Better selection process

In the article “Who makes the cut for top bank job?” (November 13), the writer Anil K Khandelwal has sought a paradigm shift in the way bank chiefs are selected. There is no doubt that bureaucratic dominance and political interference should be curbed.

Merit and future potential should be the requirement that the new panels should consider. Putting in place a proper mechanism to identify the right candidates will pave the way for economic growth in banking.

Vazhuthur RS Raghavan

Bangalore

Education first

With reference to your editorial, “Learning reforms” (November 12), transformative changes in all areas including free e-libraries for the common man in all villages is a must if Indian youths are to catch up with their counterparts globally. CSR money should be used for this purpose first.

Ramachandran Mahadevan

Online

We need to know more

This is with reference to “All you wanted to know about shale oil” (November 11). India’s oil and energy deficits are serious impediments to its progress. We need more information, more discussion among experts, better coordination and public consciousness of the implications, economic, social, territorial, legal and moral. Please propagate information on shale requiring more water (a deficit and often a costly influx), more feuds over land use, ownership, more high-tech refining.

A Madhavan

Online

The statistical conjectures of shale oil are suspect for more than one reason: the piece did not put out even the percentage of shale oil production out of the total fossil fuels now in production.

The cost of production of shale oil is exorbitantly high and the US itself is experimenting with technologies to produce at a lower cost without much progress in the last two years. Russia and France have been eyeing shale oil reserves supposedly existing in Canada and Antarctica. There are bonded Indian and other foreign engineers working in those regions facing severe hardships. But the extent of such reserves is more chance than science. In any case, the cost of exploration would send the costs sky high, and these are costs countries like India can ill afford.

Yerram Raju Behara

Online

City destroyed

This is with reference to “Now that Bangalore is Bengaluru” by Narendar Pani (November 11). I grew up in Bangalore in the 50s and 60s. In those days it was just two areas broadly defined as Cantt and City. The suburbs of Malleswaram, Basavangudi and later Vyalikaval slowly sprung up and in a more orderly and clean manner. Jalahalli, KR Puram and other outer lying areas were considered far off. Come the techie crowd and the city lost its moorings. The mushrooming clusters around the new ventures grew ugly and crowded. There has been total lack of planning and foresight and the efforts to correct it by new infrastructure links has made the city even uglier.

A beautiful city has been systematically converted into a crowded gridlocked urban slum. Imagine being the biggest service export earner with the contributors agonised by hours of commute to work (average of 12 km one way). The exposure they have to emissions and pollution will tell on their health with very few of them able to workout or take a walk. It is unsafe to walk anywhere except on some campuses or Lal Bagh.

Subramaniam Shankar

Online

Horrendous irresponsibility

The death of 11 women and hospitalisation of 52 others due to a sterilisation procedure gone wrong is shocking, a homicide committed by the state. The state is casual, callous, careless, cruel and inhuman to its citizens. These things happen only in a failed state. A dispassionate, thorough probe to unravel the truth is necessary. Capitalism is the real culprit where nobody in the system is accountable to the citizens. Everybody is pushed into the economic race and become insensitive to fellow human beings. A medical care system completely run by the state is the only solution.

Araveeti Rama Yogaiah

Hyderabad

Make Tirukkural compulsory

The Uttarakhand MP Tarun Vijay has remarked that the Tamil savant Tiruvalluvar’s biography must be made compulsory in schools in other parts of India. One feels that studying the Tirukkural must be made mandatory and not the author’s biography. After all, what’s not said in the Tirukkural is not said anywhere.

S Ramakrishnasayee

Ranipet, Tamil Nadu

Wasteful policies

Telangana has a deficit of ₹19,000 crore for 2014-15 but the Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation (GHMC) is serving meals at ₹5 and breakfast at ₹1. It has little money to repair the pot-holed roads. The government is giving ₹51,000 to Muslim, Christian, SC and ST girls at the time of marriage. It is borrowing to pay interest. The transport corporation has losses of ₹600 crore a year.

It is obvious that the government and GHMC are spending beyond their means. Not a single minister or officer exhorts people to work hard, save and have a limited number of children. All the welfare spending appears to be to make the poor live in painless poverty to keep their votes.

Countries like Korea, Vietnam, Brazil, Malaysia , Indonesia and China which were in a far worse economic condition than India in the late 1940s have forged ahead; poverty has come down to single digit figures and countries like Korea and Taiwan have become exporters of sophisticated electronics, steel ships and even aircraft. The perpetuation of poverty is a vested interest.

TH Chowdary

Secunderabad

Appalling callousness

The botched-up mass sterilisation programme in Chhattisgarh’s Bilaspur district is a sad commentary on the appalling public healthcare system. It exposes the hollowness of the buzz of ‘development’ and ‘good governance’. It is beyond belief that even a simple procedure such as laparoscopic tubectomy proved fatal for 12 women, all below the age of 32 and the poverty line.

It is worth noting that the medical camp was organised as part of a target-driven drive to ‘show results’ and claim credit for the success of population control. It would make a veterinary surgeon squirm to think how so many surgeries were done in less than five hours by a single ‘award-winning’ doctor with one instrument in an almost abandoned hospital for ₹100 a head. The financial inducement of ₹1,400 each to the poor women to undergo sterilisation bespeaks the correlation of vulnerability to the risk of death with poverty.

Be it the use of infected surgical equipment, unhygienic conditions or administration of wrong medication or expired medicines or spurious drugs flooding the market in the locality that caused the tragedy, it was callousness at its worst. Causalities on account of sterilisation are extremely rare, if not nil elsewhere in the world. Suspension of doctors, promise of a high-level probe and compensation cannot bring back lost lives or console orphaned children. We cannot afford not to make attempts to prevent a recurrence of the tragedy anywhere in our country.

G David Milton

Maruthancode,Tamil Nadu

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