It is time for the Prime Minister to stop talking about ‘Viksit Bharat’. It has, of late, started sounding like he is making a joke in bad taste. Last week, he invited some of our biggest industrialists for a meeting in Vigyan Bhawan and told them that he wanted them to play a role in helping India become a developed country, ‘Viksit Bharat’. He asked for their support for his new scheme to solve our unemployment problem. He urged them to use their CSR (corporate social responsibility) funds to hire and train ‘interns’ for a year. His government will give those who join this scheme a small monthly tip as an incentive.
As I listened to Narendra Modi, I wondered if in some private moment later he might notice the irony of what he is asking of those who run our most successful companies. These are people who have done their duty to India by building world-class companies despite the sad truth that it has not become any easier to do business since Modi became prime minister than it was before. Socialist habits are rooted so deeply in the mindset of our high officials that they find it impossible to give businessmen the freedom they need to continue building bigger and better.
Socialism is more than an ideology in our dear Bharat Mata. It is a means of extorting vast sums of money from those who spend years of blood, sweat and tears building world-class institutions. So shameless are our officials (elected and unelected) that they do not allow fine private hospitals and colleges to be built without taking their cut. It is not Indian industrialists who have failed India. It is those who are responsible for governing this country who have not done their jobs. They care more for making money than for ‘Viksit Bharat’.
There have been many examples of failed governance in recent days. I want to draw your attention only to the most heartbreaking ones. Wayanad and the devastation we have seen there comes first to mind. It is being written off as a natural disaster but is that really all it was? When unplanned construction was happening in precarious terrain was the government of Kerala asleep? The Home Minister said, after hundreds had died, that his office had alerted the state government in advance and that it did nothing. This sounds like just politics.
Soon after the Wayanad disaster came news of floods in Uttarakhand. Those images you would have seen of towns and temples drowning in muddy rivers are an annual sight in the rainy season. These floods happen because unrestrained construction has been allowed in hills so fragile that they can no longer survive. Every year, whole towns collapse and yet as soon as the rains go away, we go back to doing nothing at all to find lasting solutions. Why? Short answer: bad governance.
In Delhi, who is responsible for stormwater drains becoming so clogged this year that vast sections of the city drowned in filthy water? The Chief Minister is in jail, so the responsibility falls upon the central government since the Lieutenant Governor functions directly under the Home Minister. If the capital of India cannot build a drainage system that works, why should we expect more lower down the line?
Indian small towns look as if they have grown organically out of garbage dumps. There is not the smallest sign of municipal governance or urban planning. The situation in villages is worse. Before writing this piece, it happens that I drove through a long stretch of rural India in one of our ‘Viksit’ states. The roads were so bad that driving on them was dangerous. Narrow, flooded village streets had turned into open drains.
Another recent example of bad governance comes to mind. The tragic, needless death of three students who were studying in the basement of a coaching centre in Delhi. Once they were dead, we found that there should not have been a library in that basement. Once they were dead, we found that they are forced to live in tiny, filthy, airless cells and that their food is cooked in disgusting rooftop kitchens. I discovered these distressing details in an excellent story on NDTV’s Hindi channel, and it shamed me that these students were paying exorbitant rents to live in such awful conditions. The irony is that they are studying to become civil servants. They would not need to live in such conditions if the Delhi government had built clean, affordable student hostels.
One more reason why the words ‘Viksit Bharat’ sound like a joke came from the Finance Minister. In her Budget speech, she said that we should be proud that our gracious Prime Minister is providing more than 80 crore Indians with free foodgrain every month. No Madame, we should be ashamed that this is necessary. It comes as definite proof that we are a very long way from becoming a developed country.
It is a good dream to dream, but it will not become reality until those who govern this country recognize that it is because of the failure to do their job that India continues to resemble a country that has barely emerged from desperate poverty. The accumulated failures of bad governance cannot be blamed on Narendra Modi but he can be blamed for not doing enough to bring the promised ‘parivartan’.
