There is no other media support as well.
Our TV channels are still entertainment oriented!
The Indian agriculture is supposed to be the largest economic and social sector. This much is admitted and appreciated.
But there is no real appreciation as there are no bodies where the farmers representatives or spokespersons are prominently allowed or accommodated.
Take even Sonia Gandhi’s high profile National Advisory Council (NAC).
Who are all the representatives of the farmers and rural India?
Without taking on names we can say most of them are urban professionals, they live in cities and they do things that are of course nationally important but they don’t seem to have the pulse of the farmers in their thinking and actions.
To talk of agriculture only in grad rhetoric is not agricultural reforms, is it?
Also, simply you fight for the workers, then, you become an expert on rural India’s transformation.
Either you be a landowner or be villagers, live in actual village for most of the time, then, you can at least breather the rural air. Yes, such persons might not find it comfortable to sit with the Delhi-based activists and retired bureaucrats.
Please retired bureaucrats, please avoid.
How long retired bureaucrats can advise the government.
The same thing happens with the Planning Commission and its learned members.
Mr.Kamal Nath, the minister, did a great national service, from our point of view when he called the Planning Commission members as arm chair men and women!
You must have some genuine leaders of farmers. You must have chosen some fresh faces.
One can’t be expected to choose all the experts for all the jobs.
One wonders how the Prime Minister gets his feedback.
One can imagine that the Prime Minister gets to know only the retired bureaucrats through other bureaucrats.
This cozy system has worked well for the Prime Minister, perhaps. But not surely for the country.
There is so much frustration at the grass roots, at the farmers levels, and this the Prime Minister and Sonia Gandhi must realise.
Sonia Gandhi too is too much pressed into nominating this or that person, be it for Rajya Sabha or for Ambassadors or such high profile, high-paying jobs.
So many white elephant are floating around in New Delhi corridors.
Let Sonia Gandhi run her party organization as a model organisation.
Please let some new and fresh faces and so we can have some fresh ideas and new reforms that are overdue.
Take for instance, the working of our media establishment.
India media, as H.K.Dua, the nominated Rajya Sabha member from the media industry has pointed out that the paid news scandal is hushed up by the very media barons!
This is the greatest blow to our pride as a democracy. Press freedom is at danger.
The Prime Minister must be acting impartially and see that the PCI report is published and debated openly without prejudice to the larger public interest.
The people, the poor, the farmers, the villagers, why even the elite and other sections, women, children and others must get proper media exposure and yet they are not getting.
Vadamalai Media for its part is not run as a profit venture; it is a social business at best, with of course for a fair profit.
But the media barons who are into all branches of media, from print to TV to FM radio, earn in thousands of crores and yet when you take them as a group they, both in the North as well as in the South, they act as purveyors of cheap, almost bordering on yellow journalism.
So cheap and so vulgar is their tastes, their deployment of the language.
We need our regulators doing their jobs very sensitively.
Who are our media regulators? Who are our TV regulators?
We, in India need a TV channel like the BBC. Who is our broadcasting minister? What is the track record? Plain indifferent!
We are sorry to note that our leaders are also so isolated that they don’t receive much feedback it seems.
They don’t acknowledge even our letters of other posts.
We wonder whether Rashtrapathi Bhavan has enough staff. We also wonder whether the same situation prevails at the PMO. Or, even at the AICC or 10, Janpath.
What sort of India we all like to build?
Every one of our leaders, MPs and others, Ministers included, must sit and think for sometime every day before they start their work.
For whom they toil so hard?
Do they really communicate with their constituencies?
Or, is it all just a 9-5 jobs? The top jobs?
There is no public relations at all at our leaders offices.
Our media would very like to create a liberal and enlightened society.
A liberal society, an enlightened society must welcome new ideas, must debate and must believe in argumentative reason and reasoning, right?
We hope our a bit outspoken language is taken in the right spirit. Let us all join in this adventure of building a new India with lots of hopes and aspirations lying unfulfilled. Jai Hind!