EDITORIAL : THE HINDU, INDIA

 

Jaitapur and nuclear safety

 

The announcement by the Prime Minister's Office that the government will soon create, through appropriate legislation, an independent and autonomous Nuclear Regulatory Authority that subsumes the existing Atomic Energy Regulatory Board will be widely welcomed. Those concerned with India's nuclear safety and regulatory issues have long been of the conviction that what needs to be done cannot be directed and implemented by a body that is under the authority of the very system it is mandated to oversee. The official assurances of complete transparency in the nuclear power domain, the promise to put the post-Fukushima reviews of nuclear safety in the public domain, and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's call to the atomic energy establishment to continuously engage with public opinion on safety are not without significance. Further, Minister of Environment and Forests Jairam Ramesh has taken the lead in this ‘new thinking' with his willingness to engage in public debate on a difficult issue and with his concrete proposals to assuage serious concerns. However, the government will be fooling itself if it does not recognise that public opinion remains apprehensive in light of what has happened at Fukushima. Reassuring words need to be backed with actions that demonstrate that the independence and the autonomy of the new authority as well as the promises of transparency will be real and substantive.

Against this background, what causes concern is the government's dogmatic insistence that it is not willing to take a fresh look at the Jaitapur power project. Reiterating its determination to go ahead, it has insensitively added that a comprehensive environmental review will be undertaken after the project's first phase of two 1650 MW reactors is completed by 2019. At stake is not merely compensation for those whose assets and livelihood will be affected by the project, though that is important. The crux of the disputation is related to fears regarding the long-term environmental impact of the project and the long-term safety of the reactor complex. The government would do well to address these issues directly and transparently, abandoning any fear that pressing the pause button would result in anti-nuclear-power groups running away with the agenda. Its assurance that it takes strengthening domestic nuclear capabilities seriously lacks credibility, considering that it has virtually ruled out the possibility of modifying the Jaitapur project in overall scale as well as the size, design, and make of the individual reactors. If the new policy outlook on nuclear safety is to win credibility among the people, the government must halt the work in progress at Jaitapur and talk sincerely with the protesters and the sceptics, keeping an open mind on the future of the project. 

Address the crisis at its roots

 

Air India has managed to remain in the news for the wrong reasons. After years of being in the red and repeatedly asking the Government of India to bale the airline out of its financial mess, it has been unable to sort out its labour issues and long-standing problems with its pilots. Normally, the passengers, who are at the receiving end of such strikes, have no sympathy for the pilots because they may be the highest paid class of employees in an airline. But the present case is somewhat different — at the very least, it has to be understood from a different perspective. Although the passengers are put to hardship, and hundreds of families are losing out on their summer holidays for no fault of theirs, the striking pilots, affiliated to the Indian Commercial Pilots' Association (ICPA), have some legitimate demands that need to be addressed. From 2007, the process of merging the two national carriers — Indian Airlines and Air India — has been going on endlessly at the management and the government levels. Even the muddling-through has not been completed and glaring inequalities between the staff of the two merged entities remain.

The pilots who were originally with Indian Airlines have been demanding parity in pay with their counterparts in Air India. A pilot's monthly pay package depends on the number of hours he flies. For a variety of reasons, the Indian Airlines segment that takes care of the domestic sector has not been able to operate as many flights as it used to. So the take-home salaries of those pilots have dipped. Since pay parity has also not been achieved and the pilots borne on Air India cadre fly on the foreign routes, the differences seem striking. Without addressing this basic issue, arising out of an ill-planned and perhaps even unwise merger, the airline management and the Union Civil Aviation Ministry are dealing with it as an industrial relations exercise — derecognising ICPA and sacking at least eight of the striking pilots. With over 50 flights cancelled each day, the passengers have been left in the lurch. Those who need to fly have been placed at the mercy of private airlines which have silently raised the fares, given the dynamic pricing policy in place. Political interference in the running of the national carrier has also affected Air India over the years, denying it a level-playing field with the private airlines. Good sense demands that the Air India management initiate talks with the pilots to first end the strike, and then resolve the long-standing issue urgently.