By:  —Mr. R.V. Shahi
Courtesy: Ministry of Home Affairs

Energy is the prime mover of economic growth. Availability of energy with required quality of supply is not only key to sustainable development, but also the commercial energy has a direct impact and influence on the quality of service in the fields of education, health and, in fact, even food security. Inadequacy of energy supply would obviously affect very adversely these vital and essential requirements of any society. There is, therefore, an urgent need to enhance substantially the energy availability at a rapid pace so that aspirations of those who have remained insulated from such important inputs and services are fulfilled and they are enabled to have a reasonable access.

There is a big divide between the developed and the developing countries in per capita availability of energy. The developed countries not only have a significantly higher per capita energy consumption but also mainly depend on commercial energy. On the other hand, developing countries are highly energy deficient and also the large proportion of energy consumed is comprised of non-commercial energy sources such as bio-mass. As per the projections made by International Energy Agency (IEA), most of the developing countries are not expected to reach, even by the year 2030, the level of Energy Development Index achieved by the OECD countries way back in 1971. There is an urgent need to revisit the prevailing world energy order and to initiate necessary steps and to restructure and augment investments and technology transfer strategies to expand the reach of commercial energy to all the countries as per their developmental needs.

With consumption of 530 kg of oil equivalent per person of primary energy in the year 2004 compared to 1240 kg of oil equivalent per person in China and the world average of 1770 kg of oil equivalent per person, India’s per capita consumption of energy has been quite low, despite the fact that India is the sixth largest electricity market in terms of power generation. Per capita electricity consumption in India is only 615 Kwhr per year as compared to world average of 2516 Kwhr and 1585 Kwhr in China.

On 9th December, 2006, while speaking to the Chief Ministers of all the States in the meeting of the National Development Council, the Prime Minister of India outlined the approach to the Eleventh Five Year Plan (year 2007-12) and said “The GDP growth target proposed in the Approach Paper involves accelerating growth rate from 8% likely to be achieved in the base year (2007-08) to 10% in the final year (2011-12) of the Plan, yielding an average of 9% growth in the XI Plan period. This is ambitious but feasible. Growth has averaged 8 per cent over the past three years and is likely to be at this level again this year. This has never happened in the past. If we achieve the target of 9% growth in the 11th Plan, India will be firmly placed in the front ranks of fast growing economies. Most observers believe that we are at a historic cusp when this transition is possible”. To deliver a sustained growth rate of 8% to 9% through next 25 years till 2031-32 and to meet the life line energy needs of all citizens, India needs, at the very least, to increase its primary energy supply by 3 to 4 times and its Electricity generation capacity by about 6 times.

Thus, if we take a conservative view, India’s commercial energy supply would need to grow at the rate of 6% per annum while its total primary energy supply would need to grow at 5% annually. This is based on the assumption that elasticity of GDP in relation to supply of energy would be less than 1. However, this assumption may not be true entirely as, over a period of time, when economy grows, industrial sector is bound to increase at a faster pace and thus with the change in sectoral composition, demand of electricity would grow at much faster rate than projected above. Increase in the reach of the electricity has its own dynamism and would certainly act as catalyst towards more demand of electricity with growing consumerism in the country. Therefore, the correlation between electricity growth and GDP will tend toward 1:1. As noted economist Samuelson has said that choices create its own preferences. This is true in the context of Indian energy sector as well. We believe that availability of electricity creates demand for electricity. To meet the growing demand, there is a difference of opinion among the experts about supply options and market structure. One school of thought advocates that a competitive market is the most efficient way to realize optimal fuel and technology choices for extraction, conversion, transportation, distribution, supply and end use of energy. This approach believes that an energy market being managed on competitive principles is bound to minimize market distortions and maximize efficiency gains. However, there is another school of thought which questions the wisdom of assuming automatic efficiency gains in utter disregard to the prevailing market conditions and absence of a matured market with sufficient number of players in the supply chain and highly skewed demand – supply mis-match. Nobel Laureate Amratya Sen forcefully argues, “Market mania involves an under-examined faith in the efficiency and other virtues of the market, regardless of the context.”

Primarily there is no disagreement with the fundamentals of market approach. The problem arises when an ideal goal is projected without a skillfully structured road map to reach the goal. Management of transition to a matured market is what needs to be appreciated. In absence of tangible number of market players, particularly in supply chain, our fear is not misplaced in assuming that in case we have two or three big players in mind when we talk of competition, then strong cartels is always a possibility with a sole aim of sharing the supernormal profits. In such a situation assumption of passing of efficiency gains to consumers may not hold good.

