Article - 105 Week 31 It’s All About Fairer Laws

Article - 105 Week 31 

It's All About Fairer Laws

All our ports & terminals are susceptible to periodic convulsive paralysis. Conflicts between management and the labour force is the most common cause. When there is a collision, we look and debate vociferously on who was right and who was wrong. If you follow the unfortunate incidence in Maruti Factory in Manesar, you would see an extreme example. Many condemn the gruesome act while defending the workers on their reasonable demands for higher pay.  In any case the damage is done irreparably. The nation's industrial culture is sullied. And we would see many such similar confrontations, not only in factories across India, but also in our Terminals, Ports, & CFSs. The intensities & gruesomeness may vary , but such events would haunt us for a long long time. 

All these social outbursts stem from one bad law of our land. The Labour Law! We can hire  -  but can not fire, even when we go into losses or even wind down. What an unfair tragedy ! A dying man is not permitted die in peace, even though he was generating many jobs! The employer is always circumspect, because he himself does not know what would happen tomorrow. The market could come down or his factory may be declared unlawful by any funny law. The best insurance for him is to take as many temporary workers as he possibly can and maintain a minimum number of permanent workers, by cutting through the cumbersome maize of red-tapes. That's what happened in Manesar. And that's what happens in a more twisted way in our ports & terminals.

Once you manage to slip in as a permanent worker in a Port, your life & your future generations' life is safe and secure. Union is your impenetrable shield. Your productivity and discipline don't matter. Your wages are constantly reconstructed to beat the wages outside. Company's high profits during market upticks makes you angry & violent for more wages and the Company's losses during low periods makes you scorn and deride the management. You stop working. The Company hires temporary workers to compensate. You become angry both at the Company and the poorer temporary workers. The temporary worker takes one third your salary and produces three times more than you. This may make you angrier - but makes the temporary poorer worker hate you.  He aspires to be in your shoes one day. To have a secure, pampered, indisciplined, lazy, and most of all an unaccountable life style with loads of assured money. Then, he forms his own Union. He demands wages parity. The Company realizes that without him, works would slow down to a stop, because you are highly unproductive and at times unpredictably destructive. If the Company gives parity and permanence, the temporary worker becomes like you - angry,  vocal, violent, and lazy. There rises a distinct wall of animosity between the management and both the Unions. Enemy's enemy becomes a friend. Both the Unions join hands to punish the common enemy : The job-creator. The drama unfolds. Those in the Unions enjoy a more & more lavish life with lesser and lesser accountability. Those outside the Unions, the common poor Indians, struggle for a job for a pittance and live a life of poverty and want. The Companies stagnate and mostly wind down over a period of time or live on the dole-outs from the tax payers' money, just to pay the Union members. Investors and entrepreneurs run away. The Party gets deserted soon. All become losers - poorer and frustrated in a nation of plenty.

All this because of an unnatural Law . The Law that decrees you to hire but not fire. Until this unnatural Law is revoked, our Terminals & Ports shall be on a slow march to misery and redundancy.

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Brgds

Capt Rath

Article - 104 Week 30 Policing On Port Gates

 Article - 104 Week 30   

Policing On Port Gates

We have learnt to govern ourselves in our own ways. Under tremendous resistance or absence of governance we have found our survival tricks. Think of the times when traffic cops or red lights disappear on busy roads. It becomes chaotic. Traffic stops. Horns blare away in frustration. It's a huge crowd desperately trying to think and act in synchronicity. A smart volunteer comes forward to help and guide. It's a slow and excruciatingly inefficient traffic management system though. 

What do you see at the Gates of JNPT? As an outsider you would see a long and struggling queue of container trailers for miles and miles. At the Gate it is utter chaos. Both import and export trailers locking their horns at the Gate, paralyzing entry and exit for hours. No policing. Just a matter of self governing by a crowd of frustrated and tired trailer pilots. Some try to bully their way through and block any hope of an immediate solution to the ballooning problem. Bullying comes naturally to those brandishing there descent from the PAP villages. The CISF guys are unperturbed and at times amused by this world of turmoil outside their comfortable cabins. And also a sense of beholding from a more authoritative and powerful pedestal at the hapless inferior sea of sub-humanity. All that counts are those multi-colored Form-13s, 11s, and so on, being reverently presented from the sheepish faces with broad smiles on, despite the trauma of the struggle to get past the madness. The Terminal management is a distant and apathetic observer of this drama from the confines of those closed and comfortable administration offices. It is non of their concern to fix these mini-mutinies at their gates. They would hear out the problems with utmost condescension and ask you to take a hike if you do not like the process. 

