Doctor loses registration for 5 yrs for false post-mortem report

Mumbai: In a first in Maharashtra, a medical officer has lost his registration for five years for filing an erroneous post-mortem report which pronounced the murder of a KEM medical graduate as 'natural'. The Maharashtra Medical Council (MMC) ordered the suspension of Dr Pankaj Gajre as the false report misled the police and threw off investigations.

The deceased, Dr Mukund Kedia, an MBBS graduate from Parel's KEM Hospital, was found dead in his car under mysterious circumstances in May 2010. Despite alleged tell-tale signs of an unnatural death, including injuries, bleeding from the mouth and clenching of tongue between teeth, Gajre had stated in his post-mortem report that the 23-year-old died of a coronary artery disease. A further probe by forensic experts from KEM, Sion and JJ hospitals said the signs were akin to ''asphyxiation due to smothering'' deaths.

The MMC order has come as a first victory for the family. "We have lost six years trying to convince the authorities that it was not a natural death or suicide attempt but a clear case of murder," said Mukund's father, Dr Santosh. A general physician with a medical practice of 40 years at Andheri's J B Nagar, the senior citizen was the first to unlock his son's car with duplicate keys and spot the body. "His eyes were blood-shot. There was bleeding from his mouth and several brownish contusions on the body. Even a lay person could say that it was not a case of heart attack," Kedia told TOI.

Gajre, an MBBS graduate, was on duty at Cooper Hospital's state-run mortuary, and had carried out the autopsy without assistance from seniors. "He first told us that my son has consumed something corrosive that burnt his esophagus, which surprisingly was not mentioned in the autopsy report. We were later shocked to find out that 'heart attack' was given as the cause of death," said the father. He said an appropriate autopsy report would have set the cops on the right trail to catch the culprits.

MMC president Dr Kishor Taori said the quasi-judicial body has taken a tough stance as it was a rare case. "Prima facie, there was gross negligence by the doctor. It is also a case of exploiting people's offices. Because of such doctors, good ones also suffer in the fraternity," he said. Gajre told TOI he would challenge MMC order.

Gajre is no longer into clinical practice or living in Mumbai. "I stand by my findings that the boy died of natural causes. So many youngsters are getting heart attacks nowadays. There was no ulterior motive. I wrote in my report what I thought was correct. The injury marks on his body were actually signs of decomposition," he told TOI.

After six years, Mukund's parents have got a flicker of hope for justice. "He was a good child who volunteered with Doctors for You and travelled to places hit by natural calamities to offer medical care. He had no enemies," said the father. On the day he went missing, Mukund had gone to the KEM library to prepare for his PG entrance.

The police, the family claimed, has shown little urgency to solve the case. After the family went to court to expedite investigations, the police were directed to carry out a thorough probe in December 2014. But the family was called to the Andheri police station (crime branch) only in February this year. After being a housewife, Mukund's mother has taken up teaching at a nearby college to keep her mind off the case. "We want justice and some closure," said the mother.

I just wonder, if the above action by the Maharashtra MCI is the result of PARLIAMENTARY STANDING COMMITTEE RECOMMENDS INCLUSION OF “NON-DOCTOR” MEMBERS IN MCI TO STOP MEDICAL NEGLIGENCE AND HEALTHCARE CORRUPTION.
This was published on the 10th in our blog.

Umar Khalid and Anirban Bhattacharya back at JNU

MOHAMMED IQBAL

Jawaharlal Nehru University students Umar Khalid and Anirban Bhattacharya — who were in judicial custody for more than three weeks after their arrest on sedition charges in connection with a controversial event organised on the university campus on February 9 — were granted interim bail for six months by a sessions court here on Friday.

Additional sessions judge Reetesh Singh granted relief to the two students, while applying the “principle of parity” with co-accused, JNU Students’ Union president Kanhaiya Kumar, who was earlier released on interim bail by the Delhi High Court on March 3.

The judge at Patiala House district court observed in his 12-page order that the role attributed to Mr. Kumar did not appear to be different from the allegations levelled against the two accused. The police have claimed that some anti-national slogans were raised at the event, held in the varsity to oppose the hanging of Parliament attack convict Afzal Guru.

The court released both Mr. Khalid and Mr. Bhattacharya on their furnishing of a personal bond for Rs. 25,000 each with one surety.

The court directed the two students not to leave the city without its permission during the bail period and to make themselves available before the investigating officer whenever required.

