials arrive into the state for the industries via the sea route, rail route as well as by road. All inland transport is then by road and thus we see a large number of trucks parked at every available place outside the outskirts of our towns and near industrial estates.

Other states overcome this problem of haphazard parking by allotting areas earmarked as truck depots for trucks and trolleys. But unfortunately, Goa does not have even one single truck terminus. Even when our managers do find a solution by identifying a place in Curti, Ponda as a truck depot, our politicians stepped in and made it a political issue.

And as with any of our problems being taken over by politicians, this issue also has been taken over and is hanging in the air with no solution in sight. There is something very wrong in the way our politicians handle any matter.

The way they go about it, it is as if they don’t want any solution to any of our problems. They are under the wrong impression that if any problem were solved – be it the garbage issue, or medium of instruction issue, or traffic congestion in our cities, then the importance of our politicians will be lost.

They want people to come to them with problems but will provide only temporary solutions. If they had solved all problems, they fear people will no longer come to them. Though it appears that the politicians fear is baseless, and that people will reelect politicians who are efficient and provide excellent and permanent solutions, then the people themselves have proved it wrong.

When Shri Manohar Parrikar was the Chief Minister, he had provided solutions to a number of problems – be it by making Panaji the most attractive city in India, providing the bypass road to Old Goa to ease traffic congestion at Ribandar, or formation of GIDC to bring quality construction work, or zero tolerance of corruption in government offices by arming vigilance department with additional staff. Now there is fear that he might even lose in his own constituency, let alone be the Chief Minister.

So we can expect no solution to this problem as well.

Solutions to the parking problem

The parking space in the four city towns of Goa – Panaji, Mapusa, Margao and Ponda has reached the saturation point. The city municipalities as well as the traffic police don’t seem to have any solution to ease parking in their respective city or towns.

Each civic authority has been found to be fiddling with solutions under a trial and error system – first planning or introducing a system and then dumping or withdrawing the system when it becomes difficult to manage.

Newspaper reports say that the main roads of the city of Panaji – 18^th June Road and M G Road have already exceeded its capacity and to traverse down these roads is exceedingly difficult during the day time on week days.

The only solution the traffic police engage in is clamping of the occasional four wheeler parked wrongly in a no parking area or parked parallel to a parked vehicle on the road. This is no solution to the problem as the vehicle continues to occupy the place until the owner pays a fine and the traffic police arrives to unlock the clamp and release the vehicle.

And often another vehicle comes and parks in the same place and the whole cycle is repeated. The solution to this problem ultimately is not clamping of vehicles and increasing the fine as the vehicle had to be parked somewhere until its owner has finished his business, which often does not take more than a few minutes.

The solution lies with the policy of the government. A casual survey of the city traffic reveals that more than 50 percent of the cars parked in the city belong to shop owners. The shop owner drives down into the city early in the morning and parks the car in a legitimate parking slot.

He then opens his shop and stays in the shop conducting his business until nightfall. So his car occupies the parking space for the whole day and occupies precious space resulting in very little space for the casual visitor who drives down into the city for a few hours on work.

This transit visitor drives into the city on business and needs parking space for less than an hour of so and thus finds no place to park. This transit visitor constitutes in almost 80 percent of the city traffic, and if he had found legitimate parking space would not have spent less than an hour in the city.

But now because he has no parking space, he spends more than that hour just hunting for parking, adding to fuel costs, adding to the traffic and wasting his own precious time. The  problem has thus been created by the vehicles parked in the city the whole day.

The solution to the problem thus lies in providing alternate efficient and proper local transport. The autorickshaw and motorcycle pilots are known to charge exorbitant rates, that the mere realization that you are being fleeced makes people averse to using this system and would prefer to use his own car even though it may cost more.

If there was an efficient shuttle service passing through the major roads in our towns and city, the traffic would definitely ease to a phenomenal extent. People are willing to use public transport as with increasing fuel prices, driving down to work is a necessary evil. If an alternate is in place, people would not only accept it, but would prefer to use it.

But then our planners seem to have other priorities.

Unique Identification Number project will remain a dream

Goa is expected to be the first state in the country to be entirely covered by the Unique Identification Project, as per the Chief Minister of Goa Shri Digambar Kamat. He claims that 21 post offices in the State will function as enrolment stations under the scheme and these post offices are expected to cover each and every citizen of the State within the next four months.

Shri Kamat’s claim sounds good but the target of four months appears unrealistic. The process of covering each and every person in the State is difficult through only 21 centres. The process itself sounds cumbersome and needs a lot of effort in fulfilling the whole procedure.

Every citizen is required to fill a form for enrolling and submit it to the registrar along with the proof of address. Every enrolment station will have one postal clerical staff for verification of documents. After checking the enrolment form entries and address proof, the postal officer will impress a stamp stating “original seen and verified”.

Thereafter, the enrolment agency will record the finger print with the help of a finger print scanner and also the eyes with the help of the iris reader. The data is then sent to the ADHAR server and a unique number generated. A receipt is the given to the citizen.

The entire exercise reportedly will require 20 minutes per citizen and everyday each centre will service 50 citizens. The calculations are based on these figures. This is in an ideal situation where each and every citizen fills up a form correctly and gets copies of the right documents.

In this calculation, it is not taken into account if any citizen does not commit any mistake and has to return back without completing any work. In practice, at least fifty percent of the applicants are susceptible for mistakes in entry of forms or in getting the right forms. This is evident in every case where forms are to be filled.

Even educated people make mistakes while filling forms, what about illiterate people? Instead of projecting unrealistic time schedules, the Chief Minister must actually have made a statement of assuring the Central Government of steps the State will take to complete the task faster. Would he be able to spare more people, open more centres for the collection of the data?

