From Bhrastatha to Swachhatha

Sab ka Saath Sab Ka Vikas was the slogan coined by Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) for the 2014 Lok Sabha Elections, which was also presented by the new Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, as the aim and purpose of his government. It reverberated in his foreign tours also. The Prime Minister’s another good programme is Swachh Bharat, which made all VVIPs hold brooms.

Against the backdrop of all-pervading corruption, we have slightly moved forward from ‘Bhrastatha” to ‘Swachhatha” as the Transparency Index showed that we progressed from 34 to 36 (0 indicates Bhrasth..100 Pure).

Unless we are above 50 we are for sure the Bhrast Bharath.

Criminalisation of family
The daily newspapers reported from Jaipur said that a Deputy Manager from Ajmer went to jail for six years along with wife, son and daughter – “sab ka saath” – as every member, more so if educated, of family insisted, encouraged the head to be corrupt and shared or received/enjoyed the corruption proceeds. They are rightly together in the jail.

Receiver of stolen property is equally a thief. Lack of knowledge that wealth is ill-gotten is no defence. It is not a fact at all, as that was indifference to know the illegitimate source. If they shared the pleasure of wealth, the wife, the son and the daughter have also to share the pain of jail.

Yet another recent prominent example of family going to jail is that of Jayalalithaa who was straight away sent from her Chief Minister’s office to a jail in Bangalore along with her close friend and co-accused Sasikala, foster son Sudhakaran and another associate for joining Jayalalithaa in amassing disproportionate assets at the cost of public or public exchequer.

These two incidents prove that if criminals follow ‘sab ka saath’ rule, they will end up together in jail, a great message indeed.

Missing life and missing file
This slogan should become the rule and principle of the policy to be realised. We are not taking all our people together. It is analysed that for every eight minutes, a girl goes missing in our country, only to land in inhuman trafficking business. Missing child is the starting point of new form of slavery. It is reported that after Qatar, India is the second in percentage of slaves in the world, while in numbers India is numero uno. Among 1,42,85,700 slaves, there are bonded labour, forced marriages or trapped in trafficking for sex trade and migrant workers. These are all maladies of lack of governance or bad governance. While girls are missing in streets, files are missing in offices. In many RTI cases, the public authority pleads that the files concerned are missing. Several pages of files relating to Robert Vadra and real estate giant DLF deals are missing, according to a response to RTI request.

A case of missing file is rarely a mishap, most of the times it could be a case of missing honesty.

The plight of CBI
The Supreme Court admonished the CBI Director for his questionable conduct. He was removed from an important probe, even as he preferred to continue for 12 days waiting to retire. The CBI should not remain a caged parrot. It should be made accountable and need to be independent. The diary of the former Director of CBI reflects nexus with the accused whom he met beyond 10 pm at his official residence. Is it privacy or secrecy or cover-up of corruption? Why it is not under RTI?

Swachh Bharat programme is good, but it has to go on for the whole year, not just for one week. While individuals should have a serious change in attitude for the sake of ‘swachhata’, the state should come up with system-based changes.

Swachh Bharat & the Railways
Railways is acclaimed as the biggest public sector organization. Foreigners wonder how the management is running it with millions of people in such a big country. But one thing the world cannot understand is that, none of these trains has any system of collecting or treating human refuse.

Every minute thousands of trains leave faecal waste on tracks all over the country. If the Central government is really interested in Swachh Bharat, it can authorise the Railways, or their Board can resolve to adopt a technology that converts the human refuse into some manure etc. Besides its recklessness in maintenance of latrines in trains and at the railway stations, the Indian Railways is distributing diseases and infections to the people. Thus the Railways is committing a serious environmental crime every minute by distributing human refuse from its bogies all over India. Each member of its management should be criminally liable, if the rule of law is seriously implemented. One serious pen stroke is enough instead of annual broom holding as media centric celebration.

Let Swachh Bharath begin with the Railways.

Education paramount
Scams, delay in justice, poverty, under-development are results of lack of governance and excessive misdeeds of the government. If the government leaves millions of people without information, education and knowledge, it cannot take all people with them. To realise sab kasaath sab ka vikaas, every human being should be educated.

We cannot move together towards progress if millions of people remain without education. Claiming that we are heading in this knowledge-centric society is not honest, to say the least. It is in this context, the Right to Information assumes importance besides right to education which are just two steps in implementing the Right to Know, which is far from being realized.

Recently, the RTI usage was assessed and results are baffling. An average citizen sought information, he asked about himself 18%, about his office and promotion 8%, about his family 2%, about neighbours 29% and about the society nothing, it is zero per cent. The RTI should be used for public interest, not to choke the system with hundreds of applications to harass a public office for taking disciplinary action. One should be a well-informed and responsible citizen.

(These are salient points of the address delivered at the 36th Public Relations Society of India Conference on ‘Sab ka saath sab ka vikas and public relations,’ in Jaipur on 21st Dec, 2014)

By: Madabhushi Sridhar