“The case set up by the police qua co-accused Kanhaiya Kumar was also of organising as well as participating in the said event,” the court said.

It also noted that the video footage of the February 9 incident had been sent to the forensic sciences laboratory and its analysis would take time. “When all the aforesaid circumstances are weighed together and keeping in view that no previous criminal record has been alleged ... besides the ground of parity, I deem it appropriate to release both the accused on interim bail,” said the judge.

Hours after his release from Tihar jail, Mr. Khalid said: “We have no regrets for being jailed in this particular case. We are in fact proud of the fact that we have been booked under sedition, a law under which activists like Arundhati Roy and Binayak Sen were booked.” Addressing a gathering on the JNU campus, he said: “I am not ashamed that I was in jail. Criminals are those who are in power, those in jail are the ones who raise their voice.”

Defence counsel Trideep Pais argued that there was no violence before or after the event. Even the police had admitted that several videos of the incident, available in the public domain, were doctored. The police had arrested Mr. Khalid and Mr. Bhattacharya when they surrendered on the night of February 23 after going missing for 10 days.

Later at night the two students were accorded a rousing reception on the JNU campus.

Small savings interest rates slashed

NEW DELHI, MARCH 18:  

Your small saving investments are will fetch lower returns starting April 1, with the Finance Ministry on Friday announcing revised interest rates for these schemes. The vastly popular Public Provident Fund will earn 8.1 per cent against the current rate of 8.7 per cent.

The new interest rates, which will be applicable for the first quarter of 2016-17 (April 1 to June 30), are 60-130 basis points lower, depending on the scheme.

The interest rate on Kisan Vikas Patra has been slashed to 7.8 per cent from the current 8.7 per cent and that on the five-year National Saving Certificate to 8.1 per cent from 8.5 per cent.

The rate on the five-year Monthly Income Scheme has come down to 7.8 per cent from 8.4 per cent.

The move, announced by Finance Minister Arun Jaitley last year, will help banks in the transmission of lower interest rates.

But the rate cuts will pinch the pocket of the common man, particularly retired people.

The Finance Ministry has also back-tracked on an earlier indication that interest rates on savings schemes for the girl child and for senior citizens would be left untouched as they serve “laudable social development or social security goals.” Rates for these schemes too have been reset. The interest rate on the Sukanya Samriddhi Account and the Senior Citizens Savings Scheme has been cut to 8.6 per cent each from the earlier 9.2 per cent and 9.3 per cent, respectively.

The interest rate on post office savings has been retained at 4 per cent.

“We have aligned the small savings interest rate more in line with the market. Bond yields over the last one year have come down sharply,” said a senior Finance Ministry official.

The next round of recalibration in small savings interest rates will be done on June 15 for the second quarter ending September 30.

Of love and honour killings

RADHIKA SANTHANAM &

SRUTHISAGAR YAMUNAN for The Hindu Bussinessline

On March 13, 22-year-old V. Shankar and his 19-year-old wife Kausalya were attacked by a five-member gang in broad daylight in Udumalpet, in Tamil Nadu’s Tirupur district. Dozens of bystanders remained spectators as Sankar was hacked to death, and a battered Kausalya too left in a pool of blood. The young woman survived the attack.

Rarely has Tamil Nadu witnessed a murder of such audacity, one recorded on CCTV. Shankar, a Dalit, and Kausalya, who hails from the OBC Thevar community, married eight months ago in defiance of her family’s objections. And the attack was confirmed as an “honour” killing a day later when her father surrendered. In a television interview, Kausalya said she and her husband had been receiving threats from her family even after marriage. The matter was taken to the police but her account suggests that nothing much was done to ensure their safety.

This lax response clearly goes against the Supreme Court ruling in Lata Singh v. State of U.P. (2006) ordering “stern action” against all those threatening or carrying out threats against couples. “There is nothing honourable in such killings, and in fact they are nothing but barbaric and shameful acts of murder committed by brutal, feudal-minded persons who deserve harsh punishment,” the judgment said. In fact, the apex court, in Bhagwan Dass v. Delhi in May 2011, deemed honour killings in the “rarest of rare” category of crimes that deserve the death penalty. Soon after, the Central government proposed that Section 300 of the Indian Penal Code be amended to include ‘honour killings’ within the definition of murder. But rejecting this proposal, the Law Commission drafted the Prohibition of Unlawful Assembly (Interference with the Freedom of Matrimonial Alliances) Bill, 2011 that sought to declare khap panchayats (katta panchayats in Tamil Nadu) unlawful. Tamil Nadu was not among the 22 States and Union Territories which supported the recommendation to bring a bill to prevent ‘honour killings’.

