Beam Me Up, Tricolour

The WTF line of the day comes from Rediff:

A beaming Tricolour will flutter on the moon now.

I never knew flags could show emotion or something could flutter on the moon, but what would I know, I’ve never been up there with a flag. And this is also very funny.

There will be much celebration this week on India reaching the moon, but I’m not sure if the benefits of getting there are worth the cost to the taxpayer. Unless that flag really is fluttering, and we can be the first nation to open a golf course on the moon.

A Shaky Foundation

Rediff reports:

The Rajya Sabha and Lok Sabha are usually adjourned because of commotion. But on Thursday the Upper House was forced to adjourn briefly for an interesting reason—malfunctioning of the presiding officer’s seat. […]

Deputy Chairman K Rahman Khan, who was in the chair, rose to cool tempers. But, when he was about to sit, the back cushion seemed to fall off. […]

Soon after, Khan adjourned the House for 10 minutes. […]

But the problem with the seat persisted when the House reassembled at 12:45 pm and Khan adjourned it till 13:30 pm.

There are two things to note here:

1] Parliamentary proceedings cost taxpayers Rs 26,000 a minute, and these dudes showed a remarkably cavalier attitude towards that money. If I was the speaker, I’d just have taken any random chair available and sat on that. Khan’s attitude is of a man who thinks that politicians rule the people, not serve them.

2] If our government can’t maintain a simple thing like the seat of the presiding officer of the upper house of parliament, what chance do you think they have of running the rest of the country well?

Earlier posts on parliament: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9.

(Link via email from Deepak Iyer.)

India Doesn’t Need Olympic Pride

A shorter version of this piece was published in Friday’s edition of The Wall Street Journal Asia.

It was a gunshot heard across a subcontinent. On Monday, Abhinav Bindra, a 25-year-old shooter from India, took aim for his final shot in the 10-meter air rifle event at the Olympic Games. The pressure was intense, but Mr Bindra shot an almost-perfect 10.8 to win the gold medal. His fans and supporters jumped up in delight in the stands, as wild celebrations began across the country. India’s 24-hour news channels became 24-hour Bindra channels, and there was much talk of national pride.

Mr Bindra’s achievement warrants such celebration. On a national level, this was, astonishingly, the first gold medal India has won in an individual sport in any Olympics. And on the more important personal level, it was a testament to the years of single-minded hard work Mr Bindra dedicated to his sport. Not surprisingly, the government immediately took credit for his achievement.

India’s sports minister, Manohar Singh Gill, came on television and said, “I congratulate myself and every other Indian.” But while India’s shooting association is better than most of the bodies that run sport in the country, it was Mr Bindra’s family that enabled his success. Mr Bindra was lucky that his father is an industrialist who dipped into his personal wealth to support his son. He built a shooting range for Abhinav in his farmhouse in Punjab, and made sure he never ran out of ammunition, which is not made in India and has to be imported.

India and China are studies in contrast. The full might of the Chinese state goes into creating sportspeople who will bring it pride. The Indian government, on the other hand, does a pathetic job of administering sports in the country. Rent-seeking bureaucrats run the various sporting federations – or ruin them, as some would say. A great illustration of this is hockey, a sport once dominated by India, which failed to qualify for Bejing. Even though there is no Indian hockey team at these Olympics, four hockey coaches have duly made their way to Beijing. Franz Kafka would feel at home as an Indian sports journalist today.

Most of India’s finest sportspeople are self-made athletes who owe nothing to the system – Viswanathan Anand, the world chess champion, is a case in point. The sport where India has been most successful, cricket, is not administered by the government. Surely, nationalists would argue, there is a case to be made for pumping more money into our sport.

Such arguments are wrong. India’s leaders need to have a clear sense of priorities, and there are two things they would do well to consider. One, despite the gains sections of our economy have made since the liberalization of 1991, India remains a desperately poor country. Two, unlike China, India is democratic, and its government thus carries a certain responsibility towards its people, and the taxes it collects from them.

Any money that the government spends on sport could be better spent on building infrastructure: roads, ports, power-generating units etc. It would also do a lot of good simply left in the hand of the taxpayers, who would then spend it according to their own individual priorities. Hundreds of millions of Indians are forced to part with their hard-earned money through direct or indirect taxes, and it is perverse if that money is spent towards something as nebulous as an outdated notion of national pride.

For too long now, India has been an insecure nation craving validation from the West. Even many of us who speak of India as a future superpower have one ear cocked towards the west, straining to hear similar forecasts in a foreign accent, ignoring the condescension that such pronouncements sometimes carry. Similarly, we look to the sporting arena for affirmation of our self-worth. That attitude might have been understandable during the days of the cold war – but it no longer is.

Sport is a zero-sum game – for one nation to win, another must lose. But real life is non-zero-sum, and nothing demonstrates the win-win game of life as well as globalisation, with nations (and individuals) trading with each other to mutual benefit. In these times, it is clear we do not need Olympic medals to be a great nation, but economic progress that all Indians have access to. It is beyond the scope of this piece to spell out the many reforms that are needed for that happen – but spending taxpayers’ money responsibly is a key part of the puzzle.

I shall go against the prevailing wisdom, then, and say that I don’t mind if our government spends less money on sport, or even none. Where will our Olympic medals come from then, you ask (as if the last few decades have brought us a slew of them). Well, lift enough people to prosperity, and the sporting laurels will roll in. Ask Abhinav Bindra.

Where Your Taxes Go: 36

On a state funeral for a dead singer.