8. The Committee set up by the Government of India has recently come out with the Integrated Energy Policy, which aims to bridge the prevailing gap in the demand and supply of energy in short, medium and long term perspective. Recognizing the role of both private and public sector participation in meeting the energy needs of the country, the policy strikes a right balance by stating that “wherever possible energy market should be competitive. However, competition alone has been shown to have its limitation in a number of areas of the energy sector and independent regulation becomes even more critical in such instances”.

The approach of Integrated Energy Policy is summarized below :-

• Till market matures in independent regulation across the energy streams is a necessity.

• Pricing and resource allocation to be determined by market forces under an effective and credible regulatory oversight.

• Transparent and targeted subsidies.

• Improved efficiencies across the energy chain.

An increase in passenger fares across all classes, more than 100 new trains, enhanced frequency or routes for many others, and plansto hiremore than one lakhemployeesweresome of the key Rail Budget proposals made on Wednesday. Presenting the annual Rail Budget for the financial year 2012-13 in Parliament 14th March 2012, Railway MinisterDineshTrivedimade some key proposals.Whilepreparing thebudget he drewheavily fromthe recommendations ofKakodkar committee onrailway safety andPitroda committeeonmodernization of infrastructure. Based on the recommendations of the two committees, Trivedizeroed onfive focus areas:

The Indian census is a remarkable administrative feat. Census 2011 was the largest such exercise in the world. Our census history goes back to 1872 when although a census was conducted, it is not regarded as a regular census as it was not conducted at the same time. Since 1881 India has conducted decennial censuses without any interruption. We should be proud of our census. China conducted a census in 2010 but in terms of scope, coverage and comprehensiveness our census questionnaires go much beyond a headcount. Granted, China’s headcount is higher than ours in 2011 but there the ball stops. We have numerous tables on the demographic, social and economic life of the people in this country of great demographic diversity. The first step in the 2011 census was conducting houselisting in 2010 in every village, town and city in India. Along with it a Housing census was also conducted. The questionnaire had as many as 35 questions and collected valuable data. The enumeration of households took place from February 9 to 28, 2011 and the provisional results were declared towards the end of March 2011. In fact a printed monograph running into 189 pages was available for the general reader, apart from the website.

Paper 1 of Census 2011 on Provisional Population Totals was released by Dr. C. Chandramouli, Registrar General and Census Commissioner of India. In this brief article, I shall give some highlights. But before I do so, I would like to make a comment on the format of data presentation. Usually, all the 35 states are put in an alphabetical order and so also the Union Territories (UTs). In an earlier case, the states and UTs were presented as per geographical regions. This again was not user-friendly.

The Beginning: ”Project Tiger”, a major wildlife-conservation initiative of Govt. of India, was launched in the year 1973 to save the Indian tiger from extinction. Similipal Tiger Reserve was one of the nine reserves chosen in the country to implement the project. With focus on the tiger, which is a ‘master predator’ and an ‘indicator species’ of the ecosystem, the project has paid attention to all issues relating to conservation of habitat in the tiger reserves. 

By:  —Mr. K. Saleem Ali, Prof. Amarjeet Kaur & Prof. K.K. Aggarwal
Courtesy: Ministry of Home Affairs

As one of the oldest ‘cauldrons of civilization’ in the world, India stands apart on account of its geoeconomic and political location. It is, therefore, only natural that imbibing the ‘culture of tolerance’ in its polity, is comprehensible which is amply reflected by the fact that it has shared its home with people of various religious diversities and race like the Hindus, Jains, Buddhists, Christians, Muslims, Parsees, Sikhs, Baha’is and others. Thus, a culture of tolerance had gradually evolved and emerged over the ages, ushering in the predominance of public reasoning, magnanimity and resilience in the day to-day life of the Indians. Perusal of great Epics like the Mahabharata and Ramayana tell us of heroic deeds upholding these broad minded values, age old scriptures of the Upanishads and Vedas chant innumerable hymns with analogies reflecting the merits of patience and acceptance. With time, the charity and endurance preached by Ashoka, the sufferance and understanding by Jain Muni’s, subsequently, led to the open door policy of Akbar and the permissive Sufi and Bhakti Movements. All this only echoes the predominance of public reasoning and forbearance of its people, who had taken the test of time and matured, resulting in what we perceive today, an ‘accommodative polity of India’.
Role models in the garb of Mahatma Gandhi, Rabindranath Tagore and Jawahar Lal Nehru, during its freedom struggle, played a pivotal part to portray, practice and propagate the indomitable spirit of public reasoning and accommodation of “Unity in Diversity”. Thus “the secularism in contemporary India, which received its legislative formulation in the Post-Independence Constitution of India, contains a strong influence of intellectual history, including the championing of intellectual pluralism” 1. India prides itself as the only nation in the world, which adopted the secular democratic polity in its Constitution after achieving its independence. Contrary to this Utopian ideology, it has had to face its share of woes with the rise of fundamentalism irrespective of religion, over a period of time. The very same pillars supporting the basic value system envisaged in the Constitution has on several occasions gone to the extent of questioning this unique polity. The resilience of the people of India has kept it going, but at the same time, the cantankerous threat of communalism, looming large, remains intractable. To analyze the intractability of the communal violence and making it tractable, one need to delve into the entire issue of communalism from the historic point of view in a dispassionate manner and work out the structure of this conflict. Winston Churchill once had this standpoint, “if you want to plan for your future, you should know your past”. This paper is one such attempt.

