Since I am on break from work and
get enough spare time to do things I have always longed for doing. One of the
things that I make sure I do is to spend time with youth around my neighborhood.
It helps me to understand more about what youth of a third tier cities these
days, at the same time it also helps me share my learning to enrich their
experience.
One fine evening I was on evening
stroll of the town with one of boys of my neighborhood. While we passed the
stinking public garbage, the boy was compelled to think of some solution to
solve the problem which erupted an intense discussion among us which I think
needs to be shared with others too. The discussion also is significant to other
issues of contemporary public policy discourse in approaching election
environment. While the boy immediately came out with his hypothetical solution
of government doing more to solve to the problem of public garbage, I was more
focused on helping him think of an alternate solution. Here is a sneak pick of
our conversation:
Boy: The stinking garbage causes
so much inconvenience to people. Government must do something about it.
Me: Why government should work on
it?
Boy: Because it’s government’s
responsibility to clean our garbage.
Me: Isn’t it our responsibility
to clean our garbage.
Boy: Yes, but government has
taken up this responsibility and has staffs to do so. We even pay for this.
Me: You are right. Government has
an entire big department to maintain cleanliness in town and even after paying
for this we don’t get satisfactory result. Doesn’t this give us a learning?
Boy: What do you mean?
Me: We usually in our personal
life give more responsibilities to the ones who give us good result and curb
the responsibilities of the ones who fail to deliver. Applying the same logic
shouldn’t we take away the responsibility from government and figure out
another way to maintain cleanliness and shouldn’t we even punish the government
for failing to deliver? The thing is the moment we say government should do
this or that, we must understand that we are making an expectation from an inefficient
system to deliver which has never delivered. Can you give me an example of any
public service delivery work where government has done really well?
Boy: Well, I am not sure if there
is any such thing.
Me: Right. I am not sure whether
this big stinking garbage existed here and how it was managed before government
took over the responsibility of garbage management but I am very sure that the
more you put this on government, the bigger would be the size of garbage management
problem here.
While I tried to explain the boy
what should be core function of government and what should be put back to civil
society to do on its own, I got more examples from recent crisis to substantiate
my point. One of the flagship schemes of government to provide Mid-Day Meal to
students in government schools happened to prove killer for more than two dozen
school students recently. News channels have filled up the screen with numerous
stories of how inefficiently the scheme is managed since the incident took
place. MNREGA has spread the corruption from big offices in city/state centers
to far away rural areas. Practically, it
can be seen as the largest government program in world to decentralize
corruption. And now I am wondering what would happen with the attempt of
providing Food Security to us. Can anyone guess how this act can kick off
artificial food grain shortage, inflation rate, budget deficit, politics
entering into our daily personal lives, increase in corrupt practices and most
importantly how many lives it would claim? It would be very interesting to
calculate actual price that the country would have to pay for few Kilograms of subsidized
food grains…
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