Incredibly tied up in our own knots

They were affordable then because only a handful of Indians travelled abroad and government departments had more employees than work but would we continue with this kind of useless paperwork if 20 million Indians decide to take a foreign holiday?

If the Home Ministry has time to waste, it should spend it on simplifying passport procedures. We are probably the only country left in the world that requires police verification before a passport is issued and the form you fill even to renew a passport is a masterpiece of bureaucratic stupidity.

Information that could be obtained on a single sheet of paper is stretched out through something like fifty pages. Why? If you ask the External Affairs Ministry they tell you it is because of the Home Ministry, and if you ask someone in Home they will tell you the opposite.

I have personally put the question to at least four Ministers of External Affairs over a period of ten years and they have all admitted that procedural changes are necessary but nothing happens. Nothing will probably happen till a billion Indians decide they all want passports then they would have to be changed because you would need an army of clerks if procedures remain as they are today.

In the Third World a great deal of effort and money is wasted on doing what does not need doing and not enough on what needs urgent doing.

So, our public healthcare systems are in shockingly poor health but Union Health Minister Anbumani Ramadoss concerns himself with sacking the director of our leading institute of medical research, which on paper is an autonomous institution over which the minister should have no hold.

We have the largest number of AIDS cases in the world, the largest number of people suffering from TB and malaria and the largest number of babies who die of preventable diseases like diarrhoea. The minister offers us no solution to these grim problems. But he has the time to interfere in the affairs of AIIMS.

He is not the only member of Dr Manmohan Singh’s government who has time to waste on creating needless controversies. His colleague, Union Minister for Human Resource Development Arjun Singh, recently set new standards by announcing his caste quotas. We need a new education policy, we desperately need more schools and colleges but we get what we do not need instead: a controversy over caste.

The story goes on and on. Last year, after July 26, it was decided that the city of Mumbai needed to modernize its hundred year old drainage system. It was calculated that this would cost around Rs 1,200 crore.

In a better managed country the system would have been in place by now because thousands of crores are lost whenMumbai closes down for a day.

The money remained unspent and Mumbai ground to a halt for three working days last week on account of what the weather department called “normal” rain.

Our Prime Minister is an economist and it was hoped that he would bring an element of good sense to governance. These hopes have been belied because when it comes to governmental obfuscation, Dr Manmohan Singh has proved to be a master. When governments want to delay a decision they set up a committee and this prime minister has set a record in setting up committees. Welcome to Incredible India.