Articles by B M

Mess in Coal B M NEW DELHI BY all accounts, the performance of the giant Coal India Ltd with its heavy responsibility in conditions when the overall energy situation is last worsening is far from satisfactory. There is unrest and indiscipline in the work force, the middle level officer cadres are restive and their morale has hardly improved with the abandonment of their intention to go on strike without securing an acceptable solution of their problems. Production is simply not picking up even while demand for Coal is growing. Project planning and development of coal mines to meet future demand are lagging far behind schedule. While Biju Patnaik was able to secure the integration of the Coal Department in his Steel and Mines Ministry

NEW DELHI Planning Commission's Make-Believe World B M THE planners in Yojana Bhavan hit on a bright idea when they suggested to the caretaker Prime Minister, Charan Singh, that the final draft of the Rs 71,000 crore Sixth Five-Year Plan drawn up by them last June and approved at a meeting of the full Planning Commission chaired by the former Prime Minister, Morarji Desai, should be published without waiting for its approval by the Union Cabinet the National Development Council Irfter the coming mid-term poll. The argument advanced was that this would help the state governments and the Union ministries to prepare their annual plans for next year. This exercise normally starts at about this time of the year and it was suggested that the process should not be interrupted because of the abnormal political situation pending the mid-term poll to the Lok Sabha. The planners also felt that, in any case, there was little scope for any major modifications in the draft and if they were to be attempted by the new government after the poll, the five-year span of the Sixth Plan would nearly expire without a plan at all. The idea of publishing the draft Plan and treating it as the basis for planning exercises of the state governments and Union ministries for the coming par was thus the planners' unique Technocratic and administrative solution to planning problems in a difficult and uncertain political situation.

The Famous Battle of the Plan B M THE atmosphere in Yojana Bhavan has changed dramatically from one of despondency to one of elation. The Planning Commission claims to have won a famous victory in a close tussle with the Finance Ministry on the question of the size of the Sixth Plan. The position had seemed grim when the Commission received a note from the Finance Ministry early last month demanding a substantial cut of between Rs 4,000 and Rs 5,000 crores in the outlay of Rs 69,000 crores proposed in the Draft Plan. On its part, the Planning Commission had been carrying out elaborate exercises on updating the Draft Plan and these exercises had indicated that the financial outlay on the Plan would have to be increased by nearly the same amount as the cut proposed by the Finance Ministry if its output targets were to be kept intact. The Commission tried to make adjustments in its calculations to accommodate the Finance Ministry's views, but it found that some critical programmes and projects would suffer severe damage, and indeed the entire edifice of the Plan would crumble, if the Plan outlay was not raised by at least Rs 2,000 crores. But this seemed an impossible task in the prevailing political environment when all talk in the corridors of government was about cutting government expenditure, about enforcing a dedit squeeze and about other measures to somehow curb the expaasion of money supply as the only way to arrest the rise in prices.

NEW DELHI Hot Air on Public Distribution B M THE much-advertised expanded production- cum-public distribution scheme of Mohan Dharia, holding the portfolio of civil supplies in addition to external trade in the Union Cabinet, is ready to be launched from July 1. The .scheme is claimed to have been given final touches at a conference with the state chief ministers and civil supplies ministers at the same time as the more pressing problem of coping with police unrest was discussed in the capital. In the context of a marked spurt in prices and thriving black market even while the traders too have chosen to take to the agitational course, direct intervention of the government in the market on the scale on which it is planned to be done will be widely welcomed. But the question is whether Dharia's scheme will really work for the purpose for which it is ostensibly designed.

the date of maturity upto 15 years with increase in the rate of interest to 11 per cent per annum with effect from lanuary 1, 1980. The improvement in the company's profit is attributable to reasonable prices of raw materials and multi-fibre policy of the government, which have benefited the cotton textile industry as a whole. The company has been pursuing the process of modernisation. It installed a number of items of machinery during the year. These would enable it to achieve further sophistication in the varieties of cloth.