Thursday 5 June 2014

If I were the PM of India, what would I do?

IF I WERE TO  THE PRIME MINISTER OF INDIA, WHAT WOULD I DO?




...' If I were in his/her position.....' directing towards any politician holding public office, is the routine nomenclature found in the drawing room discussions and debates. Today I am going to do the same. Being in politics for many years I would like to present my idea of development. If I were to be the Prime Minister of India I would work on the following
  1. Corruption
  2. Quality and Free Education
  3. Quality and Free Health Services
  4. Infrastructure Development
  5. Reforms - Electoral, Police, Judicial
  6. Economy
  7. Defense

1. Corruption

  • Will not induce any Member of Parliament into the Cabinet, who is facing grievous corruption charges 
  • Strengthen Anti Corruption Law
  • Amend the Lokpal Law  to make it more stronger and Implement to its letter and spirit
  • Strong directives tagged with incentives and disincentives regarding strengthening the  Lokayukta in line with the amended Lokpal Law
  • Will make sure that the investigative agencies viz. CBI, CID, CVC, ACB (through directives reg Lokayukta) remains autonomous and independent of political influence.
By taking the above measures to curtail corruption it will increase the functioning and efficiency of all the sectors to be mentioned below.

2. Quality and Free Education

Increase the number of primary schools (LKG to 5th class) to the ratio of 1 school:5000 population. From there on, shall be boarding school concept like Navodaya, a very successful model which follows all best in class standards and have been consistently giving good results.
The infrastructure of the schools - the number of classrooms, benches, blackboards, playground and other recreational, sports activities; teaching and other supporting staff shall be placed in accordance with the international standards. For example, For every 25 children there need to one teacher.
The methodology of teaching for the primary government schools  shall be observational, activity and fun-learning based  

Higher secondary and Higher education shall be conceptual and skill oriented respectively. Shall make universities a hub for experiments and self-learning with R&D based learning methodology. For that, universities shall be established in line with Oxford, Cambridge and increase the number of IITs, IIITs, IIMs, National Law Schools, JNU and so on such that every state has at least any three of such kind. 


3. Quality and Free Health Services


Any health service right from a headache, fever to maternal delivery to the heart and other complicated surgeries should be very easy and with nil monitory efforts. This we can achieve by,
 · Strengthening already existing Hospitals by equipping with all infrastructures like Doctors and other supporting staff in proportionate to the population; put in place the required medical equipment and so on.
· Increase the number of hospitals so as to a Sub Centre (pre-primary unit) for every 3000 population, one Primary Health Care Centre (PHC) for every 20,000 population; 'Area Hospital' for every 1 lac population; Multi and super specialty hospital (AIIMS) coupled with Medical College for every two or three districts.
· Make available of the generic drugs in all government dispensaries. And also encourage private and public pharmaceutical companies to get into the track of generic drugs.

4. Infrastructure Development

It is an elementary sense that infrastructure is one sector if taken care of, will influence many others viz industries, employment, and economy as a whole. The following are the key infrastructural fronts we need to focus on priority,


· Electricity

Ø  Increase the production of electricity by diversifying the sources of production. viz. unconventional sources of energy (Solar, Wind, Nuclear, Wave, etc.)

Ø  Bringing down the Transmission and Distribution (T&D) losses as these losses are at 30-40% of the total production. So half the job is done if we concentrate on curtailing T&D losses

· Development of Roads 

National Highways; State Highways; District, Mandal, Village Roads.

· Railways
Ø  Bringing in fool-proof safety measure so that no single accident happens
Ø  Increase the number of trains to connect the nook and corner of the country and meet the huge demand
Ø  Introduction of High Speed Trains (300Kms/hr) connecting all the major cities across the country

· Airports 
International Airports in all Capital cities and near to world-class airports in all 2 tier cities and district headquarters.

  All modes of transportation viz. Roadways, Railways, Airports will be interconnected and well integrated 


5. Reforms -


Electoral

  • Replace 'Proportional Representation' (preferably with Preferential Voting System) in place of existing 'First Past the Post'
  • Debar the people from contesting any elections who are chargesheeted with heinous crimes, until cleared by the courts. And if convicted, should be permanently debarred from contesting for any political office.
  • State Funding of political parties
  • Institutionalization of political parties
  • Full-time dedicated staff to the Election Commission at all levels - streamlining all election-related procedure including enrolling and deletions of voter list
  • A law to bring in - Inner party Democracy; Strict Auditing & Accounting; making the distribution of money and liquor a cognizable offense by conferring Statutory status to the 'Model Code of Conduct'. 

Judicial Reforms 

Reforms in the judiciary can be seen from three fronts, one Pending Cases, two Corruption and three inefficiency. And to address that we shall have to go with the following measures

  • Increase the number of courts proportionate to the pending cases and future demand
  • Increase number of judges
  • Computerization of all courts
  • The above three measures should be materialized in such a way that any case should not take more than 6 months to 2 years to be finally cleared
  • Create the National Judicial Commission, to protect the independence, impartiality, integrity, and competence of the judiciary. It will oversee the appointments and removal of judges and other related staff of the judiciary
  • Create All India Judicial Council, to increase the competence and quality of judges in line with IAS and IPS.


