Govt to Invest Rs 5,000 cr to Set up 8K Towers in Northeast India

New Delhi, Jun 18 : In a bid to improve telecom services in the northeastern states, the government will invest Rs 5,000 crore to set up over 8,000 mobile towers in the region.

Minister of Communications and Information Technology Ravi Shankar Prasad said improving telecom connectivity in the north east is one of the top priorities of the government.

"In the north east, telecom infrastructure will be strengthened. The government will set up over 8,000 towers at a cost of Rs 5,000 crore," Prasad told reporters here.

He said the Telecom Commission had cleared the proposal a few days ago.

The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India had last year recommended an investment plan to improve services in north east India.

The TRAI recommended a 2 per cent discount on annual licence fees for telecom operators that cover at least 80 per cent of habitations with a population of 250 and subsidies for installation of solar power units at telecom towers.

The regulator also recommended investments to provide seamless connectivity across national highways in the north east region covering Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland, Sikkim and Tripura.

State-run companies BSNL and Power Grid Corporation of India recently signed an agreement to improve telecom connectivity in the region.

Prasad said improving telecom facilities in Naxal-affected areas is also among the government's priorities.

"Providing telecom and Internet connectivity to the north east and Naxal-affected areas will be high on our priority," Prasad said in a message on Twitter's website.

The Telecom Commission has approved the long-pending project of installing mobile towers in nine Naxal-hit states, for which BSNL had submitted an estimate of Rs 3,241 crore, which was higher than Rs 3,046 crore approved by the Cabinet. The project will be placed before the Cabinet for final approval.

Work on New India-Bangladesh Railway Link from 2015

Agartala, Jun 18 : The Indian and Bangladeshi governments will start work early next year on a new rail link to ease surface transport, officials said here Tuesday.

India will build a 15-km railway tracks linking Tripura's capital Agartala with Bangladesh's southeastern city of Akhaurah, an important railway junction connected to Chittagong port, resource-rich Sylhet and Dhaka.

An Indian delegation and a Bangladeshi team attended the third meeting of the Agartala-Akhaurah railway link project steering committee here Tuesday. They will Wednesday go for a field inspection on the Indian side.

"The work for new Agartala-Akhaurah railway link will start early next year. The DPR (detailed project report) will be finalised within a month or so," India's external affairs ministry's joint secretary Alok K.Sinha told reporters after the meeting.

Sinha, who led the Indian delegation, said: "... We will mutually sort out if any problem comes up... The fourth meeting of the project steering committee will be held in Dhaka in December."

The Bangladesh delegation was led by its railway ministry's joint secretary Sunil Chandra Pal.

Pal said: "With the setting up of the new railway connectivity between India and Bangladesh, people of two countries will benefit as they will come closer. Men and materials will be ferried very smoothly."

An agreement to implement the railway project was signed between India's former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Bangladesh Premier Sheikh Hasina during her visit to India in January 2010.

"Total cost of the proposed project is estimated at Rs.252 crore. The Indian Railway Construction Company (IRCON) would lay the new railway tracks on both sides of the border," a senior official (construction) of the Northeast Frontier Railway (NFR) told reporters.

Of the 15 km rail line, five km of tracks fall in the Indian territory.

The official said: "With the establishment of the new railway link, northeast India will be connected to the Chittagong international sea port by rail."

He said: "The proposed rail link will not only improve bilateral ties but also help in establishing connectivity with inaccessible areas in the northeast as journey from Kolkata to Tripura and other northeastern states via Bangladesh will save cost, time and distance travelled."

Surface connectivity is an important factor as India's northeastern states are surrounded by Bangladesh, Myanmar, Bhutan and China. The only land route to these states from within India is through Assam and West Bengal. But it passes through over 70 percent hilly terrain with steep roads and multiple hairpin bends.

India has for long been seeking land, sea and rail access through Bangladesh for ferrying goods and heavy machinery to its northeast from abroad and other parts of the country.

