Bijli, Sadak, Pani

Tavleen Singh writes that she gets no satisfaction from the UPA's one year. She writes

Let us begin with the eternal cry of the Indian voter at election time: bijli, sadak, paani. In my view the main reason why governments lose elections is because of their failure in these areas.

Then she goes on to show that the UPA government has not done anything at all in the above areas in its one year. The power situation is dire, road building has stopped, the water situation is apparently dire as well, the PDS system is bad and anti-poverty programmes are leaking, no improvement in healthcare and eduction, no administrative reforms as promised by the CMP. Depressing, right?

Right. And here is the lady writing about the previous government:

The fair-minded in the Congress Party admit that Atal Behari Vajpayee ran a good government and did much in terms of development. Just building eleven kilometers of road a day compared to eleven kilometers a year in earlier Congress times is indication of this. But, there was more. There was a concerted attempt to loosen government controls on private enterprise, attempts to open India to foreign investment, to new technologies and the effects could be felt – despite what you hear to the contrary – all the way down to the villages. In a village in Bihar that had never seen electricity for a single day since Independence I found mobile phones and an ISD-STD booth from which I managed to call Mumbai. There was still no electricity but there was cable TV watched with the help of tractor batteries.

Satellite dishes had arrived too and although only a handful of people had televisions in their homes there was awareness of progress and the need for change such as could not have been imagined ten years ago.

Apart from addressing sadak I don't see anything else in the Indian voter's eternal cry being addressed. And nothing at all about the bad PDS, anti-poverty programmes leaking, healthcare and education. And yet Ms Singh does not find it in herself get all worked up about it. As she has now. Strange.