New Article on Illegal Migration has been added.
My father is an audit officer, but since the job required him to travel a lot, he quit it and took a job in a new department. He worked in the Research and Development wing of the department and often found discrepancies in the documents. There was a significant difference in the money received and money disbursed for the operations. Basically the main work of his team was to check the funds received by each department and check how much were spent. His team made reports which contained a detail list which they had to submit it to the government. They were required to explain in full detail, in case of disparity between the amount received and amount spent. Many funds for the departments like flyovers, trash, and road development etc. had a huge amount of difference. In few cases the development was still going on. In a few other cases the teams applied for additional funds in spite of actually having adequate funds. Seeing all this, my dad complained to higher authorities, and on doing so he was shifted to a different department. Such was the pervasiveness of corruption in the department.
My father took up his duties in the new department. The people there were cordial, and my father really liked the job. But then again he found discrepancies in the amount of funds received and amount spent. He tried his best to be neutral and leave things as they were. But he was not able to answer himself. He was depressed for days and he tried covering the negative amount. This made the people who were there happy. They gave him bonus and benefits by which I was happy. Later one day he filed a report against them and got it published in paper. They were very furious and they threatened him with goondas and hooligans, causing him to resign the job. Had a chance to read the paper presented by Dr. B R Ambedkar at the Columbia University, on the genesis and mechanism of caste.
The paper was pretty enlightening and propounded a theory on the formation of castes and the practices of sati, enforced widowhood and girl marriage. Ambedkar theorizes that the on thing that is characteristic of caste is endogamy (marriage within the community). So in-order to ensure endogamy all castes would require equal number of marriageable men and women, else people would stray or marry outside the caste. So, death of married man would cause a surplus woman and similarly death of a married woman would cause a surplus man. So in-order to address this issue of surplus man/woman, women were subjected to sati or enforced widowhood, and men to worldly renunciation or marriage to a younger girl (girl marriage). According to Ambedkar, men were considered superior to women with respect to contribution to the caste. Hence they were not killed and were married to younger girls, so as to not affect the parity of the number of the marriageable individuals. The paper gives a rare insight into the deep and analytic mind of Dr. B R Ambedkar. For those interested in reading the paper, below is the link: http://www.columbia.edu/itc/mealac/pritchett/00ambedkar/txt_ambedkar_castes.html My dad runs a jewellery shop in my hometown. Business is decent. But occasionally there are hassles caused by the police. The police fabricate a case wherein a thief steals gold from a house in the town. I have no idea as to who the thief is or even if he actually stole the gold. But they come to a random gold shop claiming that the thief had sold the gold there. With this as the pretext the policeconfiscate a certain amount of gold. The police return the gold only when the gold association, an association of gold merchants formed to secure the gold merchants from similar atrocities, pays them a certain amount of money. The transactions of the gold merchants are not completely transparent, and it is because of this that they fear revolting against the police. The membership of the association necessitates an yearly payment which adds to woes of the gold merchants. The direct cash transfer scheme involves the direct transfer of commodity based subsidies to the accounts of the people eligible for the same. This obviates the requirement of ration shop owners to sell commodities at subsidized rates to eligible people. The subsidized commodities which the shop owners had obtained from the government were often diverted to the open market and not rightfully reserved for the poor people. So by the introduction of this scheme the government aims to put an end to this illegal diversion by the ration shop owners. The government might have impressed many with the introduction of the direct cash transfer scheme, but a recent article in 'The Hindu' about a pilot project launched in the town of Kotkasim in the Alwar district of Rajasthan throws light on the difficulties involved in the efficient working of this scheme. The government had implemented the direct cash transfer scheme for kerosene subsidies in Kotkasim. As expected, there was a decrease in the total sales of kerosene. But this was not due to the decrease of illegal diversion of kerosene to the open market. The irregular transfer of subsidies, the inability of the poor to open bank accounts and the hassle of going to the bank to check if their account had been credited with the money served as deterrents causing a decrease in the consumption of kerosene and thereby its sales. This decrease in sales even affected the dealers, many of whom no longer found the business of selling kerosene profitable. But they were allegedly forced to maintain its supply by the government, with the intent of depicting the pilot as a success. Please visit this link for a detailed account:
http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/lead/neither-effective-nor-quitable/article4161139.ece |