The Udumalpet incident is only one in a series of ‘honour killings’ the State has witnessed in recent years, and it is mostly Dalits who have been at the receiving end of the violence. In 2003, 25-year-old S. Murugesan, a Dalit, and 22-year-old D. Kannagi, a Vanniyar, were harassed and force-fed poison by the girl’s relatives while people watched them die. In June last year, the headless body of 21-year-old Gokulraj was found near a railway track in Nammakal district. The prime suspect in the case, Yuvaraj, who runs an organisation named after the OBC Kongu Vellalar icon Dheeran Chinnamalai, absconded. For the next three months, the daring Yuvaraj would continue to release WhatsApp audio clips and even give television interviews from “undisclosed” locations. The investigating officer R. Vishnupriya, a Dalit, committed suicide, after which allegations of harassment from superiors surfaced. And Yuvaraj got a hero’s welcome by his supporters when he surfaced later to surrender to the police.

The Dharmapuri escalation

There has been a spike in attacks on Dalits since the December 2012 Dharmapuri riots.According to National Crime Records Bureau data, the number of Dalits murdered in 2014 rose to 73 from 28 the previous year. It is also important to note that the Chairman of the National Scheduled Castes Commission, P.L. Punia, claimed that hardly 10 per cent of crimes against Scheduled Castes end in conviction.

An orchestrated backlash to the love affair between a young Dalit man, Ilavarasan, and an OBC Vanniyar woman, Divya, the Dharmapuri incident was used as a propaganda tool by the Pattali Makkal Katchi (PMK) for a good two years when it tried to put together a larger non-Dalit, OBC alliance against inter-caste marriages. This movement emboldened hitherto nondescript fringe casteist groups to openly indulge in hate mongering, which took the form of open and divisive campaigns even on college campuses. The party deemed many such marriages “love dramas” in which Dalit youth sporting “jeans pants” and “sunglasses” lured unsuspecting upper caste women only to swindle their wealth and dump them later. The movement objectified women by overemphasising the concepts of chastity, purity and pollution; glorified endogamy; and stigmatised inter-caste marriages in a State that pioneered a special law for such civil unions.

Fear of Dalit assertion

However, the PMK alone cannot be blamed for the rising intolerance against Dalits. The two major Dravidian parties (the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam and the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam), which claim to be legatees of Periyar's Self-Respect movement, have largely remained spectators to the violent assertion of caste identity. In fact, the AIADMK government refused to acknowledge the growing instances of honour killings in Tamil Nadu when the matter was raised by the Left parties in the Assembly. The weak reaction from these parties to the violence stems not only from the insecurity of losing crucial vote banks but also the financial might that some of these groups hold. In contrast, there are very few senior Dalit functionaries in both the DMK and the AIADMK, though Dalits account for more that 20 per cent of Tamil Nadu’s population. As indicated in a 1999 Human Rights Watch report on the southern district clashes in Tamil Nadu and the state’s response, increasing violence against Dalits stems from the fact that the economic relationship between the Thevars and Dalits has considerably changed since the early 1990s. With Dalits slowly asserting their presence in the economic and political spheres through education and thus becoming less dependent on the Thevars for jobs, and with two movements — the Dalit Panthers of India Tamil Nadu and the Devendra Kula Vellalar Federation — claiming equal share in public properties, the Thevars are “clinging more resolutely to their caste status as a way of affirming their superiority,” the report states.

Affirming superiority of caste is the basis of most ‘honour’ killings in the country. (In some cases it is affirming religious intolerance — one of the reasons for the Muzaffarnagar clashes in 2013 in Uttar Pradesh was the killing of a Muslim youth for ‘eve-teasing’ a Hindu Jat girl.) In north India, khaps, anachronistic institutions with no legal sanction, should have disappeared after the framing of the Constitution. Instead, because of a host of inter-related issues such as keeping property within the community and maintaining purity of caste, they exercise control by excommunicating members of a community for refusing to toe the line, sometimes even ordering the rape of women. They are mostly known now for opposing intra-gotra and inter-caste marriages.

