- WHAT INDIA BLANKS OUT AND WHAT IT LOVES TO FLAUNT
OUR SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT
New Delhi, Oct. 15: India is at the top of an unenviable heap that may invite involuntary sniggers but carries with it the seeds of an inexcusable tragedy.
A global report has put the number of Indians who defaecate in the open at 665 million — more than half of the 1.2 billion people estimated to have followed the practice worldwide in 2006.
A related piece of statistics brings out the magnitude of the fallout: India also accounts for the highest number of child deaths from diarrhoea. Over 386,000 children — out of the 1.5 million worldwide — who die annually from the infection are from the country, according to a report released by Unicef and the WHO on Wednesday.
Up to eight in 10 diarrhoea deaths are said to be caused by unsafe drinking water and poor sanitation as well as unhygienic practices such as inadequate washing of hands.
The figures also provide a pointer to how daunting one of India’s unfinished tasks is — a government pledge to eliminate open defaecation by 2012.
In April 2007, the rural development ministry had announced it would work to achieve total sanitation by ensuring that every household had access to a toilet by 2012, but experts have cautioned that the deadline appears unrealistic.
“Even where new toilets have been built, there’s resistance among people to using them,” said a water specialist with an international organisation in New Delhi. “This is not surprising at all — at some sites, there is not enough water, some toilets may be badly designed, and others are so badly maintained that people prefer to use the open fields.”
The scale of the problem isn’t linked to India’s large population alone. China, with a higher population, has only 37 million people who practise open defaecation. At 40,000, the number of child deaths from diarrhoea in China shows a corresponding decline compared with that in India.
The Indian government has helped build 58 million household toilets, 900,000 toilets in schools, and more than 45,000 community toilets over the past eight years under the total sanitation campaign led by the rural development ministry.
In some districts, local authorities are using community workers to run sanitation campaigns. One such worker, from Haryana’s Kurukshetra, who had attended a seminar on sanitation in Delhi this year, recalled an innovative method she and her colleague used to stress the need to use toilets.
“We would pick a blade of grass, place it for a few seconds on faeces that we would find in village fields, then dip the grass blade in a tumbler of water, and ask people whether they would drink that water,” the worker said. “We did this to tell them how flies carry disease from open defaecation.”
Indian officials said the number of child deaths from diarrhoea in the country had halved over the past 15 years. “There has been more progress against childhood diarrhoea than against childhood pneumonia,” said M.K. Bhan, a paediatrician who is now India’s biotechnology secretary. “But we also have to address malnutrition — which is an underlying cause of most of the deaths from diarrhoea and pneumonia,” Bhan said.
The Unicef-WHO report has prescribed preventive actions to improve hygiene and sanitation focused on hand-washing with soap, improving water quality and quantity, and promoting community-wide sanitation.
It has also prescribed promotion of exclusive breast-feeding and the use of fluid replacement to prevent dehydration, and zinc therapy to decrease the severity and duration of diarrhoea symptoms.
“It is a tragedy that diarrhoea, which is little more than an inconvenience in the developed world kills an estimated 1.5 million children each year,” Anne Veneman, executive director of Unicef, said in a statement released with the report.
I feel it is shocking that more than half our population defecate out in the open.
The government will never have the funds to raise the standard of living of these people unless 1) it roots out corruption and 2)stops giving its employees more than 50 % wage increases every 5 years as Pay Commission awards while the rest of India is as shown above.
It will never have the funds unless WHO or Japan or any other Western country provides it. Of course only 10% of that will be used, the rest being pocketed by the politicians and the bureaucrats.
Now compare the above with what comes below.
Mukesh pay cut: Rs 29cr
OUR SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT
Mumbai, Oct. 15: Mukesh Ambani has taken a 66 per cent pay cut, 10 days after corporate affairs minister Salman Khursheed advised companies to stop paying “vulgar” salaries to their chief executives.
Ambani’s total compensation package for 2008-09 will shrink to Rs 15 crore from Rs 44.02 crore in the previous year.
The Reliance Industries’ honcho expressed “a desire to set a personal example of moderation in executive compensation,” the company said in a statement today. He was responding to calls for austerity in executive pay that were first orchestrated by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in May 2007.
The remuneration committee of the board of Reliance Industries met recently and decided to cap Ambani’s compensation at Rs 15 crore in response to his wish.
The committee also decided to adopt a “capped structure” method to decide the compensation packages of top executives in Reliance Industries from now on.
Under the Companies Act of 1956, the top manager in a company – in this case Mukesh Ambani – can be paid up to 5 per cent of the net profits of the company. The overall remuneration that can be paid to top managers is capped at 10 per cent of net profits.
In April 2008, shareholders of Reliance Industries extended Ambani’s tenure as chairman and managing director by five years. They also approved a monthly salary of Rs 5 lakh and perquisites and allowances of another Rs 4 lakh. In addition, he was entitled to a commission on the net profits and fees for attending board meetings. All of these components were clubbed under the 5 per cent cap.
From now on, compensation at RIL will no longer be decided on the basis of the percentage of net profits. The absolute limit on compensation will depend on that year’s performance and reflect the executive’s contribution. It will remain “motivational for enhanced performance, and yet (stay) within reasonable limits”, the release said.
Brother Anil Ambani is one of the highest paid chief executives in the country and earned over Rs 52 crore from his five listed companies. The rules allow a top executive to draw his remuneration from more than one company but the overall sum has to be within the 5 per cent cap of any one company.
None of the top companies in India pay anywhere near the 5 per cent limit – a limit that was set more than 50 years ago when companies earned lowball profits.
Until now, Reliance Industries had internally pegged the managerial remuneration payable to Mukesh Ambani and his two cousins – Nikhil and Hital Meswani – at 0.402 per cent of the net profits. Of this, Mukesh Ambani got Rs 44 crore, or 0.23 per cent of the net profits of Rs 19,458 crore in 2007-08.
“The compensation of Rs 15 crore is 98 per cent lower than the limit of 5 per cent of net profits,” the company said in the media release.
In 2008-09, RIL earned a net profit of Rs 15,637 crore and 5 per cent of this sum amounted to Rs 805 crore after taking into account the various permissible setoffs
Mukesh Ambani is forgoing 29 crores in his salary.
The people above can't shit properly and Mukesh has 29 crores to give away.
I have a suggestion.
The 15 crores he keeps is still very high.
The highest salary any CEO in India should be allowed to keep should be only Rs 2.50 crore annually. This comes to more than Rs 20 lakhs per month.
Whatever forgoing the highly paid CEOs are going to do should be accumulated and spent on the poor directly by them instead of giving to the government.
The government is a bottomless pit.
Whatever you pour in will go to the pockets of the people responsible for disbursement.
Further, the maximum wage allowed to be drawn should be fixed as a percentage of profit as well as given a value (Rs 2.50 crore), whichever is less.
Further, the CEOs of loss making companies should be made to forgo their salaries.
They intentionally show loss so that shareholders do not get dividend and the government does not have to be paid any tax. Of course, the government is not a fool. It has got over this lacuna by charging MAT but the shareholders continue to suffer while the CEOs continue drawing fat salaries and perks.
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