Nuclear Power and Bullet Trains

“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.