The New Nation - Internet Edition

For reduction of fuel oil price

THE last reduction in fuel oil price was more symbolic than substantive. If it was really intended to pass benefits to users, then the cut in prices could be substantially deeper but that could, nonetheless, help keep government's subsidy on this score bearable. Bigger drop in prices could be a positive stimulus for the economy and relief for all categories of energy users. When the oil prices were last hiked the prevailing international price of oil per barrel was some $145. The price dipped to some $87 per barrel or by 60 per cent since then. But notwithstanding a 60 per cent average decline in the international price of oil, Bangladeshi consumers became the beneficiary of decrease by only 11 per cent.

Oil prices have recently dropped to nearly $40 a barrel from its peak price about ten months ago. The special assistant to the Chief Adviser on energy told newsmen some days ago that government is considering a decrease in price in the current month. But there was no surety in his statement. From past experiences, it might not be improper to think that this government will leave it for the next one to decide.

It is not expected that government should bear too big a burden of subsidies for selling oil at a cheaper price. But even a decrease in its price by some 50 per cent --now-- would mean that government would have to pay notably less in subsidies for oil compared to the amount of subsidies it was paying before. So, there is no reason for not immediately slashing down fuel oil prices to reasonable levels immediately.

Breakdown of society

DURING his last high-profile visit to the United States, Pope Benedict XVI chided Americans for 'a moral breakdown' he said had fueled the church's child sex abuse scandal. In a speech to US Catholic bishops in Washington, the pontiff berated the bishops for their poor handling of the scandal. Describing clerics who sexually abuse children as 'gravely immoral', he warned that scourge of paedophilia 'is found not only in your dioceses but in every sector of society.' It calls for a determined collective response, he said.

Ahead of the Pope's visit, a polygamist compound owned by the Fundamentalist Church in Texas emptied of more than 400 children was the site of pervasive sexual abuse where girls were groomed to accept sex at puberty and boys indoctrinated to perpetuate the cycle as reported by AFP news agency quoting officials. Girls as young as 13 were 'spiritually married' to men who claimed several wives and were forced to have sex with their significantly older husbands for the purpose of having children. A number of the children recovered and removed were unable to provide names of their biological parents. The children were taken to state custody. Almost at the same time widespread sexual abuse of children was ongoing in state care in South Australia for decades with an inquiry saying that the abuse was allegedly perpetrated by foster parents, social workers, teachers, priests and strangers. Some foster children were used at paedophile parties for sexual gratification as revealed by a former Supreme Court judge who headed an official inquiry. And atrocious events like an Australian man's fathering a baby with daughter bear the testimony of breakdown of the society as sounded rightly by the Pope.

Bottlenecks in knowledge transfer

Maswood Alam Khan

What skills do you possess that might be worth sharing with someone working in your bank? I asked this question to dozens of experienced bankers in Bangladesh Krishi Bank (BKB) where I have now been working as General Manager, Administration Division. To my pleasant surprise, everybody recited a litany of skills they have mastered in the fields of computer science, foreign trade, advance, general banking, rural finance etc. Then I asked: How many of your colleagues have you transferred any of your specialized skills to? To my chagrin, most of them gave me a blank look as they replied with a sheepish grin: "Sir, no colleague ever really approached me to learn. Is it not the responsibility of our Training Institute to equip them with necessary skills?"

In the present-day world 'knowledge' is not simply a power as the saying goes; knowledge is increasingly becoming the most relevant tool for economic survival as the economy that was once based on industrial assembly lines and hierarchical control is now fast shifting to a global, decentralized, and information-driven economy. The present civilization is no more recognized as iron, silver, or plastic civilization. Our civilization today is 'information civilization'. The more a country is blessed with a rich repository of information the more it can boast about her power in the comity of nations.

Information and knowledge are intertwined. Knowledge is a wider concept than information and both knowledge and information are based on intellectual expertise. So, an efficient information management, the cardinal goal of the neck-breaking races on the IT superhighways, may be deemed the enabler for knowledge management. The basic aim of knowledge management however is to capture and increase the knowledge of individuals and 'knowledge transfer system' is the most pivotal cog in the management wheel of an organization.

But, very lamentably, the 'knowledge transfer system' in most of our government-owned enterprises is either totally absent or very poorly implemented. Theoretical lessons the employees learn in their training institutes at home or abroad go in one ear and out the other immediately after they leave the training institute to rejoin their old desks. Because, trainings are offered and dispensed not on the need of the desk but on one's efforts to curry favor with the bosses.

And the colleague sitting next to your desk will never ever transfer to you the secret of his know-how even on the day before his retirement. The secret, after all, has glued him to the same desk for ages as he has somehow made himself indispensable to the department.