In Tamil Nadu, political parties have attributed Sunday’s ‘honour’ killing to “the law and order situation in the State”, “inaction from the police”; one party simply termed the incident “shocking”. Similarly in north India, reactions to honour killings have been muted, but also outrageous. Industrialist and Congress MP Naveen Jindal in 2010 supported the Haryana khap panchayats’ demand for amending the Hindu Marriage Act to ban marriages within the same gotra. In January this year, Haryana Chief Minister Manohar Lal Khattar called khap panchayats “useful” instruments of society.

In Lata Singh v. State of U.P., the Supreme Court had said:“… inter-caste marriages are in fact in the national interest as they will result in destroying the caste system.” This was a decade back, but rings truer today. Emphasising the issue of choosing one’s own partner as a fundamental right, the All India Democratic Women’s Association had demanded enactment of a comprehensive law on honour crimes that goes beyond just the act of murder and focusses on aspects such as compensation to and rehabilitation of the affected family. That demand still hangs fire. To love cannot be a crime in a nation that is aiming to be a superpower.

Journalist Pushp Sharma, Who Claimed AYUSH Ministry Denied Jobs To Muslims, Arrested In Delhi

Urgent Alert: Journalist Pushp Sharma, whose story about the Modi govt’s refusal to employ Muslims for the international yoga day event, has been picked up by the police. For “questioning”!

Such vengeance against a guy who exposed the govt, no action on those who incited violence by showing fake videos in JNU case.

 Journalist arrested in Delhi. Recently in news for his Yoga trainers RTI, Pushp Sharma has been picked up by Delhi Police

New Delhi: A police force claiming to be from Kotla Mubarakpur police station in New Delhi picked up journalist Pushp Sharma from his home in Lajpat Nagar at around 6:30 pm today. He was told that officers want to talk to you. He said I can talk to them on the phone, but the police force insisted that you have to go there personally. Pushp told MG office that he was taken to the South-Extension Part 1, police station and later to Kotla Mubarakpur police station where his last contact with us was at 7:22 pm after which he is not picking up his mobile phone. When MG contacted Kotla Mubarakpur police station they denied Pushp Sharma was brought there.

Apparently, Pushp Sharma has been arrested in connection with his story published by The Milli Gazette and other media outlets, portals and channels about an RTI reply received from the AYUSH Ministry saying that as per government policy, it did not recruit any Muslim as Yoga trainer. The AYUSH Ministry claimed the said RTI reply was fake but the journalist stood his ground saying that reply came to him from the said ministry. MG later uploaded all relevant papers on its it website.

March 20 is International Day of Happiness - What is Happiness?

I have received the following mail from Greenpeace.

This coming week in March is incredibly special for the environment. Here’s why: March 19 is Earth Hour, March 20 is the International Day of Happiness (and another happy anniversary we will soon reveal), March 21 is International Forests Day, and March 22 is World Water Day. That’s 4 non-stop days of reasons to support our environment!

Radheshyam, it’s not every month that we get such a great chance to remember and honour this beautiful and unique environment of ours for 4 consecutive days. At Greenpeace India, we’re planning a number of things to celebrate the coming few days, and we’d love for you to be a part of it! 

All you have to do is take a simple pledge to support our environment in the link below and you’ll be taken to a page that lets you know the easy things you can do to join the celebration! These are activities you can do from the comfort of your home with a simple click of a button.

Please do sign up and share widely with your friends and family to let them know what a special week is coming up and how you’re doing your bit for our incredible environment.

Thanks for everything!

It got me thinking.

As per Smt Jaya Row

Happiness = No of Desires Fulfilled/ No of Desires harboured.

So if you want to increase your happiness, you just have to control your desires.

The fewer desires you have, the greater is your happiness and if you can make them zero, you get infinite happiness.

      

An economist’s radical idea to make India less corrupt

Posted on March 15, 2016 from Delhi, Technology ι Report #76509

How contentious the law can be, I learned by fire, when I was chief economic adviser in India. Corruption has been a long-standing problem in India that successive regimes and governments have battled or given the impression of battling and mostly failed. One can sense the despair in the classical master of statecraft, Kautilya, when in his magnum opus, Arthashastra, written nearly three centuries before the Christian era, he observed: “Just as it is impossible to know when a fish moving in water is drinking it, so it is impossible to find out when government servants in charge of undertakings misappropriate money.”

Some 2,300 years after those lines were penned the nation was being traumatised by one corruption scandal breaking after another… Anna Hazare’s call to eradicate corruption struck a chord and brought thousands out to protest.