Agartala is 1,650 km from Kolkata and 2,637 km from New Delhi via Guwahati and West Bengal, whereas the distance between the Tripura capital and Kolkata through Bangladesh is just about 350 km.

The NFR is now laying tracks to connect Tripura's southern most border town Sabroom, 135 km south of here. From Sabroom, the Chittagong international sea port is just 72 km.

The Woman Who Invented Iraq

Gertrude of Arabia, the Woman Who Invented Iraq

The story of the British intelligence agent who rigged an election, installed a king loyal to the British, drew new borders—and gave us today’s ungovernable country.

She came into Baghdad after months in one of the world’s most forbidding deserts, a stoic, diminutive 45-year-old English woman with her small band of men. She had been through lawless lands, held at gunpoint by robbers, taken prisoner in a city that no Westerner had seen for 20 years.

It was a hundred years ago, a few months before the outbreak of World War I. Baghdad was under a regime loyal to the Ottoman Turks. The Turkish authorities in Constantinople had reluctantly given the persistent woman permission to embark on her desert odyssey, believing her to be an archaeologist and Arab scholar, as well as being a species of lunatic English explorer that they had seen before.

She was, in fact, a spy and her British masters had told her that if she got into trouble they would disclaim responsibility for her. Less than 10 years later Gertrude Bell would be back in Baghdad, having rigged an election, installed a king loyal to the British, re-organized the government, and fixed the borders on the map of a new Iraq. As much as anyone can be, Gertrude Bell could be said to have devised the country that nobody can make work as a country for very long—no more so than now.

The Middle East as we know it was largely the idea of a small coterie of men composed of British scholars, archaeologists, military officers and colonial administrators who were called the Orientalists—this is the “orient” according to the definition first made by the Greeks, meaning everything east of the Mediterranean as Alexander the Great advanced to seize it.

For decades, beginning in the mid-19th century, the Orientalists had explored the desert and found there the ruins of the great powers of the ancient world—Egypt, Assyria, Babylonia, Persia. Through archaeology they revealed these splendors to the modern world and, from their digs, stuffed Western museums with prizes like the polychromatic tiled Ishtar Gates of Babylon, moved to the Pergamon Museum in Berlin, or the Cyrus Cylinder, containing the Persian king Cyrus’s new creed of governance as he conquered Babylon, shipped to the British Museum.

They wondered why such resplendently rich and deeply embedded pre-Christian urbanized cultures ended up buried by the drifting sands of the desert, completely unknown and ignored by the roaming Arab, Turkish and Persian tribes above. The many glories of Babylon, for example, lay unexplored not far from the boundaries of Baghdad.

The Middle East as we know it was largely the idea of a small coterie of men composed of British scholars, archaeologists, military officers and colonial administrators who were called the Orientalists.

Among the explorers, a state of mind developed that was patronizing and paternalistic. If they had not made these discoveries, who would know of these great cities? If Arabs took the artifacts it would be, to these men, mindless looting; if the Western scholars shipped them home, often in vast consignments, it was to preserve them for posterity.

The Ottomans had managed Arabia through a decentralized system of provinces called valyets, run by governors they appointed. Tribal, sectarian and territorial conflicts made it a constantly turbulent place, despite the hammer of Ottoman rule. Under a more centralized system the place would have been ungovernable. But the Turks never entertained the Western idea of nation building, it was as much as they could do to keep even a semblance of order.

The Orientalists thought differently. The Western idea of nation building was the future of Arabia. As World War I drew to its end and the Ottoman Empire collapsed, the Orientalists saw an opportunity to bring modern coherence to the desert by imposing new kingdoms of their own devising, as long as the kings would be compliant with the strategic interests of the British Empire.

Into this coterie of schemers came two mavericks, both scholars, both fluent Arab speakers, both small in stature and psychologically fragile, both capable of extraordinary feats of desert exploration—a young man called T.E. Lawrence and Gertrude Bell, a more seasoned connoisseur of the desert life.

