05-28-2006, 06:24 PM
http://www.indianexpress.com/sunday/story/5301.html
How ironic that the BBC should be running a series called Giants, comparing India and China, at the very moment that our government is making it clear that it will ensure that India is forced back into its earlier pygmy days. How ironic that India should have begun this year by so overwhelming the World Economic Forumâs annual meeting in Davos that people still talk of the âIndia Everywhereâ campaign as one of the most successful ever. <b>By the time Sonia Gandhi, Manmohan Singh and their Marxist allies have finished with us we will look back on that campaign with nostalgia because it is as if they are conspiring to ensure that we regain the depths of backwardness in which we dwelled in those dark socialist days. </b><b>A whole new meaning will attach to the acronym OBC when we go back to being just that other backward country.
</b>
Ask anyone what India needs from its government and the answer is: infrastructure. From the shining chambers of corporate Mumbai to the poorest mud hut villages of rural India I meet people daily who spell out Indiaâs needs in almost the same words. Bijli, pani, sadak, of course, but also schools, colleges, sanitation, healthcare and housing. Without these things we will continue with the shaming situation of having more than 30 per cent of our people living in conditions so bad that animals in developed countries live better.
Ostensibly it is to help the wretched and the educationally backward that the Government gives us 27 per cent OBC reservation, the tribal rights Bill and the Employment Guarantee Scheme. But look more closely at these efforts and you realise that when implemented they will achieve for India universal backwardness.
We should know this considering that we spent our first 40 years of Independence distributing poverty, but we seem doomed to be ruled by people who do not learn from history.
Examine with me for a moment the ââsocial justiceââ measures that the Sonia-Manmohan government has put in place. The Employment Guarantee Scheme that when implemented fully will cost more than Rs 40,000 crore (the same as Atal Behari Vajpayeeâs highway programme) seeks to guarantee 100 days of employment a year. Please go and meet an Indian family who lives on a hundred days of employment a year and you will find that they can afford to give the smallest of their children only one meal of watery gruel a day. When the children begin to die they are rushed to the nearest hospital where the government arranges, under another misguided government scheme, for the starving child to be given Rs 40 a day for its nourishment. It survives and goes home to start starving again. Instead, if the money were spent on roads in our more backward districts people would have more than 100 days of work building them and would be empowered because roads provide access to the 21st century.
On OBC reservations the government now plans to implement the 27 per cent quota as well as increase the number of seats for those who achieve higher learning for reasons other than caste. <b>This is an impossible thing to achieve because teachers and colleges do not just sprout out of the ground at the waving of a magic wand, but we will be spending at least another Rs 10,000 crore on trying to achieve this educational form of social justice. Please keep in mind, will you, that many of the quotas reserved for Scheduled Castes and Tribes go unfilled because the schools they attend are so bad that the dropout rate before high school is more than 70 per cent. Is this social justice or a sham?</b>
No sooner have we digested this than we will be hit with the Bill that will give Adivasis the right to cultivate and occupy forest land. This will mean the end of our forests because in Adivasi areas governance is so lax that when the timber mafias move in there will be nobody to stop them. Please remember that a minister in the Maharashtra government is currently in jail for allowing timber merchants to function on the edge of a sanctuary.
By the time this government is done with its social justice measures, India will be not just backward but a wasteland. After the revelations in the Mitrokhin Archive II, published last year, we need to wonder seriously if what we are not seeing is the return of the ââforeign handââ. In this book the former KGB spymaster reveals how the KGB duped Indira Gandhi into believing that the CIA was the ââforeign handââ. In fact it was always the KGB. Mitrokhin reveals that many prominent ministers in Mrs Gandhiâs government and nearly all our Marxists were owned by the KGB. Is something similar happening again?
How ironic that the BBC should be running a series called Giants, comparing India and China, at the very moment that our government is making it clear that it will ensure that India is forced back into its earlier pygmy days. How ironic that India should have begun this year by so overwhelming the World Economic Forumâs annual meeting in Davos that people still talk of the âIndia Everywhereâ campaign as one of the most successful ever. <b>By the time Sonia Gandhi, Manmohan Singh and their Marxist allies have finished with us we will look back on that campaign with nostalgia because it is as if they are conspiring to ensure that we regain the depths of backwardness in which we dwelled in those dark socialist days. </b><b>A whole new meaning will attach to the acronym OBC when we go back to being just that other backward country.
</b>
Ask anyone what India needs from its government and the answer is: infrastructure. From the shining chambers of corporate Mumbai to the poorest mud hut villages of rural India I meet people daily who spell out Indiaâs needs in almost the same words. Bijli, pani, sadak, of course, but also schools, colleges, sanitation, healthcare and housing. Without these things we will continue with the shaming situation of having more than 30 per cent of our people living in conditions so bad that animals in developed countries live better.
Ostensibly it is to help the wretched and the educationally backward that the Government gives us 27 per cent OBC reservation, the tribal rights Bill and the Employment Guarantee Scheme. But look more closely at these efforts and you realise that when implemented they will achieve for India universal backwardness.
We should know this considering that we spent our first 40 years of Independence distributing poverty, but we seem doomed to be ruled by people who do not learn from history.
Examine with me for a moment the ââsocial justiceââ measures that the Sonia-Manmohan government has put in place. The Employment Guarantee Scheme that when implemented fully will cost more than Rs 40,000 crore (the same as Atal Behari Vajpayeeâs highway programme) seeks to guarantee 100 days of employment a year. Please go and meet an Indian family who lives on a hundred days of employment a year and you will find that they can afford to give the smallest of their children only one meal of watery gruel a day. When the children begin to die they are rushed to the nearest hospital where the government arranges, under another misguided government scheme, for the starving child to be given Rs 40 a day for its nourishment. It survives and goes home to start starving again. Instead, if the money were spent on roads in our more backward districts people would have more than 100 days of work building them and would be empowered because roads provide access to the 21st century.
On OBC reservations the government now plans to implement the 27 per cent quota as well as increase the number of seats for those who achieve higher learning for reasons other than caste. <b>This is an impossible thing to achieve because teachers and colleges do not just sprout out of the ground at the waving of a magic wand, but we will be spending at least another Rs 10,000 crore on trying to achieve this educational form of social justice. Please keep in mind, will you, that many of the quotas reserved for Scheduled Castes and Tribes go unfilled because the schools they attend are so bad that the dropout rate before high school is more than 70 per cent. Is this social justice or a sham?</b>
No sooner have we digested this than we will be hit with the Bill that will give Adivasis the right to cultivate and occupy forest land. This will mean the end of our forests because in Adivasi areas governance is so lax that when the timber mafias move in there will be nobody to stop them. Please remember that a minister in the Maharashtra government is currently in jail for allowing timber merchants to function on the edge of a sanctuary.
By the time this government is done with its social justice measures, India will be not just backward but a wasteland. After the revelations in the Mitrokhin Archive II, published last year, we need to wonder seriously if what we are not seeing is the return of the ââforeign handââ. In this book the former KGB spymaster reveals how the KGB duped Indira Gandhi into believing that the CIA was the ââforeign handââ. In fact it was always the KGB. Mitrokhin reveals that many prominent ministers in Mrs Gandhiâs government and nearly all our Marxists were owned by the KGB. Is something similar happening again?