To unglue those experts with their privatized technical knowledge from their perpetually occupied desks management discipline suggests introducing a technique, known as job rotation, in which employees are moved between two or more job desks in a planned manner with a view to exposing the employees to different experiences and wider variety of skills with an ultimate management goal to enhance employees' job satisfaction, to cross-train them, and to transfer know-how from the skilled to the unskilled.

You will be pelting a stone at a wasps' nest if you ever try to unseat one of those experts from the desk he has been occupying in the name of his special expertise. An attempt to budge a lady worker from the headquarters to a field office will invite the whole sky to fall apart. A daring step to move an employee, who happens to be a member of any of the multifarious trade unions having simply some registration numbers-elected or unelected-from the 'desk of no work' to 'a desk of little work' will spark a volcano in the human resources department. An official order transferring an employee from Dhaka metropolis to an outstation may set off an alarm from an outside source which routinely exercises undue intervention in transferring and postings on some unholy considerations.

Such is the scenario in most of the government-owned commercial institutions including banks where discharging the most unpleasant job of overseeing the administration is not possible in accordance with rules the management gurus have prescribed.

Fortunately, administration in Bangladesh Krishi Bank under a powerful Board of Directors captained by an unusually strict Chairman, a legendary banker, and a management team headed by a Managing Director, a Masters in Business Administration having varied experiences in running a number of large and difficult banks, has of late been a little different compared to other government-owned banks and commercial organizations. Moreover, employees and trade union leaders of this bank are docile in their manners compared to those of other commercial banks in one of which I have had horrible work experience in the midst of shirkers for more than two decades.

Thanks to a calm political environment and some courageous decisions based on 'carrot and stick policy' taken by BKB management something unthinkable is happening in the bank. Employees who under the pretext of ailments of his own or of any of his family members all along used to persist in retaining his/her posting in head office or in any of the risk-free controlling offices have of late started approaching the management for their voluntary transfers to field offices. Outside advocacy for initiating or canceling transfer orders has dwindled as middlemen engaged in such advocacy have been fatigued by the management's obduracy on not changing an order of transfer once issued.

The most praiseworthy improvement has been achieved in training the unskilled through the bank's newly tailored 'Knowledge Transfer Plan'. Employees who considered themselves indispensable to the so-called lucrative departments of foreign trade, information technology, and of loans and advances have already been and are soon going to be transferred to outstations with a promise from the management that they would have a chance to be transferred back to their desired desks only if they successfully dispense practical trainings on their own expertise to a prescribed number of unskilled employees.

The new 'Knowledge Transfer Plan' of BKB has created such uproar that under the first phase of the plan for training unskilled employees with practical computer knowledge the trainers are now in fierce competition with other fellow trainers and some of them have trained much more number of employees than their prescribed quota.

While there were only a few dozens of data entry operators who were conversant with handling computers only a few months back there have already been a few hundred employees including higher ranking officers who have now been engaged in computerization programs of the bank. Under this 'Knowledge Transfer Plan' almost all employees of the bank will be given 'on the job practical training' by the experienced on all the banking knowledge, especially on foreign trade, computer, and loans and advances, in a matter of two years besides regular training on general banking being dispensed by the bank's training institute. "The more number of unskilled employees you personally train the better is your chance to get a reward" was the incentive that worked like a magic behind the sudden proliferation of trained computer operators in BKB.

Similar incentive-based 'knowledge transfer plan', if adopted in other state enterprises, may not only contribute to capacity building of those organizations but may also set shiny examples of generating employments at home and abroad and encourage private enterprises and individuals to follow suit.

If the government today declares that a mason will be offered an overseas job for free only if he voluntarily trains at least ten unskilled workers with the dexterity of masonry there would be a long caravan of Bangladeshi skilled workers on their way to foreign lands where there is a huge demand for such skillful workers.

A banker so trained under a 'knowledge transfer plan' with the intricacies of foreign exchange and international trade can now easily find a US Dollar Sixty hundred per annum job in Shanghai if s/he takes an extra course to learn Mandarin. By the way, there is a huge demand for bankers and accountants in China and experienced American bankers and chartered accountants are desperately learning Mandarin in the hope of finding jobs in China even at this time of global recession.

In seconds, computers can transfer reams of data from one terminal to another while man has made knowledge far more difficult to move from one person to another. Unfortunately, humans---the sole vessels of knowledge---are very miser or deliberately inefficient at passing their earned knowledge from one brain to another.

Monopoly of knowledge has already created a digital divide between the developed and the developing nations. But a good education should not be the monopoly of the rich only. Access to knowledge, education, and information is our birthright. But today's most profitable business is lamentably the sale of knowledge. Education, therefore, is getting out of reach for most of the poor of the world.

