System Failure

Why do I whine about things that those of you who have travelled abroad must have experienced umpteen times? Because I believe that time wasted on useless tasks is the main reason for what our political leaders like to grandiosely call ‘‘systemic collapse’’. The system is made up of officials who mostly waste taxpayers money doing things that are completely meaningless while neglecting to do things of vital importance.

The same mindless bossiness, the wasted attention to useless detail that you see in immigration officers is at the root of why children are dying of hunger in remote districts of our richest state. Why did it need the Bombay High Court to order the Maharashtra Government to take notice of the starvation deaths of more than 9000 children in the past year? One thousand last month alone. Why does Sushilkumar Shinde need this column to tell him he must be sick in the head if he can describe reports as ‘‘highly exaggerated’’ under the picture of Sangeeta Padvi this newspaper carried on its front page last week? If the picture of the little girl’s skeletal body had come out of Sudan’s ravaged Dahfur province it would have been horrific enough, but out of Maharashtra? And, how does the ‘‘system’’ respond? It says that the children have died of other things — fever, snake bite, low birth weight. Did nobody teach these morons that hunger itself is rarely a cause of death but causes the diseases that cause death?

But, that is how the ‘‘system’’ has always responded because it is a system that was created by our colonial masters to serve the rulers not the people and nobody ever bothered to change it, not even in that last bastion of Marxism, West Bengal. My old pal, Sitaram Yechury, so eloquent about so many things, and yet we have not a squeak of an explanation out of him on why there should be starvation deaths in a Marxist paradise like West Bengal.

Now we have a Budget based on the noble vision of reforming the appaling mess that is rural India but it plans to realise this vision through the same system. Plans are afoot to transform education, healthcare and there is even a special fund for reviving terminal cases like Bihar. Mr Finance Minister are you being serious?

Nothing will change, nothing can change, until we change the ‘‘system’’ and limited though my understanding of Budgets is, I see nothing in it that indicates change in this area. Meanwhile, let us at least acknowledge that as long as children starve to death while rats eat our huge, useless stocks of foodgrain, anyone who tells you that India is shining needs a kick in the butt. Now that we have a government that claims as its leitmotif ‘‘economic reform with a human face’’ can we at least hope that the first kick will be administered by Sonia Gandhi to the butt of her handpicked Chief Minister in Maharashtra. Because in this story there is a human face, the wasted, half-dead face of little Sangeeta whose desperately poor grandmother travelled 40 kilometres from the village of Umargavhan to a hospital in Akkulawa, Nandurbar in the hope of saving the baby’s life. Welcome to ‘‘shining’’ India folks.

Write to tavleensingh@expressindia.com