India
Inc to help tackle Maoist terror By Neeta Lal
DELHI - In what is widely
being perceived as a unique outreach initiative,
the Congress party-led United Progressive Alliance
(UPA) government has sought the help of corporate
India to deal with with what Prime Minister
Manmohan Singh has described as "the biggest
national security challenge facing India" -
Maoist/Naxal terror.
Close on the heels of
Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee constituting the
Bharat Livelihoods Foundation (BLF) last month, an
organization to economically empower marginalized
communities, Rural Development Minister Jairam
Ramesh has sent out formal letters inviting
leading business groups - the Tatas, Reliance,
Wipro and Infosys - to become its partners and
synchronize efforts with the government to squash
the Naxal menace.
The insurgency, which is
a drain on the national exchequer, has
bedeviled large swathes
of the country, killing more people each year than
separatist terror, say surveys.
Maoist
violence continues to dominate internal security
concerns in India. In a potent reminder of how
powerful the Maoists have become in the past four
years, in April the Home Ministry revealed in its
latest annual report that 3,240 people (including
civilians and security forces) were killed last
year in Naxal violence, compared to 1,034 in
northeastern states and 496 in Jammu and Kashmir
during the same period.
Almost all
red-infested states witnessed casualties among
civilians and security forces during the period
with Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand reporting a high
number of killings. Bihar, Odisha, West Bengal and
Maharashtra are other states which have reported
casualties in double digit figures consistently
since 2008. "The CPI [Maoist] continues to
remain the most dominant and violent outfit among
the various left wing extremist groups, accounting
for more than 90% of total LWE [left wing
extremism] incidents and 95% of resultant
killings," the report noted.
And it is
towards this end - and the subsequent loss of
business to India Inc - that the UPA's latest
initiative is aimed at. "Our objective is to
create a total corpus of 1,000 crore rupees
[US$200 million] to begin with," Ramesh wrote in
the invitation letters to the captains of
industry.
"This would enable BLF to be a
sustainable, strong and meaningful organization in
its efforts to scale up civil society
interventions and transform the lives and
livelihoods of the marginalized adivasis
[tribes] living in and around 170 districts,"
Ramesh wrote. His ministry will hold a meeting
with civil society, state governments and
potential partners on April 27 to take the
proposal forward.
The foundation, reveal
ministry sources, will be managed on professional
lines, with a chairman and a full-time chief
executive officer. It will bolster developmental
activities in watershed management, dairy,
fisheries and agriculture. Holistically, it will
focus on whittling down the gap between outlays
and outcomes, ensuring better implementation of
government programs.
"Among those who have
most acutely felt the sense of exclusion and
alienation are the adivasis, who perform
poorly on every indicator of well-being, whether
it be poverty, health or education," said a joint
concept note on the foundation prepared by the
rural development ministry and the Planning
Commission.
"What is worse, given the
specific demography of adivasi India, the
pockets of adivasis' concentration have
witnessed an unprecedented upsurge in Maoist
militancy in recent years," the note added.
The government has approached the captains
of industry as while mayhem and destruction have
dominated the larger narrative of the Naxal
movement in India, a raft of businesses have
successfully managed to prosper in these places.
This was likely boosted by Corporate Social
Responsibility initiatives - as well as the
payment of protection money.
"This means
that when the Naxals see economic benefits
percolating down directly to them, they are far
more malleable," opines Dr Pradipto Baruah, a
political scientist at the Jadavpur University.
"These marginalized groups are willing to talk the
language of growth and development, and when they
see themselves as stakeholders in that process,
they are willing to cooperate."
Delhi's
multifarious attempts to control Naxal terror
across the country have met with a lukewarm
response. There are doubts that the
three-year-old, $700-million Integrated Action
Plan (IAP) has been able to bridge the "trust
deficit" between the Maoists and civil society and
the government on the other, the objective
outlined by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.
Nonetheless, a revamped IAP is likely to be
implemented from April 2013.
Planning
Commission member Mihir Shah, a critic of the IAP,
says the flagship program alienates the intended
beneficiaries because locals are given no say in
decision-making. According to Shah, the government
officials responsible for the trust deficit in the
first place are the ones who decide on the
projects taken up under the IAP. "Without
involvement of local beneficiaries and civil
society as a third party monitor, the plan cannot
work," said Shah, who is pressing for re-orienting
the approach to IAP.
Under the
government's new battle plan involving corporate
India, resources from government schemes will
enable the latter to develop better synergies with
civil society organizations. Officials say that in
the past two decades, some of the best innovation
in improving livelihoods in the tribal areas has
come from civil society and BLF is an effort to
support these grassroots initiatives to uplift the
tribal community.
According to experts,
the challenge is to transform systems of
administration and levels of awareness at the
grassroots to ensure that well-meaning pieces of
legislation (such as the Right to Information,
Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee
Act and the proposed Food Security Act and
Minerals Act) have the requisite impact on the
ground. This development will gradually bring
about the desired positive change in rebel
mindsets.
The firms can participate in BLF
by paying donations. Those shelling out about $40
million are given a board position. Though the
government will not have any say in its day-to-day
functioning, its funds will be disbursed to civil
society in a need-based manner.
The
primary reason why India Inc is willing to take on
the Maoists is because these firms too are tiring
of the government's inability to eliminate them,
which takes a heavy toll on business. Ironically,
Naxal violence is concentrated mainly in the
mineral-rich area of the country where most of the
precious iron ore, coal, bauxite and limestone are
found.
None of these mineral riches can be
exploited fully by business houses as Naxals
regularly target their factories, mills and mines.
Coal India, Nalco, NMDC, SAIL, Essar Steel and
Tata Steel - which have operations in the eastern
states - have all been victims of Naxal terror.
Jindal Steel, a $12 billion conglomerate,
has had to hold back its plans to build a steel
plant in central Chattisgarh due to Naxal attacks
while Essar's iron ore plant has been targeted
several times. Tata Steel's steel plant in the
same area has also suffered damage. State-run
enterprises aren't spared either. National Mineral
Development Corporation and Steel Authority of
India have repeatedly had their expansion plans
scuppered due to the Naxal fear mongering.
Currently, according to unofficial
reports, approximately 200 billion rupees are
stuck in power and steel industries in this
mineral-rich belt due to the Maoist menace.
Neeta Lal is a widely published
writer/commentator who contributes to many reputed
national and international print and Internet
publications.
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