By – Amar Yumnam
Since I am free as I am not subject to any instruction from Delhi, let me start straight with Governance and its functioning. To avoid questioning by the government connects, let me just quote Ali Farazmand of Florida University: “Some of the most commonly known and often used concepts of governance or government during the last two decades or so are the following: good governance, entrepreneurial government, competitive government, market-like governance, economic governance, social and political governance, enabling governance, participatory governance, regulatory governance, interventionist governance or government, steering government versus rowing government, and the like. A key characteristic of all these concepts is a claim to rejecting the traditional forms of authoritarian, bureaucratic government with unilateral decision making and implementation. These… present “new” ways of thinking, governing, and administration, with new philosophies and new approaches that broaden citizen involvements and their feedbacks, and bring into the playing field the civil society and nongovernmental organizations.” Now this implies that governance should be based on policies, which is different from policing. Policy is autonomous while police is not; policy guides, police follows. The governments in both Manipur and the Centre seem to construe policy as just exercise of political and administrative power and to conveniently utilise as per whims. Adrian Kay is very clear on this by stating that policy formulating and implementing agents “are not reducible to individual level agents or elements in the policy process. Examples of … policy institutions are budget rules, policy networks, standard operating procedures in government departments, and agencies. Most importantly in terms of understanding policy development, past policy decisions are institutions in terms of current policy decisions: they act as structures that can limit or shape current policy options. Institutionalism is an important way of thinking about policy legacies, how policies accumulate and gradually institutionalize. The ambition to understand how policy histories affect policy in the present is what drives … dynamic policy analysis..”
All these imply that people in the government cannot afford to be whimsical in functioning. Two days before the worst imaginable fiasco, a person in a very responsible and respectable position used the term ‘Cockroach’ while referring to the behaviour of youths of the country very adversely affected by the socio-economic scenario. Now an Indian boy in Boston (though I have lived in Los Angeles at the University of Southern California for a fairly long time, I don’t know where this city is as I have no instruction from Delhi to spell it out) freshly graduated from the university there has absolutely capitalised on the term to make the context of Indian youths known by the world in a deeper way. Two days later the NEET thing happened leading to even suicides by the induced frustration. Even now the government does not know how to go about it. Examination and Test related matters should be absolutely confidential. Instead, the government has already started leaking out by putting to the public how security forces would be used and how question papers would be transported. The NEET fiasco was sooner “enriched” by another relating to the most important examination, Class XII, in a student’s career. Here the Examiners did not know how to evaluate and the digitation was let loose with even answer scripts unexamined. Further, we are allowing the 40% death of youths by non-communicable diseases.
Another positive thing is about Laishram Ronaldo who has “found” a new Loktak in the sky. Though the scientists around the world are excited and might have started new research work, I am not celebrating as no direction has come. Same in Delhi, as the person is from the South East Asian part with a facial difference.
Now let me come to the economy and governance of it; I don’t need directions here. The 1991 Economic Reforms of Manmohan Singh had three significant impacts: I. Relating business with the market; II. Unprecedented emergence of new corporate investment; and III. Rise in foreign investment. This has been completely reversed by the new government by forcing everything to connect with the government – Business with the Government, not with the market; Teachers with the government, not with the students; Doctors with the Government, not with patients and so on. Now the money we spend on import of raw materials is higher than the money we earn from exports. With investment falling and poverty rising, today Bangladesh has a per capita income higher than India. There is absolute confusion on how to manage the economy. The newly constituted Committee on Demography also has no Demographers and Anthropologists related to the issues for examination. The fun is enough.