The 2009 edition of the elections to Maharashtra Legislative Assembly, where 288 seats are up for grabs, promises to be different. There are many interesting facets to ensure that. The main thing is that each of the major players is going into the fray with troubles of their own.
Once in power, status and style matter and in this the politicians are not to be found wanting. Not at all, they like to flaunt it.
The wisdom lies in shifting the investments to rest of Mumbai, and restrict the Mumbai-centric investments to fill the gaps, catch up with the graph and not for the future. The investment in Mumbai later should be only towards maintenance.
A concerted bid to seek the government's total and unremitting attention to solving for ever the drinking water problem has never been seen though even now, in some parts of the country, people have begun to protect their wells using armed guards.
Scandals and civic bodies, given the official venality, political corruption and builder's avarice, are not far apart.
Closing schools can take away the children from peer contact. But what about the parents who commute in overcrowded crowded trains, who may bring the infection home? Cinema halls may be closed for a few days -- strangely, the suggestion is a week's break for schools and just three days for the theatres! -- but what about the all pervasive crowds across the city? Perhaps the only way is to shut down entire cities where the flu has taken a grip. Nothing else makes sense.
I want the Indians to be angry and demand their right. It calls for simple assertion, and willingness to stay the ground and defeat the insouciance of the guy on the other side by showing that you have patience to deal with him, not cash to grease his palm.
I would like to judge the state -- here the civic body is also to be treated as a proxy to the state -- on two yardsticks. One is the benign approach to the issue of slums and their proliferation, not because it is a humane way of civic governance but because of the mendacious greed of its politicians and officials who become rich because of the slums. The second is the pretence of providing services to the slum populations.
Some officials, I am told, do not even have an email address and for them, papers placed on a cardboard file and wrapped in the horizontal four-inch flaps and a thread are quite the official thing. An email which demands quick attention can stare him/her in the face unlike a file that can pile up with others on some remote shelf in the office, sometimes almost forgotten.
Do the thought leaders and policy makers (and presumed enforcers) have the courage to decide which way to go? I do not think they have. But the farce should end one day.
Outcomes alone matter. It is the outcomes that are important to know if the money was spent wisely and efficiently and this is what neither the CAG nor MOSPI do not seem to do very well though the MOSPI does not have a wider mandate to poke anywhere like the CAG could do.
Little wonder, the Human Rights Watch eloquently said in that report cited earlier that "Although prison systems everywhere are marked by inertia, few can match India's in immutability of practice."
One gets the impression that most of the skywalks that are coming up in Mumbai are tethered in the philosophy that if you cannot provide a safe passage for the pedestrians on the cluttered sidewalks, provide a skywalk. It costs much more, renders the skyscape uglier but then the pedestrian deserves a new uplifting experience. So, take him skywards.
Earlier, it was blatant lies that were spoken and absurd things said and it got into the media, without comment. Then came the era of spin doctors holding forth and seeking to dominate public debate, giving stuff the kind of twists they chose for the public to lap up. Politics is limited to statements.
And we call this devolution of powers, and on paper exult that we have local self governments while what is happening is that a whole new mafia of officialdom and politicians with nexus to every unholy aspect of civilised life flourishing.
So if politics drove, or good politics, I must say, drove Nitish Kumar to the issue of bijli, pani and sadak so be it for that is the least that is needed to be done before talking of other issues.
So there are schools, swanky, modern, well-equipped -- though without a full-time doctor in attendance -- and expensive, the fees often being multiple times the earnings of any middle-class family. And there are schools which are mere shells of the concept where nothing is done, not even providing simple, basic, even ordinary education.
Being beaten up in police custody is more common than being killed by police in what they call encounters which are almost invariably staged. And policing, we are told, is always like that. It ought not to be. That fear is what we, as claims to be a part of the civilised world, need to take note of. That is a common man's biggest crisis when dealing with the police and policemen.
If Pramod Mahajan were to be alive today, the Bharatiya Janata Party would have shed the long-time ally Shiv Sena and gone it alone in Maharashtra.
People come to Mumbai because they can't find jobs in their state that can offer even minimum sustenance. People leave what passes off as their home and hearth and arrive, near destitute but with hope in their dim eyes, in big cities, not just Mumbai, says Mahesh Vijapurkar
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