Both had been recruited before World War I to gather intelligence on the Ottomans. Both were hard to accommodate within a normal military and diplomatic machine and so ended up working for a clandestine outfit in Cairo called the Arab Bureau, which was more aware of their singular gifts and more tolerant of their habits.

Bell’s epic desert trek in 1913-14 was already legendary. Her objective had been a city called Hail that no European had reached since 1893. Under the cover of archaeological research, her real purpose was to assess the strength of a murderous family called the al Rashids, whose capital Hail was.

The Rashids had been kicked out of Riyadh by the young Abdul Aziz bin Abdurrahman al Saud, otherwise known as Ibn Saud, who was to become the founder of Saudi Arabia.

Despite the rigors of the terrain, Bell was as susceptible to the spiritual appeal of the desert as others like her young protégée Lawrence. “Sometimes I have gone to bed with a heart so heavy that I thought I could not carry it through the next day,” she wrote. “Then comes the dawn, soft and benificent, stealing over the wide plain and down the long slopes of the little hollows, and in the end it steals into my heart also….”

When she reached Hail, the Rashids were suspicious and put her under what amounted to house arrest in the royal complex.

But as a woman, Bell enjoyed an advantage over male colleagues that she was to deploy on many missions: molesting or harming women was contrary to the desert code of conduct, even in a family as homicidal as the Rashids. For a week or so, Bell was warmly entertained by the women of this polygamous society, and the women’s gossip provided a rich source of intelligence on palace intrigues, of which there were many. From this she was able to see what her British minders valued: That the Rashids were yesterday’s men and the Saudis would likely be a formidable and independent power in Arabia. The Rashids released her, and she went on to Baghdad, Damascus, and home to London.

It was inside knowledge like this that put Bell in an influential position when the war ended and the European powers decided how they would carve up Arabia. Lawrence had committed himself to the princes of the Hashemite tribe, notably Feisal, with whom he had fought against the Turks, and promised Damascus to them. But unknown to Lawrence, a secret deal had been cut with the French, who wanted control of the eastern Mediterranean and were to get Damascus while Britain would fill the vacuum left by the collapse of the Ottoman Empire by re-drawing the map of Arabia.

The British were more aware than the French of the importance that oil would assume. Syria, the new French subject state, was unpromising as an oil prospect. The first Middle Eastern oil field began pumping in Persia at the head of the Persian Gulf in 1911, under British control, and geologists suspected, rightly, that vast oil reserves lay untapped in both Persia and Iraq.

While Lawrence left the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 stricken by the guilt for a British betrayal of his Arabs to which he had not been a party, Bell was sent to Baghdad, where Feisal was to be given his consolation prize: the throne of a new Iraq.

As well as the prospect of huge oil reserves, this new Iraq was crucial to the lines of communication to the great jewel of the British Empire, India. And, ostensibly, it was the diplomats and generals of the Indian administration who ran the show in Baghdad. But they depended on Bell as an expert and a negotiator, fluent in Arabic and used to the schisms and vendettas of the region. In fact, many of the decisive meetings as the British struggled to create a provisional government took place in Bell’s own house.

On August 23, 1921, at a ceremony in central Baghdad, Feisal was installed as the monarch of Iraq, even though he had no tribal roots in the country to assist his legitimacy. “We’ve got our king crowned,” wrote Bell with relief. And she made a claim about this election that would be echoed decades later by Saddam Hussein, that Feisal had been endorsed by 96 percent of the people, even though he was the only candidate and the majority of the population was illiterate.

Indeed, Bell was so carried away with her confidence in the nation she had helped to create that she crowed: “Before I die I look to see Feisal ruling from the Persian frontier to the Mediterranean.”
In reality, the Iraqi borders had been arbitrarily drawn and disregarded 2,000 years of tribal, sectarian, and nomadic occupation. The Persian frontier was the only firmly delineated border, asserted by mountains. Beyond Baghdad the line drawn between Syria, now the property of France, and Iraq was more cartography than anthropology. Nothing had cooled the innate hostilities of the Shia, in the south, who (in a reversal of the current travesty in Baghdad) were virtually unrepresented in Bell’s new assembly, and the Sunnis to the north, as well as the Kurds, the Armenians and the Turks, each with their own turf. Lawrence, in fact, had protested that the inclusion of the Kurds was a mistake. And the desert border in the south was, in Bell’s own words, “as yet undefined.”

