Welcome summer, with deepening water crisis

How good are grandpas?

IN the March of 1987 when The DayAfter ran a cover story entitled: Are the Chief Ministers Necessary? it started a lively debate on the quality and quantity of governance and how much of it ever filtrated down to the people in whose name elections were fought and democratic kings - the chief ministers - installed.

It was an intentionally controversial story which began with the provocative intro: It has become quite fashionable to question the office of the Prime Minister and its relationship with the presidency... It is also fashionable to talk critically and quite often unkindly about the office of the Prime Minister in the context of the Centre-State relationship… But it is strange that none of the critics of the office of the Prime Minister have inadvertently tried to evaluate critically the role of the institution of chief ministership in the content of honest performance and validity in its relationship to promotion of grass-root democracy, efficiency and maintenance of national integration".

We had raised the issue: Are the chief ministers less corrupt and dishonest than the politicians operating on the national level? Have the chief ministers been not responsible for organised violence, graft, robbery, nepotism and horse-trading of both extra-constitutional and dynastic cliques?

I would suggest that during the poll debates for the Lok Sabha 2004, when everyone has begun to swear by development issues and good governance and make India shine, it would be relevant to debate the relevance and performance of the institution of chief ministership itself .

Many questions were also raised: Was it necessary to have chief ministers? Could the country afford their burden? Can we replace the system at the state level where you have two costly high offices of the chief Minister and the Governor?

We had pointed out just how much money could be saved by dividing the country into just four zones - North, South, East and West - and placed under a governor each, directly elected by the people or by regional assemblies and instead of political ministers, be administered by "appointed" ministers who would be chosen because of their expertise and knowledge of administration rather than mere number of votes they had been able to muster. That would deal a big blow to evils like lingusim, regionalism and communalism, administrative waste and insularism, which were hitting at the very nationalism and integration. It would mean disappearance of several boundary disputes, river, water and transportation and taxation disputes.

That story was an effort to promote debate on governance alternatives which has become even more important today when India is poised to play national, regional and international developmental role which calls for elimination of costly and foolish "turf war".

In my letter to the readers, I had also raised the issue that newspapers and journals are also consumer products. And the interest of the people, represented by the reader, needs to be protected. At that time I had argued that according to the then available statistics, the advertisers paid Rs.30 crore every day to the media and the major share goes to the big newspapers and magazines which make crores of rupees of profits every year. We had the courage to advocate the scrutiny of the government policy on adverstisement which was and seems even today biased in favour of big and English language newspapers and journals.

In our Media focus section in that issue, there was an interesting observation in the report entitled ‘Seeking the Truth by Graham Waalas’. It was: Where there is a turbulent, pluralistic electorate, the rulers, the official bureaucracy and the legislature will be in the dark, they will not know where they are, and what they are doing, if they are deprived of the competitive reporting and the competing editorial commentaries and also the form in which the spokesmen of the various shades of opinion can say their say. This is what a free press is supposed to provide". I would suggest that the people of India should evaluate the performance of the media today on these lines as critically as the performance of the politicians and various political parties seeking their vote and mandate.