Wake up, dear fellow countrymen!

It is quite fashionable to blame the government for all the imagined ills plaguing the country. In doing so we tend to completely overlook the altruistic measures taken by the government for boosting the economy. Altruistic because in doing so the government has risked its own credibility and image. Yet it persists in doing the right things, ingratitude of the public notwithstanding. I would like to illustrate this with some very concrete examples.


We cry ourselves hoarse about the unsteady and erratic power supply and long power outages. But we fail to see the abundant availability of all kind of gadgets for overcoming these annoyances. These include voltage stabilizers, inverters, generators etc: Gadgets, unknown to denizens of more developed economies. Have we ever given a thought to the employment that the manufacture and maintenance of these gadgets generate? And we must not forget that this not achieved by understaffing the power corporations. It is quite to the contrary. It is common knowledge that these corporations err on the side of overstaffing. Erring may not be the right expression because it is this overstaffing that leads to the inefficiencies and incompetencies that stimulate industrial growth by creating demand for power conditioners at retail level. I do trust that this shows the power boards and corporations in better light. Can you see that the apparent bad governance in power boards is in fact deliberate and prompted by the noble objective of promoting industrial growth and employment?


Take the case of another essential item - water. We have heard of Coca-cola’s frank admission in USA that the packaged water marketed by them is plain tap water. And it is quite okay as the tap water there is absolutely potable and guaranteed to be so. (Though, this being the case, one fails to understand the need for purchasing packaged water unless it is purchased by the homeless only.) Back home here tap water carries no assurances of potability and many a time it has positive visual evidence of not being so. Having learnt our lessons in the previous example let us refrain from calling names and look at the positive side instead. Yes, this too has spawned an industry, the water purifier industry. And let us not forget the packaged water industry. We do hope that they do not follow the US practice of packaging tap water itself.


Yet another example is apparent lack of law and order. This too is a studied and deliberate act aimed at promoting private security agencies that provide employment to ex-servicemen in large numbers. What could be more patriotic than this?


Look at our primary education. Despite huge outlays and employment of an army of well-paid primary teachers, primary education remains the butt of jokes. We know that even the BPL guys earning INR 32 per day or less hardly display any preference for these public (government) institutions for their progeny. This deliberate mess painstakingly created by governments and its pay-happy teachers has again been done with the sole objective of promoting schools in the private sector. What is difficult to understand is the insistence of these private schools on calling themselves public schools! These schools also provide employment to a large number of educated unemployed.


What has been said for education applies equally to the health sector. This has helped a large number of health care businesses to come up and India now figures as a medical tourism destination for people from developed economies. This would perhaps have never happened if the public health care system left little incentive for private players in this sphere by working all too well.


This penchant for promoting employment has been imbibed by each and every department of all governments - central, state and local, especially those supposed to directly interface with the public. They encourage enterprising people to come forward and facilitate this interfacing by deliberately making themselves a little too difficult to approach directly and making procedures a wee bit too difficult to be correctly understood by the public directly.


The public is not merely deluded about the real motives behind apparent shortcomings and inefficiencies in governance. They are equally deluded about the real reasons behind politicians occasionally dipping their fingers in the Consolidated Fund of India. The do it with a view to provide capital to industries, their own or those of deserving entrepreneurs. This again generates employment and improves general well-being. And after putting in all this hard and thankless work for an ungrateful public, they do need an occasional break. So what is wrong if they set aside some funds at well-known tourist destinations like Switzerland?


Wake up dear fellow countrymen and stop quibbling over bad governance, corruption etc. Thank your leaders for their hard work and vision and give credit where it is due.