The reason for this was Ibn Saud. Bell wrote in a letter to her father, “I’ve been laying out on the map what I think should be our desert boundaries.” Eventually that line was settled by the Saudis, whose Wahhabi warriors were the most formidable force in the desert and who foresaw what many other Arabs at the time did: Iraq was a Western construct that defied thousands of years of history, with an alien, puppet king who would not long survive and internal forces that were centrifugal rather than coherent.

For a while, Bell was the popular and admired face of the British contingent in Baghdad. An American visitor pleased her by calling her “the first citizen of Iraq.” The Arabs called her “Al Khatun,” meaning a noble woman who earned respect. She went riding and swimming every day, somewhat diminishing the benefits of that by chain smoking in public. She also made no secret of the fact that she was an atheist. It seemed that she was more comfortable in the company of Arabs than she had been among her peers in Cairo.

Lawrence, for example, while respectful of her scholarship, thought that Bell “had no great depth of mind” and politically was a poor judge of people and “changed direction like a weathercock.” Sir Mark Sykes, a crusty diplomat who had colluded with the French to give them Damascus, was more defiantly a misogynist. He called her “a silly chattering windbag, an infernal liar, a conceited, gushing, rump-wagging, blethering ass.”

Sometimes Bell revealed a dark self-knowledge. In 1923 she wrote to her father: “At the back of my mind is that we people of war can never return to complete sanity. The shock has been too great; we’re unbalanced. I am aware that I myself have much less control over my own emotions than I used to have.”

By then she had only three years to live, and was becoming frail from overwork. She described her routine in a letter: “I get up at 5:30, do exercises till 5:45 and walk in the garden till 6 or a little after cutting flowers. All that grows now is a beautiful double jasmine of which I have bowls full every day, and zinnias, ugly and useful. I breakfast at 6:40 on an egg and some fruit…leave for the office by car at 6:55 and get there at 7…”

As well as administrating in the manner of a colonial official, she often acted like a viceroy, receiving a stream of tribal sheiks, Arab officials or simply citizens with grievances. The king had to be managed, as he sat in his garden “in full Arab dress, the white and gold of the Mecca princes.” But she also devoted much of her time to a personal passion: creating the Iraq Museum in Baghdad where she gathered a priceless collection of treasures from the world of antiquity—reminding herself and the Iraqi people how the earliest urban civilizations had flourished around the Tigris and Euphrates.
There were, though, other loves that belied the appearance of a desiccated, workaholic spinster. She lived with the memories of two passionate romances, both thwarted.

At the age of 24 she became engaged to a young diplomat but her rich industrialist father deemed it an unsuitable match and, in the compliant Victorian manner, she ended it. Her second affair was far deeper, tragic and, in its effects, everlasting. She fell in love with Colonel Charles Doughty-Wylie, a soldier with a record of derring-do with appropriate movie star looks. But Doughty-Wylie was married, and as long as the war occupied them both neither could see a way out. Bell was, however, completely besotted:

“I can’t sleep,” she wrote to him, “I can’t sleep. It’s one in the morning of Sunday. I’ve tried to sleep, every night it becomes less and less possible. You, and you, and you are between me and any rest; but out of your arms there is no rest. Life, you called me, and fire. I flame and I am consumed.”
He responded in kind: “You gave me a new world, Gertrude. I have often loved women as a man like me does love them, well and badly, little and much, as the blood took me…or simply for the adventure—to see what happened. But that is all behind me.”

Doughty-Wylie died in the amphibious assault on the Turks at Gallipoli in 1916—ill-conceived by Winston Churchill as an attempt to strike at the “soft underbelly” of the Ottoman Empire.