As some well-intentioned individuals in government looked at the vastness of the problem in despair, I spent a lot of time thinking about what we, sitting in the North Block, could do to curb this dreadful menace that inflicts harm on people and, in my view, damages economic development.

A simple idea struck me about one particular kind of corruption, which I went on to call “harassment bribery,” and how it could be reduced. I felt convinced that the idea was morally and theoretically well-founded enough to at least merit debate and discussion. Let me present the gist of this idea. In India ordinary citizens and, at times, even large corporations are asked to pay a bribe for something to which they have legal entitlement. I had called these “harassment bribes.”

Say a woman has filed her tax return properly and it turns out that the Income Tax Department owes her some money. It is not uncommon for a critical employee of the department to ask for some money before he releases the reimbursement.

To give another example: a person has imported some cargo, done all the required paperwork, and paid the requisite taxes; he is nevertheless asked to pay some money in cash before he can get all the papers that he needs to take the cargo out. These are examples of harassment bribes.

One advantage of getting a senior government job is that one is never asked to pay a harassment bribe.

So it is genuinely easy for those high up in government to forget that the crime of bribery is ubiquitous. Plaintive calls for help from relatives and friends being harassed for bribes act as a reminder that all is well in the underworld and not all is well for the common citizen. This also raises a question: are these ordinary folks who pay bribes culpable given they are virtually compelled to do so?

According to India’s main anti-bribery law, the Prevention of Corruption Act, 1988, bribe-taking and bribe-giving are equally wrong. In the event of conviction, both the taker (usually a public servant) and the giver are equally punishable. As section 12 of the law states, “Whoever abets any offence [pertaining to bribery], whether or not that offence is committed in consequence of the abetment, shall be punishable with imprisonment for a term which shall be not less than six months but which may extend up to five years and shall also be liable to fine.”

It may be added here that the giving of a bribe is treated under the Indian law as abetment to the crime of bribery, and so bribe-giving is covered under this section. I want to point out that there is, allegedly, an exception to the law on bribe-giving in the form of section 24 of the Prevention of Corruption Act, 1988, which says: “Notwithstanding anything contained in any law for the time being in force, a statement made by a person in any proceeding against a public servant for an offence under sections 7 to 11 or under section 13 or section 15, that he offered or agreed to offer any gratification (other than legal remuneration) or any valuable thing to the public servant, shall not subject such person to a prosecution under section 12.” However, section 24 has a lot of ambiguity. In a 2008 case, Bhupinder Singh Patel v. CBI, 2008 (3) CCR 247 at p. 261 (Del): 2008 Cri LJ 4396, it was ruled that this exemption would apply only if the bribe giver could establish that the bribe was given unwillingly and in order to trap the public servant. The word “unwillingly” is so ambiguous that the use of this judgment as precedence is not easy.

As a consequence, section 24 has effectively become a clause meant exclusively for those wanting to carry out a sting operation to trap a public servant in the act of bribe taking, and seeking protection from the law. Consequently, section 12, which suggests that bribe-giving and -taking should both be treated as equally punishable, has come to dominate the Indian anti-bribery legal system. This, in the case of harassment bribes, seemed to me to be wrong. In situations where a civil servant asks for a bribe from a person who is legally entitled to a particular service, it is important to distinguish between the perpetrator of a crime and the victim.

But over and above this moral position, there is an interesting strategic argument that one can put forward to distinguish between the bribe-giver and -taker.

Note that under the current law, once a bribe has been paid, the interests of the bribe giver and the taker become fully aligned. If this criminal act gets exposed, both will be in trouble. Hence, they tend to collude to keep the act of bribery hidden. And even if they do not actively collude, each has a level of comfort in the knowledge that it is not in the interest of the other to reveal any information.

It is not surprising that while all Indians know of the widespread prevalence of bribery and, behind closed doors, people will tell you how they had to pay a bribe, this is seldom revealed in the courts and a vast majority of bribery incidents go unpunished. It seemed to me that this could be changed by making the following simple amendment to the Prevention of Corruption Act.

In all cases of this kind of bribery, declare the act of giving a bribe legal while continuing to hold the act of taking a bribe illegal. If needs be, we could double up the punishment for taking a bribe, so that the total magnitude of punishment remains the same. Further, once the bribery has been proven, the bribe taker will be required to return the bribe to the giver.