We need liberalization here. We want the Terminal managers to come to the site of the problems. Guide and manage the flow. Hear the cacophony of desperation. See the beads of perspiration on those contorted faces struggling at the Gates. See the inefficacy of the outdated colored Forms creating  this mass of human suffering. See the sadistic brutality on the faces of those in charge of their Gates. And all this without asking for speed money to set things right. And we would gladly call this Liberalization - Not those high sounding empty Policies written in incomprehensibly complex rule books by a bunch of crooked lawyers to favour a certain entity at the cost of fooling the majority.

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Brgds

Capt Rath

Article - 103 Week 29 Rays Of Hope From God’s Own Country

Article - 103  Week 29  

Rays Of  Hope From God's Own Country

Vallarpadam has arrived finally. After tons of money spent, loads of files passed, endless amount of non-sensical discussions and chatters Vallarpadam got its Cabotage waiver in principle. You remember that funny rule called Cabotage, where you do not allow foreign ships to carry any thing  (not even a thakahua empty metal dabba) from one port to another in our country. Like, when you come to the International Airport in Mumbai after many chakars in the air, you are coerced & arm-twisted in to those rickety & smelly kali-pili (black & yellow) taxis to take you home or to your  Hotel. And they would charge you a bomb after shaking all your loose bones in their sockets. Meru and other fleet taxis are not allowed because they are more efficient, comfortable, and charge you less. The situation above is an exact equivalent of our Cabotage rule.

Our Indian ships are like those kali-pili  taxis. If you ask them - why they charge you so much for the shoddy services in those rust-buckets, they will point at Ports, Customs, Taxes and so on; exactly like the kali-pili  driver tells you about the high fuel cost, tolls, and the harassing cops etc. After all, we are Aam-Admi. We are supposed only to pay quietly. The State Government of Kerala finally understood and poked the Centre to have this funny rule waived only for Vallarpadam. We as users are happy  that it may happen after all. What happens next is some thing to be seen. We have gone past the stage of celebrating. The guys in the Government know how to mess up good things at the right time. I heard that the CISF did not allow the Customs guys to enter the Terminal. I was very happy to know that there is at least some one with the gumption to fix these unruly and corrupt thugs. Alas! The Terminal came to an unresisting halt. Without the permission of those elite &  powerful thugs, who sit at the border to loot - just like those Talibans at Khyber Pass, nothing moves. A separate entry for them had to be made.

Let's all hope that Vallarpadam happens. If the State Government is wise enough to keep a check on  our Customs' excesses, high port tariffs, high handling costs, idiotic Unions, and other Central inventions to sabotage a good thing as is its wont. We would see a handful of rays of hope shining on our industry, from our God's own country.

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Brgds

Capt Rath

Article - 102 Week 28 Monsters Of Indian Shipping

Article - 102  Week 28 

Monsters Of Indian Shipping

We loved monster stories as kids. We love monster movies as adults. It's a world away from our real existence. We are safe from the menacing aliens or giant sized alligators jumping at us in 3D in the comforts of movie halls. If there was a more advanced life form looking at us remotely, he would be laughing his guts out at the irony. The irony that we humans while willingly giving in to the deadly monsters gnawing at our body, mind, and soul - make it an entertainment theme from the imagined ones. 

