“The gap in India has always been between the promise and the execution”:- RBI governor Raghuram Rajan.
The year started with a flurry of wishes and hopes and resolutions as usual. And yet, even before the first month of the year has completed, the turn of events have made everybody believe that the wishes were what they will always be- mere wishes. The present developments in the state- almost every single one of them regretfully negative- have once again posed as an ominous dark cloud over the state, threatening to wash away the hopes and with it any feeble signs of the fickle sense of stability and peace that has been so hard to come by in a deluge. Reports of stalled projects turning out to be white elephants have cropped up with alarming regularity, and as if these regularly occurring “phenomena” is not enough to grab the attention of the slumbering and scheming state government, the aftermath of the recent earthquake have opened up more than a few cracks and is threatening to tumble the government off its highly prized and exorbitantly procured pedestal. The tragedy, however, is not as much about the failure to implement the various projects and schemes in a proper manner as it is about the failure of the state government to acknowledge and admit the lapses and blunders as a matter of fact. What is still happening on the contrary is that most of the ministers and bureaucrats, acting as cheerleaders for the state government could not be less bothered with the details and technical minutiae- all that matters to them is that their positions and political clouts are still not on the wane.
While it might be argued by various sympathizers with varied vested interests in the survivability of the present government that the real hurdle to the implementation of various public development activities in the state is the unstable social and political atmosphere, the fact remains that the very social tensions and uncertainties being faced by the public at present is the deliberate and planned product of the system which stands to benefit and gain from all the chaos and confusions that has so far marked our volatile society. That a stable society free of disturbances and tensions will definitely turn to the inadequacies and inefficiencies of those at the helm of affairs of the state is a foregone conclusion. It is therefore a logical extension that to mask the discrepancies and misappropriations in governance and administrations, there has to be as much distractions and diversions so that the attention of the public does not remain fixed on any one aspect, or that their concerns are not shared effectively. Case in point: why is the state government hell bent on spending more on the construction of a temporary market shed in the middle of the most congested stretch in such a hurry when, even after the visiting experts on earthquake declared that the damaged market sheds can be repaired, have kept the sheds shielded with no evidence of repairing activities even weeks after the expert pronouncement?
