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Journalism of Courage
One clearly doesn8217;t know what will finally come of it, but a lawyer friend is in the midst of filing a lawsuit against the Airport Authority of India AAI for negligence leading to a young girl8217;s head being crushed just a few weeks ago. He has sent a notice to the AAI asking for a reply, and says that on various occasions in the past he has himself told officials at the airport of the problems with the escalator and the fact that the emergency stop button wasn8217;t very visible. His view is that if the amount AAI has to shell out in a law suit is sufficiently large, it will force it to pay attention to such details, to ensure passenger safety.
The first thought that comes to mind is whether this can be emulated in other areas. Is it possible to sue various civic bodies for the damage caused to our lungs each time we breathe the polluted air in most cities, or for the loss in revenues caused by sharp voltage fluctuations and frequent power cuts? Citizens have tried, for well over 50 years, the other method of voting in and out governments for their lack of performance, but nothing has changed materially, with each successive government unable or unwilling to make any significant improvement.
Surely we can argue that the government is wasting our taxes on useless subsidies, that are not even reaching the audience that they are intended for. Remember the late Rajiv Gandhi8217;s statement that less than a fourth of subsidies reached the poor? Or P. Chidambaram8217;s discussion paper on subsidies, presented in Parliament, on the waste being incurred in the name of subsidies. The government can, then, be restrained from increasing or levying fresh taxes, and may even have to commit itself to reducing wasteful expenditure.
My lawyer friend, who shall have to remain unnamed till his suit gets to the courts, unfortunately has some bad news for us and good news for the government on this front. He says that there is no clear statement anywhere he thinks including the Constitution, but isn8217;t an expert on this holy book which lays down the specific duty of the government, and says that the government will not waste taxpayers money. He adds that government is, in fact, about waste. But even if you ignore this poor attempt at humour, he is right. There is no contract that we sign when we pay our taxes, defining what we will get in return for our money. And the law is very clear on this one. If there8217;s no contract, where8217;s the question of breach of contract? So that8217;s one mutiny nipped in the bud right away.
Not fully though, since there8217;s a little loophole left. In his last budget, Yashwant Sinha imposed a one-rupee duty on diesel and said that half the amount collected from this and the full amount from a similar cess put on petrol in June 1998 would be transferred to a dedicated Central road fund. The amount of money which has accrued to the road sector, but alas not transferred, is around Rs 5,000 crore. Now clearly this is a breach of promise, and maybe this is a loophole some enterprising lawyer can use to hang the government on in court.
It gets juicier if you give it a bit more of a twist. Let8217;s say, instead of spending it actually wasting is more appropriate, the government actually gave it to a Road Fund and that Fund decided to invest this since they didn8217;t have any road project worth the name at that point of time. Now you can figure out what this would have been worth in as many ways as you want. If it was invested in Infosys last March, for instance, it would be worth a whopping Rs 25,000 crore! Any lawyer who wants to make a difference, and get a lot of good publicity in the bargain?
Endgame: While on the subject of using court cases to prevent the government from messing around with our lives, here8217;s something a senior colleague came up with, on why the government announced its deal with the hijackers only late in the afternoon, though they had reached it the previous night and had even got the three terrorists released from the jails they were in.
If they had announced it in the morning, someone would have gone to court and filed a case saying that all the three terrorists were accused in ongoing cases and so could not be released without the court8217;s consent. He or she would then have got a stay order. The government would then have had to convince the hijackers that they would have to wait for another seven or eight years till the courts cleared the case!
