It is unfortunate that while the world is moving ahead, our nation is bogged in a deepening quagmire of basic problems with hatred and acrimony predominating. India is facing immense socio-economic problems which are rooted and unresolved due to humungous corruption and mal-administration holding an octopus-like grip over the entire system, writes former IAS officer V.S.Pandey.
Currently India is roiled in a tariff war with its erstwhile strategic partner USA. The international trade is in turmoil due to the Make America Great Again (MAGA) policy being pursued by the American President Mr. Donald Trump. Undoubtedly, every country has the sovereign right to devise its policies focusing on the interest of its own people so Mr. Trump cannot be faulted on this account. Similarly, every nation aspires to trade with other nations keeping their own interests center stage, so India should also chalk out its future trading strategies, in the same way. There is no reason for India to panic as similar situations had arisen in the past also and they were handled prudently. Issues like H1B visas are there but they affect only a few lakh skilled individuals who chose to desert their own country for greener pastures.
Both the issues, tariffs and visas, are solvable as there are hundreds of other nations to trade with. India is huge and capacious enough to accommodate a few bright millions with suitable career opportunities. They have to shed their calculating mentality of multiplying the earnings in dollars with the rupee exchange rate and satisfy themselves with accelerating India’s growth. Stopping or reducing trade with US will hit our exports by 50 billion dollars or so in the near future, but that can be overcome. We must delink our trade in dollars like many other major economies who are willing to bite the bullet.
These external issues impact only a minuscule section of our population and will get settled in time. Our focus should be on the larger and most vital issue- how to resolve the multiple problems faced by more than a hundred crore of our hapless populace, which are of our own making and we, as a nation, must single mindedly concentrate on their resolution expeditiously.
As India is passing through multiple crises, we first need to ponder over the ways our politics is being conducted. Over the decades, the politics of vested interest pursued by political organizations of diverse hues have pushed aside people-oriented politics. While catchy fraudulent sloganeering has overtaken real issues, the masses living in abysmal conditions are despairing about how to improve their plight. With every electoral exercise either at national or state level, the developmental agenda is pushed to the back seat and all pernicious divisive agendas are made dominant. The coming Bihar assembly election is no exception where caste and communal issues occupy center stage.
It is unfortunate that while the world is moving ahead, our nation is bogged in a deepening quagmire of basic problems with hatred and acrimony predominating. India is facing immense socio-economic problems which are rooted and unresolved due to humungous corruption and mal-administration holding an octopus-like grip over the entire system. How seriously corruption in our system has deleteriously impacted our lives is an issue which has not been documented properly. People generally complain about corruption but fail to gauge the real impact it has had on our lives. The people must be told about it in detail and not in generally vague terms as has been done in the past. The problem has assumed such alarming proportions that nothing less than a total war against this malaise is going to alter the situation.
There are numerous questions that we must answer before we begin the process of overhauling of governance to make it people oriented. Why does a large chunk of our population still continue to live below the poverty line and remains cut off from the progress we have made? Why did we fail to set up the required number of schools and colleges to enable every child to have access to even a decent education? Who is responsible for nearly 35 percent of our population still remaining illiterate? Why are our roads and other basic infrastructure facilities so pathetic? Why does most of our population remain deprived of basic facilities of sanitation and has almost no access to many essential services for a larger part of the year? Why are the civic facilities almost non-existent in most of our 6 million villages? And why are millions homeless? We have even failed to provide safe drinking water to our population. These are just some of the crucial areas where we could have done much better, like other nations, which have performed admirably.
Corruption, mal-administration and lack of transparency in governance are core issues haunting the country but no political party is ready to even discuss them. The public must force governance to focus on social, political, economic and administrative reforms to abolish this abject poverty and pave the way for all round development, without compartmentalization, of various communities. For this to happen the governments needs to manifest principled leadership and strive to implement a roadmap prepared for developing our great nation.
The results of successive elections are indicative of people’s yearning for change. They have failed to find an ethical alternative. Hence, they have to fall back on the same groupings whose politics is bedeviled by caste, religion and money/muscle power. People have to realize that those pursuing corrupt and divisive politics have had their opportunity for decades at the top but have abysmally failed to deliver honest governance. People have to become aware that unless they shun divisive politics based on caste and communal agendas and denounce the role of black money in our political culture, their situation will degenerate further.
The famous American thinker Henry David Thoreau in his famous essay titled “Civil Disobedience” wrote, “I ask for, not at once no government, but at once a better government. Let every man make known what kind of government would command his respect, and that will be one step towards obtaining it.” The time has come for we, the people to unequivocally convey the forceful message that we want development minus corruption and there is no place for caste, communal and such other divisive forces in politics and in our lives any more.
(Vijay Shankar Pandey is former Secretary Government of India)
