India Inc to help tackle Maoist terror
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.
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