Saturday, June 13, 2015

Why is the Modi government playing with the health of the Delhi residents?

For those who don't know --the MHA or ministry of home affairs has a deptt for the union territories. Since Delhi is a quasi state and the biggest union territory and the most important as it is the nation's capital, there is a seperate deptt within the MHA just for Delhi controlled by a specific Joint secretary. All funds for the MCD are routed through this Delhi deptt of the MHA.

The MCD has 22000 ghost employees who seem not to exist. We had found a similar situation in the Bombay Municipal Corporation after 2000 civic elections as on paper there were supposed to be 1 BMC employee for every 100 citizens of Bombay(population 1.8 crore, BMC staff strength 1.8lakh)-- I think at that time the population was 1.2 crore and staff strength was shown as 1.2 lakh. 

The story must be the same all over India. Even in the Police deptt, there are a lot of ghost employees (satyamev jayate video on police reforms--ex DG BSF Prakash Singh who fought for implementation of National police commn reports via the Supreme court said this). The railways which is overstaffed many times over has a lot of politically appointed ghost staff because it has traditionally been the easiest to loot. 

The defence ministry's super secretiveness shield also lends it to the possibility of superfluous ghost staff whose pension and perks may be going to unknown areas--therefore OROP is not being implemented,The defence ministry controlled Ordnance factory board, defence security corps and other bodies must be surely having lot of such ghost employees because traditionally everything related to the ministry is covered under the official secrets act and other legal cloaks of being beyond public scrutiny.

That is the state of affairs in our country at present but we don't talk about these glaring issues. Also the most important pillar of the democratic form of govt-- the judiciary's supreme court still functions for only 5 days a week, 6hours a day for only 180 days a  year--the rest of the time they are on paid holiday. Even among the 180 working days, a lot of judges and staff take vacations --so the number of working days effectively comes down much more. YET WE SEEM TO BE IGNORANT OF SUCH CRUCIAL FACTS and feel THAT remaining UNAWARE of all this is better.

BUT I FEEL we must make more people AWARE of such crucial facts --because when the light of KNOWLEDGE comes, then ignorance and apathy are swept away and positive change happens. WE MUST STRENGTHEN THE POSITIVE FORCES IN OUR OWN SMALL WAY by bringing AWARENESS and not IGNORING the systemic deficiencies--The world will change FASTER if we do our bit.
Kussh

No comments: