It is amazing that a few rains come and ‘smart cities’ convert into ‘a city of lakes.’ Dengue and other illnesses make a vicious return even as the hospitals become places of intense chaos. Potholes, overflowing drains, stinking garbage, poor water supply, improper medical services are not an isolated phenomenon restricted to one state or region but is generally the story of our country. Irrespective of which political party comes to rule at any level, it is a sad fact that the political and bureaucratic machinery of the country gets low marks after independence for public services. Despite holding enormous power, even today the citizens do not have standard amenities by way of public infrastructure: roads, schools, hospitals, sanitation, and water management to name a few. We need to search hard for a five-kilometre stretch of road without potholes anyplace in the country. Efficiency and quality are still in the private sector of the country as the political-bureaucratic machinery equates only to corruption, inefficiency, and incompetence. This is not to deny the many brilliant politicians, bureaucrats, and public officials but they have always been individuals as the system stays intact.
Thomas DiLorenzo (The Problem with Socialism) says that every capitalistic and democratic society has some government owned monopolies like the post-office, railways, electricity, banks, police, firefighting, garbage collection, and so on. Experience and the numbers clearly indicate that they are always running in a loss. The ‘Bureaucratic Rule of Two’ holds that the ‘unit cost of government service will be on average twice as high as a comparable service offered in the competitive private sector.’ Profits, losses, and deliverance of quality manages the private sector. No such pressure exists for the government agencies which work solely on budgets and taxations coming from the people. In fact, the worse a government performs, the more it can claim from the budget. Indian citizens flock to private schools despite better salaries to the teachers in the government schools. What do we make of this? Ironically, the government employees always have a higher salary on average than their private counterparts despite the poorer services.
Yet the governments keep throttling the private bodies by innumerable ‘quality controls’ and even passing moral judgements when their own mirrors do not show a very pleasant face. Every single government office and every single law is an opportunity to make money over and above the salaries. The roads are pathetic and nothing exists like a proper traffic control in most places. There are no provisions for parking in most towns and cities but the traffic police are very enthusiastic about taking photographs of all ‘illegally’ parked vehicles and collect money from the e-challans which they now issue with irritating regularity. The best solution would be to devise vehicles which can float in air to prevent the irregular parking on the roads. Why airlines only and a few industries? There is a case to privatise many of the government bodies and departments to help and save the citizens of the country from the iron grip of the babus and the political leaders.
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RANDOM MUSINGS 