Conflict Theories and Communal Violence in India

To analyze the glaring factors and the complex structure of Hindu-Muslim conflict in India, an attempt is made to correlate and put it in the right perspective, by examining the relevant Conflict Theories. On exploring a large number of themes and various Schools of Thought on Conflict Theories; the macro and micro theories were dropped, as they focus more on individual than group behavior. Hence, the search was extended to the Modern Theories relevant to our times which combines both individual and group behaviors.

Enemy System Theory

Among the Modern Theories the Enemy System Theory (EST) developed by a group of psycho analysts and International Relations Practitioners of the United States of America is most relevant. Donald L. Horowitz’s ten explanations on ‘conflict’ are also widely applicable in this context. Conceptually, both these theories have about six to ten factors, generally explaining the conflict between ethnic groups. The dividing line between ethnic groups and that of a religious group being very thin, both these aspects would be consolidated and utilized for our interpretation.
The EST hypothesis Paraphrases that, “humans have a very deep rooted psychological need to dichotomize and establish as enemies and allies”. It can be inferred from this hypothesis that the rapport between such groups would depend upon their past historic relationship. In the context of this paper, this theory is apt, since there has always been an attempt from the Eighteenth Century by the Fundamentalists of both the communities to mutually dichotomize each other as enemies and allies. If this perception and attitude was one sided, the conflict should be tractable, but since it is mutual, it becomes intractable.

Us vs Them

Coalition Politics is a time tested thing in Modern Democracy. TheconceptofCoalition Politics basically draws its roots fromthe times when warring states sometimesused to allywith each other inorder to defeat of a common enemies, as in Vedic Civilisation’s Dasragya war, Nizams & British coalition verses Marathas . In recent times in India got a taste of Coalition Politics at the state levelwhen the Left front comprisingof Communist Party of India (CPI), CPI (Marxist) and others formed the first ever Coalition

Newspaper reading and deep knowledge in text books of standards IX, X and XI will determine the performance of IAS and IPS aspirants, according to B. Ramasamy, Director, RIAS Civil Services Academy, New Delhi.

He was speaking at a motivational programme conducted by Mohamed Sathak Dastagir Matriculation School here on Thursday.

The Union Budget 2012-13 presented by the Finance Minister Mr. Pranab Mukherjee on 16th March 2012 seeks to accomplish the path of rapid, inclusive growth by pursuing five major objectives to be addressed effectively in the ensuing fiscal year.Termed realistic and pragmatic the budget focuses on domestic demand driven growth recovery, create conditions for rapid revival of high growth in private investment, address supply bottleneck in agriculture, energy and transport sectors; address the problem of malnutrition and improve delivery system, governance and transparency, and address the problem of black money and corruption in public life.

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Courtesy: Yojana.gov.in

The Union Budget 2012-13 presented by the Finance Minister PranabMukherjee in Lok Sabha on 16thMarch, identified five objectives to be addressed effectively in the ensuing fiscalyear. Theyinclude focus on domestic demand driven growth recovery; create conditions for rapid revival of high growth in private investment; address supply bottlenecks in agriculture, energy and transport sectors particularly in coal, power,  ational highways, railways and civil aviation; intervene decisively to address the problemofmalnutrition especially in the 200 high-burden districts and expedite coordinated implementation of decisions being takento improve delivery systems , governance, and transparency; and address the problemof blackmoney and corruption in public life.