India 2020 - wishful thinking
All of us have our own pet peeves about India. Its easy to crib. What if we can make a random list of TO DO items for the nation?
Assume you had the backing of the Union cabinet, State cabinet and the Kitchen cabinet, what can you do to make India better? Try to keep it economically feasible and realistic as much as possible. Its a good exercise 
- Triple the number of courts, recruit more judges to finish of the backlog of cases. Justice delayed is justice denied. A case MUST be settled within five years. The lawyer and the judge will be kicked out of their jobs otherwise. The money spent is worth the cause.
- Provide free compulsory school education to all at any cost. Bring reservation for rural candidates. Remove reservation for those in urban areas. Another way to tackle reservation is to build more schools and colleges. Triple the number of agricultural, arts and science, engineering and medical colleges. Money spent on education is well spent too. We have a clear ROI on education. Ask any middle class person on the importance of education. Allow foreign universities in India so that the rich and the wealthy can go and learn there.
- Restrict the proliferation of organized religious schools and outfits of all religion.
- Let Railways complete the double track and electrification of routes where people pay for their tickets, not where the Railway Mminister comes from. Have a target for expanding the rail network across the country to all towns above 50,000 in population. It is bad to see towns like Dharapuram go without rail network even after 61 years of independence. I do not mind paying a hundred rupees extra on my tickets to achieve this.
- Make all our national highway and state highways multi-lane highways. We can pay more tolls.
- We lose more people in accidents than to major diseases. Habitual traffic rules offenders should not be allowed to vote. Their passports should be revoked.
- Allow corporates to run public transport, not necessarily buses, but definitely mini buses, vans etc. We need more efficient public transport.
- Begin inter-linking of rivers and lakes at district level and state levels. Why expect to connect Krishna and Cauvery if we cannot connect Thamiraparani and Cauvery? Maybe we should enable water to be pushed To and Fro.
- Encourage people to have an authorized ’side business’ except the government employees. The income from second job/business can be declared tax free. Hopefully this reduces the time spent before TV watching ‘Maanada mayilaada’ and ‘Arasi’.
- Make it compulsory to have master plans for all towns with a population of fifty thousand reviewable every five years. The same should be available to the locals on demand.
- Bring a ceiling to the number of people who can live in a metro. There is no perumai in having a metro with crores of people. Bar new developments within a defined area in the cities. For e.g No new building/development should be allowed within Chennai / Mumbai city limits. We take care to reign in inflation, but have no such concern to reign in people aggregating in a small place all through the year for centuries.
- Make elections more frequent - once in three years.
- Ensure inflation adjusted wages for labourers. A blue collar worker should be able to sustain a decent standard of living. The middle class Indian wants his software engineer son get a hike every year but insists on paying the same amount to his servant maid, auto guy etc.
- Bring a common coordinated network among the intelligence agencies. Acts of terror occurs in this country just because RAW was too busy to inform the local police and vice versa.
- Pay as much salary for a police man as we do for a trainee software engineer.
- Remove subsidies for petrol and gas for those in the cities. Make it available to only those who live in tier 2-3 towns and villages. People in the cities - either they can afford to pay seventy five bucks per litre or they can opt to move to smaller towns where fuel consumption will also be less. It takes lot of oil subsidy to drive from Maraimalai Nagar to Navalur in a car everyday.
- I think there are few ways to reduce corruption in government offices
a) automate, computerize the process as much as possible, which would reduce human discretion
b) increase the number and salaries of the officers and decentralize their powers.
So long as the CMDA, with a handful of officers is the only authority to grant approval to buildings in the whole of Chennai, we are bound to have corruption.
- Only about 10% of India’s work force are employed in the organized sector. While the rest 90% eke out a living on their own. How do we make their lives better? Maybe microcredit will really help these people escape the clutches of money lenders. I don’t know much on this.
- Encourage doctors to build more clinics, but discourage corporatization of hospitals. Hospitals should not be allowed to operate as a company and declare profits and dividends to share holders.
- Restrict our current active sports persons from appearing in Ads. If they do, let 50% of what they earn trough commericals go for sports development fund. Let the fund be administered by a non political, non bureaucratic body of ex athetes who have won medals for the country in Asian games and Olympics.
PS: It was kinda difficult to jot down a twenty point agenda. Its easier to crib than to write something like this. And I bet its easier to write than to implement. But I still encourage people to try this as a tag and see what they can come up with.
October 16th, 2008 at 3:24 am
PK, Citizen II eduthudalaam.
October 16th, 2008 at 3:24 am
I meant the movie Citizen Part II
October 16th, 2008 at 4:38 am
SM
The idea is, assuming you have all the powers in the world, it still takes some effort to come up with a policy framework to develop this nation…
This is by no means perfect or even close to good… but the more you think on these lines, the better we get…
October 16th, 2008 at 8:28 am
I take exception to your stand on reservations and religion. Reservations — I am firmly against it whether its rural/urban, caste-based, community-based, religion-based. The cause of the malaise is elsewhere. 30 years of reservation haven’t gotten us anywhere. #2 — the more religion disappears from people’s lives, the more lawless the nation will become. This is esp. true for India where the fear of god is the only thing that keeps things under control.
October 16th, 2008 at 9:53 am
Subha
The perfect way to bring a level playing field in education would’ve been mentoring and close interaction without any reference to a person’s community, caste…. apparently this does not happen in small towns and rural areas.
Four days back, i was fixing my chappal in my native place… The guy who fixed it was talking to a friend about a wedding he did not go… the reason he gave for not attending was ‘jaadhi vidyasam parpanga’.. he did not say to me.. it was a casual remark …. but thats the reality.
If he does not expect fair treatment in a wedding, how is he going to interact with the rest of the population and gain knowledge and information?
I’ve had views similar to yours sometime back. I am not so sure anymore.
I know about people from Bihar who had cleared IIT-JEE… but those seem to be exceptions rather than the rule.. Even there the students had active mentoring…
I’ve heard this argument about the number of years it has been in force.
Its not as if all other initiatives had progressed at desired pace in India.
Unrelated note:
Check out the Wiki for Chennai MRTS. It had taken 24 years to build a tardy, incomplete MRTS for a city.
So that’s a taste of how fast and effective things work.
The person should’ve been at least 50. I don’t think his son or daughter could compete with my cousin who is in Bangalore. Exceptions are not the norms.
Regarding Religion,
Religious conversions and terror do get sanctity and support from religious schools.
Though it is true that religion especially Hinduism and Buddhism keeps the masses dormant, peaceful in India.
I am not against religion. But I am against according it a level higher than ordinary folks and keeping it closer to the powers that be.
Religious institutions has political dimensions IMHO.
Indian history do have examples where religious heads had been close to the rulers who had committed grave atrocities with the full sanction of these religious heads.
Philosophy, literature, spirituality etc are a different ball game.
Like what Indira Parthasarathy says in Vedapurathu Vyabarigal, religion, politics, cinema.. its all the same here.