There are dozens of private television channels in Bangladesh catering to our thirst for foreign culture and educating our youngsters how to make subtle movements of their buttocks while dancing. But there is not a single TV channel wherefrom our poor students instead of going to their private tutors can learn lessons from the Nesfield's book on English Grammar, Composition and Usage or to study audio-visually the Pythagoras Theorem to learn that "In a right-angled triangle the square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides".

I don't know for sure whether our government has any secret pact with the powerful association of thousands of private tutors for not doing anything that may tell upon their knowledge-selling business. But I wonder how our government could afford to be so myopic about distance learning programs through television channels for all levels of schools, colleges, and universities! A laptop that with reasonable configurations can be bought from China at Taka 30 thousand only may be another window for our poor students to learn their lessons from the comfort of their homes. Shouldn't our government distribute such laptops to our poor students at subsidized prices with a view to hurdling over the barriers to knowledge transfer?

Getting rid of nuclear weapons

Jonathan Power

For readers under 35 this will probably be news: from the time of President Richard Nixon to the end of the presidency of George W. Bush the consuming, most visible, foreign policy passion of successive governments, including both Democratic and Republican, was nuclear arms control- attempts..

sometimes successful, for modest mutual cuts in nuclear weapons held by the US and the Soviet Union. Since the days of President Bill Clinton the passion has totally ebbed.

Apart from the fact this is not a good reason to make such an intimate Clintonite as Hilary Clinton secretary of state, it also reflects a lethargy among the big nuclear powers, the US, Russia, the UK, France and China, that comes to us all when passion dies and routine takes over. The Cold War is dead and out. And whatever the clashes today between the West and Russia- over Georgia or the planting of American anti-ballistic missiles on Polish soil- everyone knows that with Russia with a military which is now only 25 per cent the strength of America's there can be no real conflict.

But voters aged 18-35, even if the past arms control efforts are a very hazy memory, are aware that nuclear arms are spreading- to Israel, India, Pakistan, North Korea, Iran and possibly free-lance terrorist groups.

What enough of them don't realize is that the leverage and moral conviction to do much about it has been subverted by the loss of momentum of the big powers to honour promises made ?many times to abolish their nuclear arms.

Going back to the olden days, in successive US and Soviet administrations there used to be a group of tough, hard, men in charge of defence and foreign ministries or foreign policy advisors to their heads of government. A group of them on the American side last year wrote a letter to the Wall Street Journal calling for the total abolition of nuclear weapons - they were Henry Kissinger, Brent Scowcroft, Charles Shultz, William Perry and Sam Nunn. Their letter was later endorsed by no less than two-thirds of all living former secretaries of state and defence, and national security advisors.

At about the same time, Georgi Arbatov, a former senior advisor to Soviet presidents Brezhnev, Andropov and Gorbachev was telling me that Russia should set an example and begin to disarm unilaterally. Perhaps most ?telling of all, during the presidential campaign both John McCain and Barack Obama said more or less the same thing.

The elimination of nuclear weapons is called for in Article 6 of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Presidents Bush Sr and Gorbachev made a credible start on this path. Since 1990, with little fanfare, the number of Russian nuclear warheads on intercontinental missiles has been cut by almost 70 per cent.

And on the US side, the largest part of the US force - weapons deployed on submarines - has been cut by 50 per cent.

During Barack Obama's term the two treaties on US-Russian strategic arms limitations will expire. This then is the time to put negotiations towards zero possession into overdrive. There is no reason, as in the previous treaties, to dot every i.e. flexibility should be the watchword.

Let both sides be left with the choice which strategic long distance missiles should be reduced first. Then they will not have to engage in the time consuming detailed negotiations of the past. It boils down to being serious about setting an example for non-proliferation and lining up the most powerful nations on earth to really enforce it. Time is not on our side.

In an article in the current issue of Foreign Affairs, Columbia University professor, Stephen Sestanovich observes that, "Many US foreign policy specialists look at the return of nuclear arms control with a mixture of boredom and regret. Most stopped viewing Russia as an interesting security problem years ago. In the military, Russian issues are no longer where the promotions are."

This is not good news if it means that the likes of a reticent secretary of state Hillary Clinton is not going to be pushed from within the administration. Barack Obama needs to bring into his administration a special arms control negotiator - someone of the caliber and status of Sam Nunn, former chairman of the senate's armed services committee or former Republican secretary of state, James Baker, reporting only and directly to the president and Congress. The Russians should do something similar, perhaps using Georgi Arbatov in a key role. And these wise men should be encouraged to negotiate fast.