Now think of a civil servant trying to take a bribe. He will know that, once he has taken the bribe, he can no longer rely on help from the giver in keeping this fact a secret. Unlike under the existing law, after the bribery, the interests of the giver and the taker are diametrically opposed to each other. Knowing that this will happen, the bribe taker will be much more hesitant to take the bribe in the first place. Hence, if the law were amended, as is being suggested here, the incidence of bribery would drop sharply…

The idea seemed sufficiently compelling and of practical value that I quickly wrote and put it up on the website of the Ministry of Finance as a working paper.

There was a rancorous debate going on in India on corruption at that time. Much of the debate, while founded in genuine passion and concern, generated few practical ideas of what could be done.

Most of the popular talk was of creating a layer of special bureaucracy to catch and punish corruption. Little thought was given to what David Hume recognised some 250 years ago—that with each such layer of bureaucracy, there would be a tendency for a new layer of corruption to arise. This was the fundamental question of who would police the policeman. Indeed, one factor behind the high incidence of corruption in India was the complex layers of laws and inspectorates that we had built up over time in order to curb corruption.

I felt pleased with the idea. I knew I was addressing only a segment of the problem—namely, corruption that took the form of harassment bribery—but this segment was not negligible by any means. If we could bring this down drastically through a small change in the law without adding to the size of the bureaucracy, that seemed to be worthwhile. What I did not anticipate was the level of anger (and misreporting) that my note would generate. It began with small mentions of my paper in the newspapers, followed by lacerating editorials and op-eds. Some of them stemmed from the mistaken view that I was somehow condoning corruption and saying that bribery should be made legal. I may add that I myself would be upset if someone made such an argument (even though I must admit I could never quite follow what making bribery legal means).

Soon there were some Members of Parliament (MPs) writing to various leaders in government protesting against the floating of this idea. Two MPs, members of the Communist Party of India, wrote letters to the prime minister and the finance minister, asking that action be taken against such an immoral idea on a government website and insisting that it be taken down. Then the television channels picked this up and there were some screaming matches debating the idea.

Some individuals, including some prominent industrialists, called me up to support this kind of an amendment to the law. Narayana Murthy, the founder of Infosys and one of the pivotal figures in India’s takeoff in the information technology sector, publicly stated that it deserved serious consideration and was roundly subjected to criticism himself. I knew that, at least for the next two or three years, my idea was dead. No politician would want to be associated with it. Not openly.

Yet, curiously, it revealed a side of Indian politics which gave me hope. At the peak of this debate, when protest letters were sent to the finance minister and others and the political leaders had to write back and explain the government’s position on this, I thought I would be asked to take the working paper down from the Ministry of Finance website. That did not happen.

Moreover, no politician in the ruling party, not one, asked me either to relent or told me off for causing embarrassment to the government.

On April 23, 2011, a Saturday evening, the prominent TV journalist Barkha Dutt phoned me requesting me to appear on her show We the People the following evening. Having an instinctive taste for such discussions but not knowing whether this would churn up the debate more or dampen it, I decided to do something which I rarely did—ask the finance minister or the prime minister whether I should risk stoking the fires by participating in the debate.

The finance minister was away in Vietnam, so I phoned the prime minister at his residence. When he called me back, I told him I enjoyed these debates and, left to myself, I would love to explain my idea to the public, but since I had caused grief enough to the government, I was wondering whether or not I should go on the Barkha Dutt show. This was the first time I was speaking to Prime Minister Singh on this subject. There was a moment’s pause, and then the prime minister said that he had heard about my idea on how to control corruption, but he had to say he did not agree with me on this. Fearing that he had heard one of the many misstatements that were floating around, I explained briefly what my argument was. I doubt I would have succeeded in persuading him so quickly. But anyway, what he went on to say was very heartening to me.

He said he was leaving the decision on whether or not to appear on this particular programme to me, but since it was my job as the chief economic adviser to bring ideas to the table, I should feel free to articulate my ideas in public and discuss them. Eventually, I, on my own, decided not to appear on We the People, but I participated in many subsequent debates and felt strangely good about India.

There are not too many developing countries, and not that many industrialised nations either, that would give this kind of space not just to the nation’s writers, intellectuals, and journalists, but also to its professional and technical advisers to air new ideas that may be unpopular and perhaps not even in keeping with the government’s own position, but are potentially useful in the long run.

This strategy creates short-term turbulence, but by enriching the quality of a nation’s public discourse it contributes to a more robust development.

The above article has been written by Kaushik Basu, Economic Adviser to the UPA government.

It is from "I Paid a bribe", who send their mails to me regularly.