Monday, February 22, 2010

tavleen singh: India’s bureaucratic albatross

feb 22nd, 2010

the neta-babu-media nexus is killing the country.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Ram Narayanan


 
INDIAN EXPRESS.COM, FEBRUARY 21, 2010 

India's bureaucratic albatross
 

Tavleen Singh

Every time I deal with Indian officials I become so depressed that I almost need therapy. As a reckless optimist and a proud Indian, I keep hoping that I will one day go into a government office and notice the changes that are necessary if India is to drag herself out of poverty, illiteracy and corruption. Having just last week had dealings with officials in various government departments, I can only report the opposite. Our officials remain untouched by technology, modernity, national interest or higher ideals. So I endorse from the bottom of my heart a new report that concludes that our bureaucrats are the worst in Asia. The report is the result of a survey of 12 Asian economies done last year by the Political and Economic Risk Consultancy based in Hong Kong, and although bits of it have found their way into Indian newspapers, there has been not nearly as much fuss as there should have been about a report that shames India.

The report blames India's 'suffocating bureaucracy' for us falling behind countries like Vietnam, Bangladesh, Bhutan and Myanmar in providing our people with minimal standards of healthcare, sanitation and education. Examine just the sad fact that 43 per cent of Indian children under the age of five are underweight compared with 20 per cent in Vietnam and 14 per cent in Bhutan and you understand what we are up against. It is not because of a shortage of funds that millions of Indians are forced to live in conditions of shameful poverty and degradation. The Government of India spent Rs 4 trillion on various poverty alleviation programmes last year. The report points out that if even half this money had been distributed among our estimated 60 million poor households, they would each get Rs 80 a day and so rise above the poverty line. Our own Planning Commission pointed this out more than a decade ago but because there has not been the smallest attempt to get our babu-log to work more efficiently, nothing has changed.

... deleted

Having covered governance and politics for more than 20 years, it is my humble view that India could become an economic superpower with clean air and water, magnificent new cities and a healthy, literate population, if we could make our officials do their jobs properly. Dr Manmohan Singh knows this and has been talking about the importance of administrative reforms since the first press conference he gave after he became Prime Minister in 2004. Why does he do nothing about it?

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if i might hazard a guess, because his boss didn't tell him to?

1 comment:

M. Patil said...

MMS is part of the problem, not solution.

Polititian, Babu and Media nexus is destroying the nation.