Dear Ritu Raj, You have quoted verbatim from Dr. Sanjib Barua's recent letter.
I have some things to say on the Economist paper's supposed-to- be-infallible observations: Economist is neither owned NOR edited by Engineers. A mediocre thinker- like today's UK leadership is. England and UK are not run by Engineers at any level . Three Gorges dam World's largest dam, Largest Hydro Power Producer-- safe on Hard rock sides - is running to full capacity in Power,Irrigation,Ship lift Tourism modes . SARS EPIDEMIC WAS not the Engineers Leaders' creation. Please read the PostScript **- and note who-- not engineers . High Speed Rail Net is running very well. What has SPECTATOR to comment on World's largest High Speed Network of Rails? <But democracies can find ways of engaging with ontological politics that autocracies cannot> Wonder which one is a democracy -- India or China. Had India been - The work at Lower Subansiri dam site would have been stopped a year back. The Indian Plan would have been discussed at all schools of learning in Assam since its first planning in 1970's -- and since its being declared a wrong Geological site in 1980 by Indian Geologists . Now can the Assamese find ways of engaging with ontological INDIA- ASSAM Congress politics? <Elected Govt . or the Law>> Poor clueless India /Assam Voters only cast Votes. Some say the Voting machine does that . They do not ELECT LEADERS . <THE LAW. > Did Barua mean the India Constitution-"WE THE PEOPLE" -- copied from the USA one? POOR PEOPLE!! The logical recasting of a solution for Lower Subansiri Dam is common sense Engineering-- not political ONTOLOGY /Ontological Politics. Do you need that Common Sense Engineering? MM PS **Should every Scientist know the facts?? H5N1, which devastates chicken flocks, first caused human disease in 1997. Since then there have been 581 confirmed cases, 342 of them fatal. Nearly all have occurred in Southeast Asia in people with close contact with infected birds. Person-to-person spread is extremely rare. The two research groups — Fouchier’s in Rotterdam and one at the University of Wisconsin led by Yoshihiro Kawaoka — created H5N1 strains that were both lethal about 60 percent of the time and easily transmitted between ferrets, the lab animals used as surrogates for human beings in flu research. The National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity, created by the US federal government after the 2001 anthrax letter attacks, reviewed the papers. It advised the Department of Health and Human Services that it ask the journals not to publish the methods for making the strains, and not to identify the specific gene sequences and mutations that appear responsible for the virus’s easy transmissibility. The journals reluctantly agreed as long as provisions were made to give all the data to scientists and governments with a legitimate need for it. Who those are and how to do it will be major topics of the Geneva meeting---. MM Date: Wed, 25 Jan 2012 07:05:09 -0800 To: [email protected] From: [email protected] Subject: [Supporting Akhil Gogoi] It is extremely unlikely that the authority of... FacebookRitu Raj Hazarika posted in Supporting Akhil Gogoi.Ritu Raj Hazarika 8:35pm Jan 25 It is extremely unlikely that the authority of experts would at this point be able to bridge the trust gap that has developed regarding the Lower Subansiri project. But we should be glad that we do not have an “unconstrained technocracy” like that in China where as the Economist magazine pointed out last year, “all but one of the nine members of the Politburo Standing Committee are engineers.” Unconstrained technocracy, says the Economist has not been a guarantee of “good ideas or decisions” in cases such as the says the Economist has not been a guarantee of “good ideas or decisions” in cases such as the Three Gorges dam, the SARS epidemic or the high-speed rail network. the SARS epidemic or the high-speed rail network. But democracies can find ways of engaging with ontological politics that autocracies cannot. However, to find a way out of the impasse on Lower Subansiri the authorities will have to go beyond dogmatically asserting the authority of the elected government or of the law. Fortunately, in a democracy people who fear the potential adverse impact of a government decision has the ability to organize itself into a public. The memories of devastating earthquakes, the lived experience of frequent floods, and the knowledge of scientists, technologists and intellectuals deeply engaged with the region, have constituted an extremely well-informed regional public around the issue of Lower Subansiri. Indian democracy has to find a way of meaningfully engaging that public. View Post on Facebook · Edit Email Settings · Reply to this email to add a comment. _______________________________________________ assam mailing list [email protected] http://assamnet.org/mailman/listinfo/assam_assamnet.org
