Building India at the cost of Bharat

The conflict is poignant, the exploitation is downright. India has started rampaging Bharat in a more unrelenting manner ever than before. From Niyamgiri to Dhinkia and from Jaitapur to Bhatta-Paursal, the war of land acquisition has finally turned ugliest. Farmers and landholders brutalized, state went berserk on agitators, many fled away from their ancestral homes, and many were killed in the tug of war between India and Bharat. How long will this desperate war continue? And for what reason? Why is that every time the people of Bharat are stripped off their marginalized property to help build a modern India? Why is that they turn victims in every episode of development that they never relish its fruits? Why is that the modern India becomes so callous in exploiting the resources of Bharat? Perhaps, nobody has a rational answer to all these queries, but the fact remains that every time India makes a visible progress, the farmers, the tribal people, and the poor people living in JJ colonies become the inevitable sacrificial lambs. Because these people are helpless, gullible, and maybe have no access to power.

Let's look at how Posco with support from the state administration of Orissa tries to destroy the livelihood of thousands of betel farmers by offering them a miniscule compensation. Calculate this: a normal betel farmer earns somewhere between Rs. 10,000 and Rs. 20,000 a month from an acre of land whereas the onetime compensation for the land hovers around Rs. 250,000. Is this justified? Now the moot question is if the same farmer who can earn the compensation amount within a year or two from a perennial crop, why would he settle for such a lower amount? Moreover, given spiraling inflation, the same farmer can achieve even higher returns from the crop in future. Isn't this a clear exploitation of gullible farmers? Is there any future dividend even Posco will skyrocket its profit margin once production gets started? No. Everybody from state administration to company board will forget the fact that the plant which is built on thousand acres of land was once an economical, social, and emotional storehouse of thousands of farmers. And if this huge economic progress has been possible couldn't have been materialized without the utter sacrifice of these farmers or local people. No one does care how a piece of Bharat metamorphoses into an enlightened India in such a short span and some elites of that modern India will take credit for what they never had sacrificed even few moments of their life.

How long this exploitation will continue? When will the growing hiatus between Bharat and India be put on a reverse gear? Here we are forgetting a glaring fact that so long as we continue exploiting Bharat, we are pushing India to a stage of unsustainable development where progress would be there, but without sustained prosperity.

Curbing the free speech

When IT has made India one of the fastest emerging economy in world market, the regulatory move against virtually free online media including blog sites and other social networking sites is a clear indication of the fact that the rotten politicians and bureaucrats in this country are trying to tighten the noose against unbridled free speech, primarily because the ongoing exposures of their corrupt practices in unconventional media like Facebook, YouTube, Blogger, etc., have attracted huge public attentions and reactions, which become a deterrent to their clandestine corrupt practices. In the recent Anna Hazare's crusade against corruption, the social media played a significant role by spreading the awareness across the world, and this became another jasmine revolution.

Now that politicians think the educated, IT-savvy citizens are well-informed and their collective free speech can bring down their supremacy in a society that they have legitimately exploited for decades, which furthermore won't be possible and this fear psychosis has triggered an authoritarian regime like situation to nip any future online revolution in the bud. This is a serious contempt of freedom of speech provisioned in a democracy. No matter how blasphemous or hateful be the views on an individual on any subject, that should be given a benefit of doubts in the ambit of “personal interpretation”, not as interpreted by a motley group of “pseudo-intellectual bureaucrats” who have continuously blocked the social innovations in this country.

Every time when a corruption news breaks out in this country, people blindly blame politicians without analyzing the length and breadth of the crime, but the time has come now to look beyond the lopsided view. The systemic corruption in India is a phenomenon dangerously propagated by the bureaucrats since independence. Their feudal attitude to keep every policy inherently flawed has stumped the progress of this country. If we have witnessed any social, economic or technological revolution, be it market liberalization, IT revolution, or mobile revolution, in this country, that has been possible just because of the sincere efforts of some good politicians, technocrats, and intellectuals. Though there are very few bureaucrats who have helped executing the policies with due diligence, the majority of this power block have continuously manipulated the system on their side, and the recent move on curbing the free speech in a democratic system is again their misadventure to prohibit public reactions, but this act of despot will never succeed. Controlling the internet framework across the world by any local government agency has never been successful, and this wild act of authoritarian governance will rather raise more conflicts in a working democracy.

Why philanthropy in India is not so successful?

In the last two decades, few new economy companies, including Infosys and Wipro, started investing in social developments; however, the real philanthropy is too premature on Indian soil. The reasons: first, most of the Indian entrepreneurs believe in the dynastic transfer of wealth from one generation to the next, which becomes a stumbling block for dispersing huge amount of wealth for public good or philanthropy, and the other one being the upsurging corrupt practices in almost all NGOs and similar charitable organizations those claim to be the crusaders of all socio-economic evils in our society, compel corporates to take enough precautions for not throwing their hard-earned money to some unreliable group of people, and perhaps, that is the most rational reason as to why many companies in India rather take pain in instituting their own trusts or engage some people in corporate social responsibility (CSR) to manage the philanthropic actions. The growing corruptions in social organizations, including misappropriations of funds and a brutal unaccountability, have prompted many industrialists to continue their philanthropic works either though a trust with management control or by engaging themselves with very selective NGOs.

The genesis of NGOs in India dates back to the 1860s when societies like Prarthana Samaj (1864), Satya Sodhan Samaj (1873), Arya Samaj (1875), and National Council for Women in India (1875) got instituted to fight against the social evils propagated by the then feudal patriarchs. With the growing trends of social revolution, the Societies Registration Acts (SRA) was enacted in 1860. Many Christian missionaries continued their efforts to reduce poverty, social bias, and constructed infrastructures such as roads, community buildings, hospitals, and schools. Mahatma Gandhi also stressed on the growth of these social, non-profit organizations and worked seriously on this area by engaging some industrialists like Birlas to contribute some amount of their profits for social cause. Though international NGOs entered India in 1960s and 1970s, the real surge in Indian NGOs took place in 1980s in areas such as social empowerment, civil liberty, education, health, environment, and livelihood. And the participation of large corporates began in the early 1990s.

In all these years India has more than 1.5 million NGOs with over 19 million people work as volunteers or paid workers. Despite this huge organic growth over the years, Indian NGOs haven't lived up to the expectations of the real beneficiaries of this program – the less-privileged people in our society. The most sordid part of this program is that there is no accountability of funds generated by these organizations. And even the worst part is many NGOs act as pressure groups and work for political parties, business organizations, and foreign agencies to generate actionable opinions for the funding organizations. The growing social development programs as projected by NGOs talk an altogether different story in India, a story replete with betrayals, false claims, sufferings, and corruptions. That's why the philanthropy as a popular social measure hasn't appealed to many entrepreneurs in India to act like their foreign counterparts such as Gates and Buffets. And especially in India, human greed, which of course regenerates systemic corruptions, has been the single most contributing factor to the degeneration of a globally acknowledged program, which otherwise could have been a savior of the socioeconomically backward people.