Sunday, October 23, 2011

Missed opportunities for national development

1) Roads: We have mastered the art of making "perfect roads"; great on paper and absolutely pathetic in execution. Technically, the cost of road construction (where prices are dictated by the lowest tender) are as:

a) Cost of land acquistion by the Government; usually palming off the peasants by intimidation, below market cost and illegal detentions.

b) The public money used to award contracts and tenders inclusive of the cost of kickbacks feeding from the lowly peon to the corporator and the "party funds".

c) Finally, the "inferior quality material" used by "engineers and contractors" and exploitation of the poor labor.

2) Railways: Huge behemoth. Multiple proliferating unions feeding on like leeches to the public funds. In 50 plus years has not been able to channelize the freight and passenger fares. The maximum speed (in certain stretches) is 160 kmph (for India's fastest trains) and is near bankruptcy because it has been allowed to slowly rot away under populism.

3) Refer to point number 1 for why railways are allowed to bleed dry. The Government has come up with an ingenious way of "Build Operate and Transfer model" where a private contractor is allowed to "collect toll" till 30+ years (by the time, the old files would have rotted away). There is double taxation; what you have paid in your road taxes and other "infrastructure cess" on petrol/diesel, you pay again while passing through these toll barriers. Brilliant.

4) No waterways: What could have been used to interlink the national rivers of India to develop indigenous waterways has been allowed to squander away. By creating a huge bogus claim of an "environmental disaster". No one knows the impact because it has not been allowed to develop. Now precious funds are being withered away to import Oil and pay the masters for their opulent life styles in Saudi and Middle East.

Is it even surprising that all of this spawns from the "Nehruvian model of development"? Or the huge socialist structures that have been unleashed on us by ensuring perpetual slavery to the Government of India?

Of course, no one argues about it because it has become our way of life here.