People need help to fill the forms and appointing just one clerical staff for each centre is plain stupidity, if not anything else. Though four months target is not unrealistic, the way the State plans to go about the exercise sounds very unrealistic.

Terror makes its ugly appearance

Within a span of 15 minutes, three blasts ripped through the crowded areas in Mumbai on Wednesday evening killing at least 21 people and injuring over 140 others. The maximum casualties have been have been reported in Zaveri Bazaar which is a famous jewellery market in Mumbai.

This area appears to be the target of almost every terror attack that has taken place in Mumbai. In the first case in 1993, the police had successfully defused a bomb kept in a scooter when 13 blasts had rocked the city in other places.

In the second case in 2003, a blast at Zaveri Bazaar claimed 54 lives. Wednesday’s blast took place outside a popular eatery which is crowded on most evenings. This blast was of higher intensity than the one at Dadar but the Opera House blast was evidently the most powerful.

All these blasts occurred between 6.50 pm and 7.05 pm on Wednesday. The blast at Zaveri Bazaar was triggered through explosives planted in an umbrella. The one at Opera House was caused by an explosive device concealed in a meter box while the one at Dadar was concealed in a Maruti Esteem car.

Police suspect the hand of a home-grown Islamic terrorist group, the Indian Mujahideen behind the three blasts. Police said the bombings at crowded places bear the signature of what the Indian Mujahideen had used in carrying out earlier blasts in Bangalore, Ahmedabad and New Delhi in 2008 and in Varanasi and Pune in 2010.

This terror attack is a wake-up call to all authorities the world over that even though the United States government had eliminated Osama bin Ladn, it has not eliminated terrorism along with him.

The threat of terrorism still looms high in the world and can strike at any moment at the most unsuspected areas. Lightening may not strike twice at the same place, but terror attack can as is seen in the three-in-a-row attack on Zaveri Bazaar in Mumbai.

Hence the world must take notice of the Mumbai attack as a grim reminder to recoup ourselves and be ready to fight terrorism.

Its time to stop gloating on the fact that Laden is dead but America has not killed terrorism and its cause.

Bail is not a verdict of innocence

In most police and CBI cases, acquittals have become routine because of delayed and casual approach by the investigating officers – sometimes deliberate, sometimes because of incompetence, and sometimes because of too many persons involved in charge of the investigations.

Because of this trend of acquittals in most cases of economic offences, especially where high profile persons are accused, the new trend of denial of bail by the Supreme Court of India at the inquiry stage itself has been welcome.

Some may call this denial as a window dressing measure so that the credibility of the Court is maintained. Refusal of bail and confinement to custody before charges are filed were normally reserved for heinous crimes like murder or dacoity or here there was probability of the accused tampering with the evidence.

This trend seems to have changed with the 2G scam case. The Supreme Court seems to have noted that the CBI took an inordinately long time to arrest the accused probably because of the influence the accused wielded in their public offices.

It probably indicated possibility of the accused tampering with the records or with the witnesses. In a similar case, the Court had observed that offences against body and property affect one person or at the most a few others, whereas in case of economic offences where public offices were used to defraud over large sums of money, it affected the society at large.

It meant that the impact of the offence in the society could be the next yard stick to measure the gravity of any offence and thus become the deciding factor on the decision whether to grant an accused bail or to keep in custody.

The society welcomes this decision even though it is a temporary feeling of having punished the rich and powerful. It however does not augment well for the rich and famous, as the chances of bail seem to diminish on the accused’s financial status.

The Court may observe that the CBI seems to take inordinate time to arrest the accused and may appoint committees in other cases, but at the same time, shouldn’t Courts look within their own functioning?

How many cases are there where Judges have been pulled up for delaying cases? None. Is there a system in place to pull up a Judge for delay in hearing of civil cases which we know have been dragging on for years, or for the accumulated rates of interest in land acquisition cases in the form of arrears? None.

Who will bell this cat?

Judicial activism in India - a new awakening

A series of judgments from the Supreme Court of India in the last few months has suddenly jolted the Government from deep slumber. In the 2G spectrum case, in which Telecom Minister A. Raja was the main accused in a mega-crore scam, the Court wondered “how is he continuing in the Cabinet when the CBI is probing serious charges against him?” Following this observation, A. Raja quit office and in February this year landed in Tihar Jail along with the other high profile accused.

In March 2011, the Supreme Court quashed as illegal the appointment of P. J. Thomas as Central Vigilance Commissioner because of a charge sheet pending against him in Kerala. The Court also laid down guidelines for future appointments to this post. P.J. Thomas had been cleared for appointment by the Prime Minister Shri Manmohan Singh but had not taken any action when it was brought to his notice the pending case.

Three more judgments were pronounced this month. The judge hearing the multi-crore black money laundering case pulled up the government for the laggardly pace of investigations. The judge wondered aloud “What the hell is happening with this country?” and made headlines all over the country. The Court appointed a special investigation team to probe and monitor steps being taken to bring the black money back to the country.

In another case, the Supreme Court ordered disbanding and disarming of the special police officers called “Salwa Judum” formed in the anti-naxal operations in many states. It called the arming of tribals by the state as unconstitutional.

In yet another case, the Supreme Court quashed the Mayawati government 2007 notification to acquire land in Greater Noida accusing the state of a sinister campaign to grab land of poor farmers.

All these judgments have come against a background of administrative inaction, in efficiency, graft or worse. The public has suddenly become happy that judges have come down heavily on our elected representatives.

The writing is there on the wall. It is up to our elected representatives to wake up and read the writing on the wall.

Or face the consequences.