Police Reforms 

Shall send strong directives coupled with incentives and disincentives to the states, Police being the State Subject as incorporated in the constitution of India, to bring in reforms in police department such as,
Pictorial presentation of Police Reforms
  • Recruit adequate police personnel in proportionate to the population i,e. 1:270 (1 police for every 270 people) or increasing police force to 6% of the total population
  • Allocate adequate Financial resources to - create Technical infrastructure; increase salaries; increase the expenditure of operational officers
  • Separation of responsibilities of the police viz. Law & Order, Crime Investigation and VIP protection
  • Do away with undue political influence or interference in matters of day to day functions and transfers and promotions
  • Set 'Police Complaints Authority' to look into complaints on police personnel
  • As suggested by 'Soli Sorabjee committee on Police Reforms', 100 years old acts on which police system is based should be replaced with the new acts

6. Economy

From a broader perspective, the economy of the country is influenced by Fiscal Deficit, Current Account Deficit, Inflation and so on. The following shall be the measures to be taken to drive a healthy and strong economy,
·To reduce Fiscal Deficit (FD)
There will be a spurt in expenditure keeping in view of the introduction of huge projects; an increase in payment of salaries (as the government workforce will be increased to the proportion of the workload vis-a-vis the government related services). This may in turn cause FD to increase. However, it can be reduced with the following measures
ü  With the reduction in corruption, the hitherto unaccounted drained money can be used efficiently. As our PMs time and again been saying that only 25% of the allocated money is being actually spent on the projects and the rest is swindled.
ü  One, Streamlining the composition of Taxes and two, increase in the collection of the taxes. Both these are interconnected and interdependent.

· To reduce Current Account Deficit
ü  With a friendly and economic oriented Foreign Policy there will be the scope of the increase in exports.
ü  Focusing on our strengths like Software services, Tourism and so on
ü  Encourage Domestic Savings

· Creation of Employment
ü  Along with Administrative reforms (Police, Judicial) one important demand erupts is recruiting staff in proportionate to the workload. 
ü  Regularizing lakhs of contract Labors as it includes sheer exploitation. 
ü  Howsoever we increase Government jobs it would be only a fraction of the demand. Thus we should encourage Self-employment by strengthening the related schemes and streamlining the process like providing loans and so on
ü  Manufacturing sector plays a key role in terms of employment generation. And the performance of this sector is dependent on many infrastructural sectors like electricity, roads, monitory market, etc. 
Encourage Public-Private Partnership in huge projects viz. Intercity High-Speed Trains, Roads, Airports, etc.

· Farming
Ø  Develop Cold Storages
Ø  Bring in Scientific Farming - encourage usage of Technology in farming right from which crop to plant to tilling to sowing to reaping. By doing so we can reduce the cost of production and improve the productivity in the available limited land
Ø  There is a huge disparity in landholding. The scarce limited natural resource- cultivable land has to be redistributed to the marginalized farmers
Ø  Irrigation – make sure that every hectare is supplied with water
Ø  Making the 'producer - whole seller - retailer - consumer' chain fool-proof by removing all unnecessary middlemen

7. Foreign Policy


Renew and maintain friendly relations’ shall be made to be as a policy. ‘You can choose your friends but not neighbors’. Thus we shall have two approaches when it comes to the relationship with our neighbors.
One with Pakistan and China where we shall have regular communication in regard to commerce, defense, intelligence; increase economic and sports activities; being assertive on matters like defense
Two, with Bangladesh, Srilanka, Nepal, Afghanistan, Bhutan, Myanmar and Maldives. Opening up and granting MFN (Most Favored Nation) to all South Asian Countries; sharing border-related and intelligence information; make monitory transactions more regulated with particular reference to the Maldives from where most of the Indian black money re-enters India.
Other faraway neighbors like US, E.U, Russia, Brazil, and Israel, etc shall be dealt with mutually beneficial economic and strategic angles

8. Defense

The defense as the name and its functions goes, misses a humane approach. So my defense strategy would be to bring in welfare and developmental measures in the lives of soldiers (low cadre), like increasing the salaries into two folds and so on.
Increase allocations for Intelligence so that they have all infrastructure in place to identify internal and external issues like terrorist threats and so on.
Unlike any conventional thought process, there shall be a Decrease in the budgetary allocation of arms and ammunition (not to confuse with arms and ammunition of the police force which shall be increased). Divert the decreased fund to the Health and Education sectors.
Encourage R&D in space which would have a direct impact on the well being of the people of the country.


Devil is in Detail, so to keep crisp and short, I have mentioned only a broad framework of the vision or to call it a mini 'Manifesto' which in my view, would suffice to eradicate poverty, bring up the Human Development Index parameters (education, Health, etc). If we go by this, calling our country, India is a developed nation is not a distant dream.




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