On the Eve of the 62nd Year of Indian Independence
As I sit down to write this, late into the night of 14th of August 2008, in the city of Cochin, the commercial capital of Kerala, the power has already failed thrice. The state is reeling under acute power shortage; the indefinite bus strike announced by the workers Union is well onto its third day. Dengue fever, Jaundice and rat fever on the rise, thanks to the city corporation authorities failing to develop scientific methods of waste management but efficiently fighting over who should be given the credit for the mismanagement. In a city where there are no flyovers, broad roads or clean pedestrian walks, where traffic jams are the order of the day, a metro rail project is envisioned as if that would solve all the problems!
At the national level, inflation is creeping to 12.5 %. The power situation is no better in other states too. National statistics indicate that corruption in Govt and non-Govt institutions of our country are one of the highest as compared to other developed and developing nations. Corruption begets corruption. In a land, where every pillar and brick is to be greased, where law enforcers themselves are the greatest offenders, the public cannot but be corrupt themselves to stay in the great race of survival!
We are a country of people who spend a lot of our energy in debating anything and everything. We inherit the traits of Veda Vyasa who was a master in the hair splitting exercise of defining Dharma and Adharma. No wonder we carry on the tradition in our national channels and print media in unmatchable style. But, is it also not true that the effort ends there? We are happy, once we have had a good fight to establish what went wrong and who was responsible. But not for us, the responsibility and the determination to correct or to amend the system that led to the failure.
What have we, as a nation been doing all these years since independence, other than blaming the system, the bureaucrats and the politicians but faithfully electing a different set of rogues again and again once in every five years?
1 comment
Comments feed for this article
January 27, 2009 at 12:32 pm
Biju Mathews
Though the inflation rate has come down drastically, we are into the middle of a very serous global recession which will hinder any hopes of “India Shining” to do any serious infrastructure development. In his budget speech sometime last year Finance Minister, Chidambaram agreed that the deficit in India is the infrastructure deficit. He promised somewhere between 150 -200 billion dollars to develop world class infrastructure covering power, telecommunications, roads etc. The funny thing is that it was last year. Nothing has happened after that.