Governance

In producing the new series, the Central Statistics Office with its rebased National Accounts Statistics has done a studious job of marshalling diverse sources of data and weaving them together into a composite new source. However, the final picture of NAS data would have been more acceptable if better caution was exercised in using new concepts as well as new sources of data, and in weighing the growth results against frequent and extensive revisions. The CSO has failed to refine the growth results juxtaposed against the repetitive and substantial revisions that the data sources have impelled and have completely ignored the analytical construct of gross domestic product at factor cost.

Cities in Europe and North America have been through three decades of innovation in institutions and practices as they seek to accommodate the new environment of global economic integration. Many have learned to facilitate the creation of new economies that have institutionalised incremental change with a changing political consensus, liberating themselves in part from those rigidities that make for extreme vulnerability in conditions of crisis. The same is also true of cities in Latin America and in China. However, elsewhere - including possibly India - the sovereign state is often still struggling to retain its monopoly control. In doing so, the state stifles the full potential role of cities to advance the world, to reduce the burden of world poverty. Liberating the cities is thus a key part of the agenda for the new century and for the eradication of poverty.

SARS is unprecedented in many ways. For one, we may well be the first real epidemic of a globalised Asia. Second, it has prompted new measures put in place rapidly and with wide scope to counter the spread of the disease. How has SARS been perceived by the public and what are the social consequences of the outbreak and the responses? What can we learn about governance from the SARS outbreak? How will it impact on the planning of public health systems, much neglected in this region in the race for economic development in the era of globalisation?

The tea labourers in Assam have always played a significant role in electoral politics. The recently held by-election for the Khumtai assembly constituency, dominated by tea tribes, has brought to the fore important issues - regionalism, intra-party, politics and most importantly, misgovernance - that will impact on electoral politics in the state, especially the Lok Sabha polls in 2004.

The second act of the catastrophe in Gujarat was carried out within parliamentary portals, in the course of the debate on the Gujarat violence which exposed the hypocrisy that while political discourse might concern itself with people's anguish, it is in reality driven by aspects of competitive politics. Even as extraordinary violence was perpetrated on Indian women, it was women's bodies that provided the necessary domain for the assertion of competitive party politics - a fact reflected in the arguments and counter-arguments offered during the debate. As this essay suggests, the ominous final message that seeps through is that constitutional governance can achieve little except normalise violence, almost as a social cost of democratic politics, in which even structured practices of governance are established that deny as well silence women's sufferings. The task for the 'active citizen' thus is to frame imaginative patterns of social action that would not merely empower victims but also adequately present the voices of suffering, giving voice to the anguish - a task that could effectively challenge the newly instituted narratives of 'pride' and 'honour'.