Ishmeet Singh’s death might be a tragedy for his family and his fans, but I don’t see why people who do not fall in either of those categories should have to pay for his funeral—and that chartered flight carrying his body from Ludhiana to New Delhi at taxpayers’ expense. If Parkash Singh Badal feels that Ishmeet deserves a grand funeral, then Parkash Singh Badal should pay for it out of his own pocket. That goes for everyone else who holds that opinion as well. Why should the taxpayer pay?

Yes, yes, Badal is obviously just making a populist gesture here. And it will work, because the people who praise him for it won’t figure that it is their money he is spending. Such it goes…

(For more on how our government loots us, check out my Taxes Archive.)

Where Your Taxes Go: 35

On a statue for a dead farmer in Karnataka.

I’m not kidding you, see the link above. A farmer named Siddalingappa Choori was shot by the cops for no fault of his own, and then:

[…] Choori’s wife, Kusuma, was given an appointment letter to work in the Haveri tehsildar’s office, and the government undertook to pay her children’s school fees and promised to install a statue of Choori in the town.

Compensation and suchlike is fine, but why on earth should my hard-earned tax money go into building a statue for a dead farmer? (Or even a dead politician, but that’s another matter.) If they really need to get rid of that money, just hand it over to Kusuma, it’ll be more use there. Who thought of a statue and why? I want to smoke what he was smoking, I do.

(Link via email from Happy-Go-Lucky. For more on how our government loots us, check out my Taxes Archive.)

Where Your Taxes Go: 34

On a bigger statue for Mayawati. The Times of India reports from Lucknow:

A statue of Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Mayawati has been removed from a prominent location by the authorities here barely 45 days after she unveiled it, officials said. She wants a bigger statue of herself in its place.

[…]

Officials said Mayawati was not happy with the quality of the sculpture. She had also expressed her displeasure over the fact that it was smaller than the statue of her political mentor Kanshi Ram.

Now there’ll be anti-incumbency in the next election and Mulayam Singh Yadav will take over and want an even bigger statue than Mayawati’s, and then Mayawati will come back and want one size bigger, and so on until some low-cost airline’s airplane crashes into Mayawati’s nose and there are enquiries and Rajesh Talwar is blamed for that also. I love my India.

(Link via email from Ravikiran. Related posts on taxes in UP: 1, 2. For more on how our government loots us, check out my Taxes Archive.)

Where Your Taxes Go: 33

On foreign holidays for our esteemed judges. CNN-IBN reports:

The Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, KG Balakrishnan, wants judges to be kept out of the purview of the Right To Information (RTI) Act.

Now an RTI application put in by CNN-IBN has thrown up interesting details of how judges have extended their holidays, often for personal purposes, at Government expense.

Ironically, the urge to travel starts at the top. Balakrishnan, after taking over as Chief Justice, made at least seven trips abroad in 2007 traveling First Class with his wife with the air fare alone costing over Rs 39 lakh.

For instance, during his 11-day trip to Pretoria, South Africa in August 2007, the Chief Justice took the following route – Delhi, Dubai, Johannesburg, Nelspruit, Capetown, Johannesburg, Victoria Falls, where the judge finally didn’t go and returned via Dubai to Delhi.

Sure, a judge might need to make an official trip to study the judicial system of another country or something, but this is clearly tourist travel happening here, and according to the CNN-IBN reporter, there are “government rules that say judges cannot be accompanied by wives on work tours.” When the law minister HR Bhardwaj was asked about this, he replied:

How can you deprive the wife? You are a woman. You should understand.

I hereby demand that all Indian women be sent to South Africa for a holiday paid for by HR Bhardwaj out of his personal savings account. Thank you.

(Link via email from reader Shyam. For more on how our government loots us, check out my Taxes Archive.)

Where Your Taxes Go: 32

On celebrating a mutiny that took place 150 years ago. MSN reports:

India spent Rs 130 crore to celebrate its First War of Independence, 1857 revolt, without constructing a memorial for the martyrs or their directory.

A day after the government officially ended the year-long celebrations, a member of the National Implementation Committee (NIC) on 1857 revolt has termed most of the expenditure as “waste” on a “national tamasha”.

A tamasha it is, and an ironic one at that, for our government is closer in spirit to the British forces of 1857 than to the mutineers—this waste of our money, coercively taken from us, is a great example of that. Will we ever rise up against such theft?

Also read: The Republic of Apathy.

(Link via email from Rajeev Mantri. For more on how our government loots us, check out my Taxes Archive.)

Where Your Taxes Go: 31

In unnecessary gizmos for government bigwigs—especially ones that will keep them occupied during traffic jams. Mid Day reports that Mumbai’s mayor Shubha Raul recently threw a “tantrum” and demanded a laptop.

“Raul liked the additional municipal commissioner’s laptop and said she wanted one like it, but we gave her a better model,” said an IT officer. “It’s the best laptop in the BMC.”

Raul obviously is happy. “Who doesn’t want to get the best in the world? I am no exception. At least now, when I’m stuck in traffic jams, I can entertain myself with the laptop. I have never been tech savvy, but I will learn,” said Raul.

I don’t grudge our mayor a laptop, even if her post is largely ceremonial, but see the one she got. It’s a Toshiba Qosmio G40 costing Rs. 1.65 lakh. That’s like buying a Merc as an official car—it’s simply not necessary. I bought a beautiful Dell Inspiron 1525 a month ago for 45k, and it performs every function the mayor could possibly require—unless she’s editing films or creating special effects for Star Trek .

And see the woman’s gumption. Who doesn’t want to get the best in the world? she says. That’s my money you’re spending, Mrs Raul. Have some shame.

(Link via email from Amol Chavan. For more on how our government loots us, check out my Taxes Archive.)