There is a huge credibility gap for the government
Manmohan Singh government is now in an unsustainable dilemma

The government is there now for quite a time and it hasn’t started any of its promises into real action. No programme had captured the imagination of the people so far. The poor, the farmers, the minorities or the unemployed have any hope that their lot will improve thanks to a new government.
Why this disillusionment?
There are news behind the news these days. I myself started searching for additional newspapers to wet my thirst for authentic information. To understand the inexplicable actions and events and developments in Delhi. The visiting Pakistan Prime Minister seeks an audience with 10, Janpath and he is disappointed. He seeks out Vajpayee in retirement and shares his confidences. The PM is seem as quite politically unimportant?

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Life after the Nobel Prize
Or, an afternoon at Santiniketan!

Why this title! The other day I was speaking to my long-time friend in Santiniketan. What can you do when you are caught up in a remote village where you don’t have Internet Broadband connectivity. Accustomed to live in hightech Bangalore where latest technological gadgets are our daily lifestyle, a lone telephone wire in a remote village could be sometimes a nightmare!
The only laptop was engaged and the Internet access through the telephone was taking all the time. So, when a chance came, I used the phone to converse with my long time Santiniketan lady friend! Oh, it was such a pleasant long distance conversation one fine afternoon!

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One of the Oxford’s enduring institutions is the Oxford Union. It had produced leaders who went on to build an Empire, fight the World Wars, establish international standards in all walks of life. Here is how I was able to fulfill my life’s ambition of participating in this august body. I a way, I imagined myself to have stood shoulder to shoulder with some of the great and good of England’s history and its civilized way of life!
One of my memorable, in fact when I now look back seems to be an utterly audacious acts while I was at Oxford was my participation in the Oxford University’s historic institution, namely, the Oxford University’s Debating Society. In fact, the Debating Society is simply called the Union Society. What I have got to say I should give the readers unfamiliar with this unique institution a short history of this institution. The Oxford Union Society was established in December 1825 out of the Oxford United Debating Society which had been founded in 1823. The Society in the words of a former Prime Minister Harold Macmillian, a “unique one in that it has provided an unrivalled training ground for debates in the Parliamentary style which no other debating society in any democratic country can equal”. Past office holders of this Society would read like a who is who of England’s leading Prime Ministers and great many Parliamentarians and all the great office holders of the State like great judges, members of the House of Commons and House of Lords and not the least some of the most colourful characters of the British Society and culture. All the great Prime Minister of Great Britain, Gladstone, perhaps the most distinguished, the most fully developed or trained Oxford man to occupy both the chairs of the Debating Society as well as the Prime Ministership. The others are also no less distinguished. Some of the other names familiar to the Indians of this and the last generation may perhaps is only the Tory Prime Minister Harold Macmillan. The other name is Lord Curzon, who was the Imperial Viceroy during the 1905 Swadeshi movement.

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They talk of rural India. We listen!
This government is seen progressively as groping in the dark for policies. To tackle several important segment of issues. one is rural India.

Agriculture and rural India’s development are interlinked. So too, the many new institutions, Panchayat Raj in particular for rural India’s transformation. So, what have we got in the first 100 days or the Mahmohan Singh Government? Pretty little!
Mr. P. Chidambaram, Mani Sankar Iyer are two rather, if we can say so, ambitious (or follhardy?) over-taking these days. Mr. P. Chidambaram is given to talk so much on so many times. This time in Chennai, releasing a book, India Untouched: The Forgotten face of Rural Poverty by Dr. Abraham George, based in Bangalore, Chidambaram says rural poverty is because of the 30 years of Independence governance model! Not to go further we like to dismiss this sort of language as born out of either ignorance or the audacity of being in a government office.

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Time has come to call the British bluff. The “New Britain” is seen by British people themselves as a nation given to much war-mongering on the part of Tony Blair who imagines himself a second Winston Churchill! More war interventions, more name and fame for Britain.

I had read the two biographies of two great men, one a statesman, another a great economist. Now, reading these biographies, after I had lived through a rather longish life in India, I don’t seem to have the same excitement and a sort of glamour I had associated with these great men of great achievements. Yes, there was time when I was in Oxford I was taught economics by great economists themselves. One was Sir John Hicks who went on to win a Noble Prize. Another was Sir Roy Harrod, author of a first life of Lord Keynes and was also a student of Keynes. Harrod had this rather haughty way of saying us, students: “This is how Keynes thought of this problem, I know him so well, not the way you would be reading from other economists!”.

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Economics alone doesn’t save a government

Economists in India had enjoyed periods of much recognition and also much neglect. In Independent India, under Nehru, economists came to much public notice. P.C.Mahalanobis, V.K.R.V. Rao and many others, including the foreign economists of the calibre of Nicholas Kaldor and Tan Tinbergen, Oscar Lange (Communist economist) were more welcome, the Soviet Russian Five Year plans were our model.
P.C.Mahalanobis laid the statistical foundation for much of economic planning, he was the real author of the Second Five Year Plan. That plan shifted our planning from agri/irrigation perspective to heavy industrial model.
Then, came Indira Gandhi, things got wrong from day one and from one misstep to another, it was more and more State control of the economy. A recent essay in a popular journal narrates how Indira Gandhi’s years were described as “the dark age of Indian economy.”. This was said by Rakesh Mohan, now RBI deputy governor.

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So,what hopes for our leaders to take India forward?

Even highly educated Indians, I mean those with foreign education qualifications and training don’t seem to know how the world is moving forward. Those Indians with foreign qualifications, with MBAs, are employed in corporate world.

They are either owner entrepreneurs or employed by businessmen at high salaries. Those with other higher qualifications, Ph.Ds or such academic qualifications, like our own Prime Minister are either senior bureaucrats all their lives or academics like university professors. These are the two classes (types) of highly educated Indians.

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Chief Minister’s expeditious steps solve tricky problems

No day passes in Karnataka without the engineering colleges hitting the front page news headlines!Such is the top priority for engineering education in the state.Bangalore is setting the agenda for top quality engineering graduates.
The IT companies are now desparately in search of high quality talent.Infosys,as the news has it,is getting nearly 1.5 lakh applicants.It interviews 50,000 candidates.Finally selects 15,000! Is this good news or bad news?It is plainly bad news for educators.Education planners.Education promoptors and finally the unfortunate many who dont make it at the company gates!

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Should the government engage foreign consultants?

When the government reconstituted the Planning Commission, we wrote the Commission be headed by some practical politician of repute. There are very practical reasons for making these suggestions. The previous Vajpayee government, knowingly or unknowingly nominated many lightweights, some plainly unworthy, some plain party enthusiasts.
So, the Planning Commission gradually went on its historic decline. What a pity! Men like Nehru and Mahalanobis visualized a very active, participative role for the Commission in drawing and reordering development priorities.

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There are routine disturbing news coming out everyday. What news except farmers committing suicides?

The latest is of course more farmers deaths in AP. In two days, 5 suicides! There is also now farmers suicides from MP, Maharashtra and even from the other Southern States; Karnataka, has of course for notorious insensitivity, Kerala, the more pathetic.
Considering the more advanced development parameters, the plight of farmers in the Southern States, in TN it is water scarcity in the Cauvery delta regions and the peculiar TN politicians penchant for making politics out of the peoples’ misery.
West Bengal, Orissa and Maharashtra tribal belts are a great human tragedy, with deaths by starvation or malnutrition causing children’s plight. Words fail at this enormity of the tragedies. Tragedies man-made? Yes, of course!

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