agenda for election 2014

As General Election 2014 is nearing every political party is busy in making big promise and trying to draw the attention of public towards them. General election is the biggest festival of a democracy specially a participative democracy where stake of a common man is more or less limited to casting vote once in a five year. It’s a chance of every adult to express the values, ideals they stand for and what they want from their law makers. Keeping this argument in mind it’s very important for people to set agenda, issues for general election and hence selecting appropriate government. Today the major problems our country facing are price –rise, increasing gap between labour and middle class, high unemployment rate and more importantly very high hidden unemployment (for example if one person is sufficient to do the job and two person are doing the job then one person is suffering from hidden unemployment), productivity of capital investment and human resource use, increasing crime graph and all time high corruption and opaque system and arbitrary process of decision making. Most of the problems can be tackled by boosting Indian economy in Indian way. Increasing proportion of manufacturing in GDP so that more jobs are created and unemployment rate goes down. At the same time we need to check the harassment of labour and executives by big corporate. We also need to make small blocks of industries so that the migration from villages to metros stops and the difference in development of states goes down and all states can be happy. It will also help in uniform the utilisation of resources of all the places like ground water and air. We need to correct the education system in a way so that it doesn’t produce machines or robots but intelligent humans with humanitarian values rather than being totally focussed for material benefits and with innovative thinking and a thirst for going up not for materialistic benefits but for betterment of fellow citizens. The other area of concern is inefficiency and malpractices in delivery of public services be it police, ration, education, health or any other service. Because there are malpractices in public delivery system, all of our policies are failing and right people are not getting their rights and despite of several policies in place our country and society is not going forward. Inflation needs to keep in check and not by subsidies but by right policies. Subsidies should be provided in areas which directly affect poor people. Another most important point is to that whosoever parliamentarian comes in parliament he must follow parliamentary decorum and should not disrupt parliament because disrupting parliament is like killing government and governance because parliament is highest decision making body and it should take decisions otherwise country will go in policy and decision paralysis. Public should out rightly reject the parliamentarians who are killing the parliament. Law and order situation of the country needs to improve and criminals or politicians supported by criminals must be kept out of power. A mechanism needs to be set in place by which inefficient public servant can be thrown out of the system so that efficiency of public servant increases. On the foreign relation front i am quite satisfied with current government’s policies but new government should try to improve our relations with our neighbours and most important of them is China. Boundary issue with China should be settled so that trust with china can be developed and our defence expenditure can be cut down to utilise it for some other purpose. On the defence side we need to develop more infrastructures to reduce our dependence on foreign machineries. Energy security should be given importance and nuclear technology should be used aggressively for electricity rather than defence purpose because nuclear energy is till now looks to have better future than all the renewable sources combined because all the renewable technology available till now either needs high capital investment with low returns. And in the end railways should be given prime importance because it has suffered most from coalition politics since 1996 and railway is most important source of conveyance for India. It should be made more secure, and more robust. Four lane railways should be employed on busy tracks to increase efficiency of railway and instead of just increasing the number of trains we should focus on increasing the number of rails and other infrastructure.

Why death penalty must be abolished

I have had several discussions with my friends over death penalty with my friends and colleagues and myself on several occasions but none of the times i have thought about it in more articulated view than this time. I still remember the time during summer of 2010 when kasab was sentenced death penalty by a session court to be more precise it was 8/5/2010. I was very happy because after all he killed many of my fellow Indians and it was only justice to ask for his death and the first reaction of normal nationalist Indian i celebrated it. But later on during the next summer when i really started reading newspaper and to be more precise it was “The Hindu”. And after realising how inhumane it is i went against it. But if you give any man the reasoning that giving capital punishment is inhumane his first argument will be why do we only care about the human rights?? Second argument will be that criminal is really inhumane so he doesn’t deserve human rights. But to counter all these arguments i must say remind all that any criminal act is committed against the state and so is every punishment awarded by state. But what is the definition of state?? To be precise what is the definition of India?? Is it the mountains, rivers, plains, sea, sky, stones , trees or land?? Or it’s the government?? Or the people who live in India. The most logical definition of India will include very thing that is contained inside India and most important of them will be people of India. So every punishment given in the name of state is given in the names of Indians. Hence in short if anyone has been awarded death by Indian courts is the murder of that criminal person by all the Indians that includes all of us. Because that man committed an heinous crime against us all so if you think about it at first you will think that its fair because its revenge and we all love revenge. But we are seeking revenge then we can’t be a civilised society. Revenge is something we all like may be because in our movies all the heroes seek revenge or may be it has to do something with human psychology. But revenge is never good and civilised society can never seek revenge. If murder is heinous crime for which someone has got death penalty then why we should all commit it. Hence capital punishment should not be awarded. But the second argument goes that what should we do to criminals who are inhumane? I would say keep them in jail till they are dead. Never let them out because they are dangerous to society so isolate them from the society. Because his any sort of influence on our society can harm us. And that’s the real aim of sending a person to jail. Jail is not about beating or punishing a criminal but jail is about isolating the people who are dangerous for the society and trying to change them so that they are again valuable for society because every life is valuable to us. The other question of death penalty being a deterrent. This theory has already failed on many accounts plus jail for whole life will also serve as equally or more effective deterrent.