“We have to honestly and
deeply reflect on the accident,” says Takafumi Anegawa, TEPCO’s managing
executive officer, whose role is to shake up a utility he has accused of cozy
relations with regulators and a cavalier attitude toward safety. “We should
reset the level we pursue to the very highest. If we cannot achieve that level
because of our capability or our culture, it means we are not qualified.” Akira
Ono, the plant superintendent at Fukushima
Daiichi, is equally blunt—at least in a Japanese context—about the need to
reassess the nation’s nuclear future. “Because of the accident,” he says,
“nuclear energy is an issue that should be discussed again in our country.”
“A Right to Information
(RTI) query has recently revealed that 20,000 people died on Mumbai railway tracks in the past five
years. That means over 4,000 people per year and, on an average, 10 people per
day.”
India has a
habit of ignoring reality. Many of us are so self-absorbed and egoistical that
we tend to shut out sane and practical voices amongst us. One such unlikely personage
is the mild mannered and scholarly Dr. Manmohan Singh, our former Prime
Minister. He staked his reputation on opening up a ‘Nuclear Deal’ with the USA
that effectively ended the nuclear apartheid that India had been subjected to:
“The framework for this
agreement was a July 18, 2005, joint statement by then Indian Prime Minister
Dr. Manmohan Singh and then U.S. President George W. Bush, under which India
agreed to separate its civil and military nuclear facilities and to place all
its civil nuclear facilities under International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)
safeguards and, in exchange, the United States agreed to work toward full civil
nuclear cooperation with India.”
Let me hasten
to clarify that I strongly believe that India has the right to nuclear weapons
and nuclear power. The apartheid that India had been subjected to was wrong and
discriminatory and in that sense Dr. Manmohan Singh did a signal service to the
nation by forcing the door open. The issue is whether India has the technology,
discipline, quality orientation and maintenance required for running nuclear
plants. Accidents in the USA, USSR and now Japan have demonstrated that even
developed economies find the vigilance required for managing nuclear assets
difficult to come by. What chance does a country like India have when we find
it difficult to even maintain roads, run an airline or keep a toilet clean? It’s
a disaster waiting to happen. In the interests of public safety we need to re-evaluate
whether we really need a nuclear energy programme. It may be far better to
focus on fixing our coal supplies and getting power generation and distribution
under control from our existing thermal plants rather than chasing the nuclear
mirage.
In a similar
vein, our current Prime Minister, Mr. Narendra Modi seems to be obsessed with
Bullet Trains. There is something undeniably attractive and symbolic about
trains that could cut travel time from Mumbai to Delhi to 8 hours. It signifies
a country that has arrived on the technological stage and sounds like a fitting
gesture for the triumphant ruling party. However, the grim reality is that
4,000 people die every year on the Mumbai suburban rail network. A nation that
ignores such a chilling statistic can hardly aspire for technological or moral superiority.
Overcrowding, lack of toilets forcing slum dwellers to use the tracks as a
bathroom, few over bridges – whatever the reasons, the number of fatalities are
mind boggling. It is a shame that life is so cheap in our unfortunate country.
There is a
tendency in India to always look at the brighter side of life. To ignore the
grim reality today and yearn for a better tomorrow. It reflects in our tendency
to create grand buildings, malls, airports and multiplexes and then forget that
they need maintenance too. A Pakistani once said that while people from the two
countries were quite similar, they were different in one aspect. He said that
while both Indians and Pakistanis were lying in the gutter, the Pakistani had
his head facing down in the filth while the Indian’s head was facing upwards
looking at the stars!
A great
attitude but it does need some practical back up.