A monster can safely be defined as an entity that steals our life and its resources. Let's look at the institutions empowered by the Government in our industry. The Port Authorities, the Customs, the Police, & so on. What do these entities do?  The Port Authority is a mechanism for rent extraction. If you need to move your goods through them, you have no option but to cough a huge price. If there is a small violation of its rules, they would seize your goods and ask for storage and other silly costs that would make you a pauper in the street. Any vehicle or vessel that comes into the Port will be levied sky high. The Port Authorities have employed a few private companies to do a better job of extraction while belting out shoddier services. Exactly like the big monster who would employ smaller devils to perpetrate his cruelty & exploitation on the people. Lets look at the Customs. Their job is to collect tax as written in the Rule Book. They do that with a good amount of ineptitude. But what they do with real efficiency is seizing your goods with the slightest of excuses. Then you are doomed. They would extract from you depending upon the entire bloated damage that could possibly enact and their ingenuity in finding lapses and magnifying them to push you on to a slow and painful financial and mental train to hell. Bigger they magnify and longer they can procrastinate, the more they can extract. In such situations other Authorities like the Port, the Police, the CONCOR, the Railways, Plant Quarantine or even the Fire Department, would happily join the orgy to nibble away the leftovers. In most cases the amounts they extract is a wee bit smaller than the complete loss. You soil your soul, mind, and dignity to give precedence to cold logic. You get back a small part of what was originally yours. And come out poorer, dejected, bruised, and broken. The farmers commit suicide and you lick your wounds. It's survival game in this wilderness of monsters. The monsters we live with are far more ubiquitous, threatening and life sucking than the ones we would read in comics or watch in movie halls. And the ironic part is, we do not have the nerves to make movies on these real monsters gnawing at us constantly, from many such places like the Passport Office, the Municipality, the Tax office, the DG Shipping, the MMD, the Shipping Master, and so on! Is this because we ourselves would turn ourselves into such dastardly monsters, if we are put in those positions of discretion?

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Brgds

Capt Rath

Article - 101 Week 27 Right to Export

Article - 101  Week 27     

Right to Export

We all build stuff - materials and ideas. However, the stuff is of no use to us, unless we are able sell it. When we try to sell it, our Government barges in to steal or stop the sale. It tries all its little tricks in its dirty bag, to tell us what is legal and what is not. Most of what we want to sell comes under 'illegal' and therefore makes us poorer. Over a long period of time, we stop thinking and making less of all those good things we could make, because they were branded 'illegal'  by our Government. For example, if you are a farmer, our Government would prohibit you to sell your wheat or rice to any one you please and force you to sell the produce to the Government Agencies at a pre-determined fixed price. This makes you poorer. Then our Government would prohibit exports from time to time or even steal part of the proceeds as a tax. Such controls drive the prices down and makes the farmer poorer. So what is left as 'legal'  to sell is limited in depth, scope and range. Even within this narrow window of legalized sale, our Government throws stupendous amount of  hurdles to block you. If you try to sell something to someone in some other country, you are in big trouble. There is a big negative list, restricted list, and licensed list and so on. You need to have a whole lot of licenses, NOCs, certificates, registration numbers, controls, and complex documentations. Not to forget the high cost of handling of your cargo in the port or the airport, because your government manages them with utter inefficiency, waste and high profiteering. Your government also arbitrarily extracts huge rent from the carriers who visit your port or airport to carry your cargo. Does this not look like a big mountain to climb just to be able to sell your so-called legitimate produce across the border? Huge cost escalations, huge delays, huge rent collections, and huge compliances for a few Rupees that ultimately stands the test of the ultimate sacred fire of the Income Tax department.

The name for removing such arbitrary and debilitating hurdles - a minute installment at a time or throwing a freebie like a much hyped subsidy - is euphemistically known as 'Liberalization of Policies'. It's a cruel joke that we innocently endorse such hurdles by repeatedly voting wrong governments and wrong ideas. We have learnt to live without our freedom for millenniums. Our concept of freedom and liberty is perverted. We vote government after government that sadistically injures the people who produce or create and reward those who do not. So we have more losers and less winners in our society. The majority are losers and they vote the government or the ideas. This is no rocket science. Liberalization has always come under extreme compulsion of the government rather than a well thought out choice for the good of the people at large. The Government needs to be in a desperate financial problem, to allow liberalization. This time it's going to be a big ticket crisis on capital account deficit and a fiscal black hole. And it is our turn to shout and panic like hell. The Government would liberalize. Thanks to a frenzied press, an angry electorate & a few loud Rating Agencies,  to help us in this process of forcing Liberalization on exports.

Brgds

Capt Rath