Whatever It Is, It Is Cheat And Looting In Manipur: Telecommunications as an example

Amar Yumnam *

A mobile tower in Imphal :: 2013 :: Pix - Hueiyen Lanpao

Many disturbingly interesting stories are coming out in the case of India as a whole. First, Nehru argued extensively in the meetings of the Constituent Assembly that the States are not to be trusted. It must be this principle which framed the Armed Forces Special Powers Act to apply only to limited places like the ‘Switzerland of the East’; my little cognitive power fails to appreciate if Nehru would have had any qualms in allowing cohabitation of Switzerland and special powers of the army.

Or was it a pure case that, since the States were not to be trusted, just apply the army rule to areas of which less is familiar and as acquiring knowledge takes time and involves other costs. In the light of global governance experience in a context of diversity of expedient interventions leading to long term turmoil outcomes, one cannot help feeling if this was really the case.

Another second instance, which adds fuel to this suspicion, is the recent revelation that Nehru directed the Indian intelligence to monitor the activities of the relatives of Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose; to a Manipuri Netaji arouses feelings of love, association, courage and unmixed patriotism. There is also the third instance of Nehru directing censoring of their communications and even forwarding them to the British intelligence (MI5) for comment; it was as if the Indian Independence and accompanying sovereignty were still incomplete. Now there is also an intense academic debate among scholars working on development issues on the imperative to go for contextualization in every attempt at understanding and policy formulation.

In the Indian context, the aging Father of the Nation so emphatically argued for contextual evolution of policy when the nation got Independence. But the imitative modernization approach of Nehru carried the day. However, on hindsight, Mahatma Gandhi turns out to be much more contemporary and post-modernist. All these stories have been put for, I am sure, many of us are puzzled by the reality of Manipur which is untouched by any debate and by any paradigm of development thinking. The case of Manipur turns out to be one where everything works only on the principle of rents and not on anything else.

If we look back to the development literature of the 1950s, it would be salient to anyone how the inability of markets (market failures) to address poverty removal, care for social justice and development were so religiously emphasized. But the 1970s and 1980s saw the reversal of trend due to the global learning that market failures were only being replaced by even more dangerous government failures; rent-seeking and corruption became more real than the hypothetical market failures. In India too, the reversal became very real by the middle of 1991.

Though measurement is difficult because of “non-observed and non-reported activities involved in creating, extracting, and contesting rents”, “[t]he social costs of rent seeking are incurred when resources are unproductively used in quest of privileges from government. The privileges sought involve preferential tax treatment and benefit from public spending, which offer private gain from common-pool state coffers.” It was because of this global experience that market was back to the centre stage of economic governance. “

After several decades in which public-sector enterprises (PSEs) played large and often increasing roles in national economies in most countries in the world, the past two decades have seen a reversal. In industrial countries, privatization efforts started in the late 1970s and 1980s as concerns with the efficiency and cost-effectiveness of state-owned enterprises mounted.

During that same period, it was becoming increasingly evident that PSEs in many developing countries were not fulfilling their intended roles—they were high-cost monopolies, often greatly overstaffed as politicians used them to provide employment for friends and relatives. Privatization ! began tentatively in a few countries, and then picked up momentum in both the pioneers and others. The original motives were buttressed by the need for revenues from privatization and from elimination of PSE losses to reduce fiscal deficits, as the costs of inflation became increasingly evident.

Then, in the early 1990s, the collapse of the command economies of the former Soviet Union and of Eastern Europe resulted in strong pressures for rapid privatization in those countries. By the late 1990s, increased appreciation of the importance of the financial sector’s efficient operation led to intensified efforts for privatization of financial institutions, as well.” Greater trust was put on the signalling system of the market than the various regulations of the government.

In the language of the Institutional Economists, market is emphasised as a more effective, non-discriminatory and ethical institutional foundation for social relationships, technological innovations and participation in productive activities rather than the government. The “regularity of social behaviour” generated by the “system of rules, beliefs, norms and organizations” based on the market were found to be more robust and development-supportive than the one based on government regulations. It is true that there have been instances of scams in the recent past in India.

But the beauty and strength of this country overall is that the mechanism of addressing the pitfalls have really taken roots for India as whole. The tragedy for us is that Manipur has been an outlier in all the qualitative changes. Rent-seeking contagion did touch Manipur quite early in her social evolution, but unlike any other region in the world the reform measures would shy away from impacting Manipur scenario at all. Whether it is government or the private sector, it is rent-seeking lock, stock and barrel in Manipur. Today I would like to give the example of the telecommunications scenario in Manipur.

The whole world is now reinventing the significance of information exchange as a prime driver of economic exchange, knowledge flows and development. “Mobility, cloud computing, social networking, sensor-nets and big data analytics are some of the most important trends in the digital economy today. Collectively these trends are making possible the future of “smart everything” (i.e. grids, homes, business processes, energy, healthcare, transport and government), as well as empowering businesses, consumers and society at large.

These new and future applications rely on the widespread availability of fixed and wireless broadband networks to meet the growing demands of economies and societies with a concomitant rise in the number of devices connected over the Internet.” But in Manipur we live in an environment characterised by (a) non-recognition of its importance by the government, and (b) rent—seeking in the form of bluffs by both government and private players.

How do I say these? Given the global and Indian coverage norms today, there must be at least 18 lakh mobile cellular connections in Manipur today. Any communication on cellular connection means immediate transfer of money from Manipur to outside Manipur. When a call is completed the transfer of money is complete. This is where the greatest looting and cheating occur. The cellular connection in Manipur is a conundrum of incomplete talks, disturbed voices, unexplained noises and what not. By the way, even these talks result in the completion of transfer of money out of Manipur.

Assuming that all the persons having a connection experience these in only about 5 out of ten in a day’s communication, a daily loss to Manipur would at least come to Rupees 90 lakhs. Mind you, this looted amount is not a joke. The agents indulging in this looting are on both sides of government; there is the government service provider (BSNL) as well as the private sector companies.

The crime being indulged by the BSNL is even worse. This is the only agent providing fixed-line connections in Manipur. Well, in most instances, complaints for defects in the fixed-line connection will hardly be attended promptly. On top of these, the fixed line connections on the Airport road were gone with the wind along with the road-widening exercises.

Now the BSNL instead of trying to restore the connections even after almost a year, they are treating these lines now as non-existent as evident from the attempts to book complaints. So BSNL has no qualms in violating the contract on the basis of which it gave an individual a fixed-line connection. Anyway, this is a government organ and who cares.