More Anniversary Fare

This via India Uncut compares the Manmohan Singh-Sonia Gandhi to a two-headed mule at a country fair. As an aside, the hyphen is here to stay I guess, but I wish they standardised the order of the names soon. Then we could just abbreviate the whole thing and refer to it as MSSG or SGMS or whatever.

Then there is this article marking the return of statism. It faults a Rs 174,000 crore allocation for rural infrastructure predicting that corruption will eat up this money with nothing to show. The news item here. I'm not sure what the alternatives are. Would the private sector be willing to take up projects in rural electricity, rural water supply, rural roads, rural housing? Will they be able to break even? I hope the writer had given some answers.

Update: I was surprised by this passage in Ashok Malik's article above:

If you point out any contradiction or make noises about “delivery systems”, you are socially ostracised. The government, of course, couldn’t be bothered with cutting its own expenses.

I distinctly remembered the problem of delivery systems being mentioned by someone in the government. Maybe Chidambaram in the Union Budget I thought. And yes, it was him. Look at this excerpt from the budget speech:

Outlays versus Outcomes

100. At the same time, I must caution that outlays do not necessarily mean outcomes. The people of the country are concerned with outcomes. The Prime Minister has repeatedly emphasized the need to improve the quality of implementation and enhance the efficiency and accountability of the delivery mechanism. During the course of the year, together with the Planning Commission, we shall put in place a mechanism to measure the development outcomes of all major programmes. We shall also ensure that programmes and schemes are not allowed to continue indefinitely from one Plan period to the next without an independent and in-depth evaluation. Civil society should also engage Government in a healthy debate on the efficiency of the delivery mechanism.

So who is doing the ostracising? And look at this more recent news about District Collectors / Magistrates from across the country meeting up with the government:

Though, according to the press release, the idea was to discuss how the delivery system at the district level can be improved, sources said a second reason was to get direct feedback about the administrative problems in non-Congress-ruled states.

If you ignore the sorry title and the second reason provided by the anonymous 'source', it does seem like the concerned people are worried about delivery systems contrary to the impression one gets on reading the excerpt from Malik's article. Of course, I'm not trying to make the case that just an awareness and/or concern about this problem implies that it will not happen or even that the intentions are good. I'm just saying that when civil society is called on to 'engage government in a healthy debate' on the issue by the government, it is difficult to believe that it would ostracise someone who 'engages' it on the topic. Unless it is someone else who is doing the ostracising.