Bell died at her house by the Tigris in Baghdad in July 1926 at the age of 57.  She had taken an overdose of barbiturates, whether deliberately or accidentally it was impossible to tell. Lawrence by then was a recluse, in flight from the road show devised by the American journalist Lowell Thomas that had turned him, as Lawrence of Arabia, into the most famous man on Earth.

But it was Gertrude Bell, who was never a public figure, who had left the greater mark on the Middle East, for better or worse.

King Feisal, who had been ailing for some time, died in Switzerland in 1933, at the age of 48, to be succeeded by his son Prince Ghazi. The monarchy was brought down by a pro-British military coup in 1938, a regime that would ultimately mutate into that of Saddam Hussein’s in 1979.

It's his duty, to guard that booty

Beers of the World Cup 2014

Listen to the Shillong Chamber Choir sing 'Baar Baar Dekho' with a jazzy twist

The classic tune from 'China Town' is reinterpreted.

The country's most famous choral group is back with a new track. a reworking of the classic melody from the 1962 film, China Town.

Lal Thanhawla’s Pragmatism

Nirendra Dev asks if five-times Mizoram Chief Minister Lal Thanhawla is reconsidering his political allegiances, given a new regime in Delhi, his state’s financial woes & rebellion in his party

The massive mandate in favour of Narendra Modi has been a gamechanger in the country’s politics. Most politicians are like chameleons, changing colour when it suits them; with the changes blowing in the wind, a lot of that can be expected to happen in the near future. And while some may have scruples about switching parties outright, many would not mind taking whatever steps are necessary to get on the right side of a Prime Minister, who commands the support of 336 NDA MPs.

Veteran Mizo politician Lal Thanhawla is one man who has been making the right noises. He defied the AICC’s diktat and flew to Delhi to attend Narendra Modi’s coronation as Prime Minister on 26 May. Subsequently, he also called on Mr Modi and it is be any body’s guess what the two leaders spoke about besides developmental issues and the fund crunch faced by Mizoram. “My guess is as good as yours,” remarked a Mizo leader,  considered a rebel in the Mizoram Congress. Some Congress legislators in Mizoram are upset with Pu Lal Thanhawla because they missed out on ministerial berths and are said to be fomenting a rebellion against Lal Thanhawla’s monopoly over the Congress party in Mizoram for last three decades.

There is no doubt that Lal Thanhawla remains the undisputed ‘local leader’ who has led the Congress to success after success, becoming, in December 2013, chief minister of Mizoram for a record 5th term. In fact, his success was the only saving grace for Sonia Gandhi when the Congress party was humbled by BJP across western and central India in Rajasthan, Chhattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh and by the BJP and the AAP in Delhi.

But Lal Thanhawla’s problems are many. Even if insurgency is virtually a matter of the past in Mizoram, the economic woes are as serious as they used to be. The state administration is reeling under an acute financial crunch. Lal Thanhawla, observers say, is clueless how to steer the state government out of its financial impasse. Another dilemma is how to handle the possible rebellion building up in the Congress. The Congress has 34 MLAs in the 40-member Mizoram assembly but he could accommodate only 12 ministers (including himself) and 7 parliamentary secretaries. The other legislators who missed out on berths are fast losing their patience. Age is also catching up with someone who was born in 1942. Lal Thanhawla may also be reaching out to the Prime Minister and the BJP to forestall any move on the part of the BJP’s close friend, the Mizo National Front and its leader Zoramthanga to stir up trouble inside the Mizoram Congress.

The causes of the fiscal crunch in states like Mizoram have been the subject of much debate among North-east politicians and observers. The changed pattern of Central funding since the 1990s as recommended by the 9th Finance Commission is also blamed. The golden days in the North-east when politicians flourished on the generous central funding have come and gone without the common citizens really reaping the benefits. There has been rising inequality as corruption thrived.
Government jobs vanished and as the funding pattern changed, things appear to be headed into a dark tunnel.

