Aam aadmi then can steal your clothes, dont you see?
Congress patented aam aadmi?
See the bye-election results!
Yeddyurappa for 36 point rural development!
AP political reality point to ugly corporate-politicians nexus!
Tamil Nadu exhibits coalition degenerating into family empire!
Yes, even coalitions must have some baci principles, some basic truths and some basic ethics in governance. You can’t have too much gimmicks, too many slogans to hide the ugly ground level realities.
The aam aadmi have wisdom, much objectivity and when the time comes they bust your egos, punish you with ruthless voting and turn you out. That is the power of democracy, the wisdom of the commonpeople, Rousseau’s famous “general will”, the social contract and much of how the political evolution is taking place.
Let us hope our learned leaders who are supposed to be the embodiment of honesty and integrity do some introspection and ask themselves: do they deserve the trust of the people? Did they earn it by their moral basis for what they were called upon?
Are they democracy’s children? Or imposters from outside?Hard questions. But the aam aadmi are the hard ask masters, do we know? Now, there is some lull, it seems, in New Delhi. The 100 days announcements are over and what have we?
The Assembly elections in Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh and Uttarkand have dampened the enthusiasm of the Congress. In Gujarat, the BJP has staged a surprise; it won seven of the 12 bye-elections to various state assemblies. Bye-polls were held for 20 assembly seats in seven states. The first results for the 12 seats gave the Congress jitters.
The fallen hero, the BJP, stood up. The victorious outfit, namely, the Congress had fallen in a sullen mood. It is at this environment came the austerity drive that saw not many takers, first, in the Congress ranks itself. One by one, from S.M.Krishna and his deputy to the others have come out from their cozy rooms.
The five star culture was once the mark of the most successful of the Congress leader. So too their own private helicopters and even private planes, courtesy, the corporate helpers were the usual mode of transport for the otherwise undemocratic and power-grabbing class. Let us be frank.
No one realised and no one learnt any lessons from playing politics. We have a government that is not genuinely democratic, both the party as well as the government. That is one reason why the ground level realities are not reflected in what the political leaders speak. See the slogan: aam aadmi.
What nonsense is this slogan? It is as plain as daylight robbery? What this aam aadmi mean nowadays?
There is drought, there is crisis in agriculture and there is labour shortage for the farming sector. The NREGA had in some significant farm pockets, from Punjab to Tamil Nadu had taken away the farm workers into unproductive and plain wasteful expenditure on daily wages for those who wanted to work on the projects.
These projects are not chosen by the local agencies, the panchayats have no say, no role, it is the state government agencies, or rather the agents, the party brokers who boss over the projects.
The NREGA is not locally designed, it is designed at the New Delhi drawing rooms, it seems! So, there is much talk in Delhi, less talk and more manipulation at the state level. No state level leader would give credit to the Centre and so this programme is implemented with the eye on local publicity and for the state level electoral advantages.
So too the many other issues in agriculture. The crisis in agriculture is accentuated more by faulty policies and less on drought or monsoon failure. There are no institutional reforms and safeguards, for instance, in the implementation of the Vaidyanatham committee recommendations in revamping rural credit.
The finance minister seems to be simply unaware or disconnected with this side of the crop/development loan lending programmes. There is no clear announcement from the finance minister on farm lending. This is to be done sooner or later.
First, let the farmers’ views be sought.
The farming sector, on average, is becoming unviable for most farmers, the owner-cultivators. There is this real difficulty. If you own lands, you are called landlord. This is false. To own landed property is a sin in the current government schemes.
All land owners don’t engage in cultivation. They lease out their lands for tenants.
The very word tenants bring out some mutual suspicion in the rural areas.
There is a need to relax the land reform laws so that there is incentive to invest in land, to invest in technologies, to invest in rural housing etc. Even now, the very aam aadmi are all mostly rural people, right?
Go to any village; let the Prime Minister make a surprise visit to any village. He will see every village these days is a dumping ground at the very entrance to the villages. Garbages lie uncollected for months together. So too the sanitation situation. Too unmentionable the scene is villagers is.
Sanitation work can be given to the NREGA workers, so too garbage removal from the village entrances can be assigned to the NREGA workers. Then we can take up watershed and even rural housing schemes.
Villages are no more liveable. They are, at least the villages in the outer perimeter of most cities are now crowded. The villages need more expansions; more new colonies can be built around the existing villages. So too the need to extend the rural medical facilities.
A very sensible suggestion is to give highly subsidised rural clinics building loans to qualified medical doctors, say, build clinics at a distance of say, 30 kms from the centre of the city. So, that new clinics can be opened by qualified medical doctors at a very attractive subsidised loan scheme.
This would really encourage rural doctors; encourage a sort of pay by your ability to rural patients. The telemedicine scheme can be tagged to these rural clinics so that quality treatment can be ensured. So too the IT rural kiosks. We need now more and more IT related developments.
Now, it is a shame to think that with all the various rural development schemes, there is much wastage of funds, much leakages, much corruption and only very weak talk at the top.
There is a tendency in the government, at the level of many ministers, to imagine they are the most clever and wisemen! And women! They are not! They are many ignoramuses!
In education to rural development to panchayat raj, there is very little attempt to invite outside talents. There must be advisory panels to every ministry, they must be experts, NGOs and the minister must seek advice and then only act on their policies. Now, Kapil Sibal, before he did anything, he invited himself controversies, be it teaching Hindi to 10th standard exams! So too the rural development minister. To use the funds to build Rajiv Gandhi Bhavans is fool hardy!
The agriculture minister gets angry if we point out his ministry is a failure! An agriculture country like ours imports sugar! What a shame! There is so much poverty, so much malnutrition, and so much farmers’ suicides and yet we seem to indulge in gimmicks like travelling by train and economy class! Elections come at any time. Slogans seem to serve us. But even here, the electorate seems to have the sixth sense. They surprise us, wisely!
Image Source : thehindubusinessline.com