The best way to know the self is feeling oneself at the moments of reckoning. The feeling of being alone, just with your senses, may lead you to think more consciously. More and more of such moments may sensitize ‘you towards you’, towards others. We become regular with introspection and retrospection. We get ‘the’ gradual connect to the higher self we may name Spirituality or God or just a Humane Conscious. We tend to get a rhythm again in life. We need to learn the art of being lonely in crowd while being part of the crowd. A multitude of loneliness in mosaic of relations! One needs to feel it severally, with conscience, before making it a way of life. One needs to live several such lonely moments. One needs to live severallyalone.

Saturday 3 November 2012

EVOLUTION OF RTI ACT AND LOKPAL BILL AND EVOLUTION OF POLITICAL CORRUPTION IN INDIA (I)

Evolution of two Acts, RTI and Lokpal, tells us the evolution of the political corruption in India. Like the struggle for these pro-public Acts, decades old, political corruption in India has always been a reality since the independence.

As the time moved on, consumerism increased. Commercial interests became paramount and started dictating the geopolitical stakes. Saturation of markets forced the developed world economy to look further for big markets. The global policymaking intended to pressurize the developing countries that were ready stocks to serve as the big markets. Among others, China and India were the natural options owing to their huge population stacks.



Forced by their internal conflicts and the external pressure, China and India including others adopted liberal policies and opened up their economies. Like others, India, too, has seen the big gains since. Initially, the country served as a market. But now it is a manufacturing hub with a thriving knowledge economy based on the services sector.

The country has seen rapid growth in economic parameters since the opening up of the economy in 1991 (the subsequent growth in the social indicators has been and is a matter of concern – and corruption of the ruling class is the major culprit behind this dent). Inflow of the foreign capital has been regularly on the rise. Multinationals are coming to India. Indian companies are going transnational.

There has been flurry of activity on the policy front owing to these developments. And these policies are framed by the politicians in consultation (collusion should be a better term owing to the widespread misuse of them) with the senior bureaucrats under intense lobbying by the industrialists.

Though the growth began in 1991, we can say till 2000, it was the foundation period given the explosion some sectors saw in the post-2000 period; the sectors that have created new avenues of wealth generation. Spectacular growth in telecom and the services sector including the ITES led to the creation of huge chunks of jobs in metros and big cities. That forced migration of multitudes. That subsequently led to the related infrastructure boom. Land prices increased astronomically. Increased migration and demand of more investment created an atmosphere to develop a robust public infrastructure investing heavily (unaccountably in this case) in projects like highways, civic amenities and power generating plans.

All these were policy issues. Policymakers were to decide on telecom policies. Policymakers were to define the land categories to satiate the demand created by the boom. Policymakers were to chose (tender process has been a big sham) whom to award the contracts of the public infrastructure spends.

The nexus (politician + industrialist + bureaucrat) saw a big opportunity and started milking the cow. The rapid explosion in the sectors mentioned above scaled up the magnitude of their scams manifold.

Now when we go back to the trajectory of the RTI Act and the proposed Lokpal Act, we see some basic differences based on the common thread of the corruption of the ruling elite.

To continue.. 

©/IPR: Santosh Chaubey - http://severallyalone.blogspot.com