The refrain among North-east politicians has been that it is a commitment of the government of India  to supplement the revenue of the states like Mizoram and Nagaland, dipping into the Consolidated Fund of India if necessary. The likes of Lal Thanhawla and Zoramthanga or Naga politicians like S C Jamir, Vamuzo or Neiphiu Rio have always argued that economic viability was not a consideration when states like Mizoram and Nagaland were granted statehood. Rather it was a culmination of political negotiations and hence the respective statehood agreements should be honoured in letter and spirit.

But Lal Thanhawla is one of the few pragmatic politicians of the North-east and he knows mere argument cannot save the day for him. He needs a friendlier regime in Delhi so that the state is bailed out of the crisis and at a personal level, he has a security firewall against possible rebellion in the state Congress. Lal Thanhawla has himself made it clear that he would not quit Congress or float a pro-BJP regional party. At the same time, despite his personal friendship with Sonia Gandhi’s family, he reportedly told his aides that he is sceptical of Rahul Gandhi’s utility factor in reviving the Congress.

Personally, Lal Thanhawla seemed to have reconciled to the reality of the Modi phenomenon and he did not hesitate to declare that religious sensitivities of Christian-dominated Mizoram would not be affected by the policies of a supposedly Hindutva party like the BJP. If ‘winner takes all’ is a phrase that suits Mr Modi today, to be on the right side of that winner is the pragmatism of Lal Thanhawla.

The writer is a Special Representative with The Statesman in New Delhi and author of the book ‘The Talking Guns: North East India’. He blogs at www.bestofindiarestofindia.blogspot.com

Work Stalls at Northeast Dam, Delhi Affected

By Rahul Karmakar

Work on the Subansiri Lower Hydroelectric Project in Assam has stopped due to protests by NGOs and student groups. 


Gerukamukh (Assam) Jun 17 : Along with the National Hydroelectric Power Corporation (NHPC), Delhi is probably the biggest loser due to the anti-dam protests at the Subansiri Lower Hydroelectric Project (SLP) straddling Arunachal Pradesh and Assam.

Delhi was supposed to be the biggest buyer of the power that was to be generated from the dam which could have ended have ended its power problems had it been commissioned in March.

Instead, now the NHPC is losing Rs. 10 crore every day due to the protests. The loss on the 2000MW SLP crossed the Rs900-crore mark on Monday when PM Narendra Modi laid the foundation of the India-funded 600MW Kholongchu hydel project in Bhutan, some 500 km to the west of the project.

The Delhi government had signed an agreement with the NHPC for buying power from SLP before the project had even received clearance for work to commence from January 2005. The eight-unit project was scheduled to start generation from mid-March but Assam-based pressure groups labelled the SLP an invitation to disaster and forced suspension of work in December 2011.

By that time, the NHPC had put more than 60% of the infrastructure in place. “Had we started generation, Arunachal Pradesh and Assam would have received 240MW and 25MW free power as per the Gadgil formula.

Our project could have ended Delhi’s power woes after selling it an agreed-upon 508MW of electricity,” SLP executive director Rakesh told HT. But with the SLP having run into rough weather, the NHPC is not sure when it can start generation after completing the 116m high — revised from the original 257m — dam and powerhouse.

Though there are several higher dams in India, SLP is the largest generation-wise.“We expected to start selling power from March. Instead we are losing revenue at Rs. 6.59 crore a day. Loss due to idling of men and machinery makes the figure Rs. 10 crore. This is besides the cost escalation of almost double the Rs. 7300 crore we invested,” Rakesh said.

Hoping the new government would help resume work on SLP soon, particularly in the wake of the Intelligence Bureau report on foreign-funded NGOs stalling development projects in India, NHPC officials said the project was modified on the recommendations of an expert committee.But local NGOs and student organisations have refused to accept the changes, saying they were not enough to safeguard the life and property of villagers downstream. There is no opposition to the project in Arunachal Pradesh, whose government too wants the SLP to start soon.