Today is Vijayadasami, the last day of the Navraathri Pooja
festival when people celebrate the victory of the good over evil. This is the
season when soldiers worship the weapons they use and students the books they
study. I wondered what should our people in government be worshipping? Mamon or the devil himself? Anyhow this train
of thought led me to start my own vidhyarambham by showering the choicest
epithets in my repertoire on the most good-for-everything-bad
person on this side of the Western Ghats. But I soon realized that these would
not be a patch on the perfidy and treason of this person. So I have limited
myself to listing the top 5 on two lists: ‘Not doing anything that
he (the Chief Minister of the Government of Kerala) is expected to do’ and ‘Doing everything that he (the Chief Minister of the Government of
Kerala) is expected not to do’.
1.
Not doing anything that he is expected to do.
1.1. As the
Chief Minister of the Government of Kerala he has been tasked, empowered and
paid to the extent of being pampered to work for the greater common good of the
citizens of India who are native to this part of the country. In this he is
expected to be guided the Directive Principles of State Policy as explained in
the Constitution.
1.2. As the
Chief Minister of the Government of Kerala, we, the citizens, have placed a lot
of resources at his disposal which he is expected to manage judiciously and
fairly for achieving the objective of Justice- social, economic and political-
enshrined in the Preamble of the Constitution.
1.3. As the
Chief Minister of the Government of Kerala, he is required to be beyond
reproach as his conduct is supposed to be totally transparent and worthy of
emulation.
1.4. Such
incompetence as this government has displayed cannot be imagined in any
democracy worth the name. A bill passed unanimously by the whole lot of elected
representatives in the Legislative Assembly almost two years ago, to set up a
tribunal to compensate the victims of Coca Cola bottling plant at Plachimada, remains
in cold storage in one of the posh offices in Delhi.
1.5. How much
do the citizens of Kerala know about the pros and cons of the UID or Aadhaar
which have been thrust on them in unusual haste? But look at the tax payer’s
money splurged on advertisements (with mostly exaggerated claims of unsubstantiated
achievements and mirage like promises) on the occasion of completing 1 year of
governance by the UDF and on the eve of another bash in the name of Emerging
Kerala!
2.
Doing everything that he is expected not to do.
2.1. Kerala can
easily be said to be the worst governed state in the country. That it tops the
list of states with highest rate of suicides and consumption of alcohol is
proof enough for this. And the only businesses that it is doing with full gusto
seems to be selling liquor and lottery tickets! (Of course that is apart from
the not so open business of helping every known and unknown mafias-land, sand,
forest etc- on this side of the Sahyadris).
2.2. The
resources that we have placed at the disposal of the CM is not to be treated as
dowry or inheritance from his pop’s assets. But that is exactly what Mr Ommen
Chandy has been doing. While he has been volunteering to pay the hospital bills
of celebrities who have no need for any financial help, poor patients depending
on the government run hospitals are forced to depend on external pharmacies and
laboratories for their medicines and diagnostic services at unaffordable cost.
Examples are plenty- while cricketers and film actors are the beneficiaries of
his indulgence there are plenty of cases of poor people running from pillar to
post to get some financial help or refund of expenses they have incurred while
seeking treatment from government hospitals. The number of sick and old people
who have been brought- in ambulances and on stretchers- to the venues of his
much touted Public Contact Programs would alone suffice to prove the perfidy of
this person mismanaging our resources authoritatively with impunity! And now
even a football player coming to the State to inaugurate a private business
showroom and air taxi service is being pampered as a state guest at the cost of
the poor and hapless tax payer! (I need to clarify that all these celebrities
are lovable people and I too, personally, hold them in great esteem. But the
point is that they do not need financial largesse from the government. In the
case of Maradona, the King of Football, not only is the government not required
to spend on him, it is also required to recover the cost related to provision
of security etc from those who have brought him to our land as part of a
campaign for their business! Of course even these expenses could be condoned
had the government been able to fulfill the basic needs of health care and education
to all the citizens here instead of only whining about the lack of funds for
fulfilling these most essential of their responsibilities.)
2.3. While the
Right to Information Act is supposed to be a landmark legislation to hold Governments and their
instrumentalities accountable to the governed, this law been totally
subverted in this state. Not only have even the basic requirements like the
mandatory information required to be disclosed proactively not been disclosed,
there have not even been any transparency in the appointment of information
commissioners who are required to enforce the law using the penal provisions effectively. It may sound ludicrous, funny, offensive and
all that but it is also true that when information was sought from the Public
Information Officer in the office of the Chief Minister on the action taken on
an application submitted to the Chief Minister sometime earlier, the reply
received was that the application ‘seems to have been submitted to the earlier
incumbent and there is no provision in the Secretariat system to transfer files
and documents when incumbents change’!
2.4. In
contrast to the dumped Special Tribunal Bill, a controversial bill to
facilitate misuse of plantation land for resorts has been pushed through
without any problems being encountered anywhere, by the time one could say
‘ithe poyi, ithe vannu’!
2.5. Do the
citizens know that after spending about £250 million (that is about Rs 2000
Crores at current exchange rates!) over eight years on developing the National
ID (NID) program, the UK government (administering a population of just about 62
million which is less than 6 percent of the population of Mera Mahan Bharath!) abolished
it? This scrapping of the project meant that Britain avoided spending another
£800 million over a decade. The NID was launched in July 2002-and as of
February 2010, its total costs rose to an estimated £4500 million. The UK
government has cited higher costs, impracticality and ungovernable breaches of
privacy as reasons for cancellation of the NID project. These concerns will no
doubt impact India as well. (See: http://www.moneylife.in/article/8/5684.html).
It is important to note that even as the process to issue Aadhaar cards began,
fake cards even in the name of Nandan Nelekani, heading the project, had been
produced? And we all know how tardy and error prone has been Voter’s Identity
Cards issued by the Election Commission of India. Not to mention the gross
crime of not even having a reliable electoral roll- the Gita-Bible-Koran-like
document in a democracy! And for that matter, what is the quality of the
process of issue of even ration cards which have been in existence for so long
as we have been free from the colonial yoke?
3.
Of course these lists may not make any impact on
any politician worth his/her name. But this is part of my vidhyarambham for
this year. It is sincerely hoped that both my pen and my compatriots become
stronger by the day throughout the year and the good will win over the evil
before the year is out!
P M Ravindran
Kalpathy-678003
Tel: 0491-2576042
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