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Austerity?

Everyone in the majority partner of ruling UPA, Congress(I) is into an austerity drive now.

• Finance Minister requests External Affairs ministers to stop paying their own money on the accomodation they preferred. Media puts another spin on it by claiming FM actually forced them to move out!
• Party President travelled by economy class, shaming another first-time MP to move down from business class to economy, while in flight.
• General Secretary, who also happens to be the son of the Party President, travel by Train.

Hardly any of these are newsworthy, but there are a whole lot of news-starved channels that keep pushing this up the charts.

Most Indians know what happened to Bihar - when the ruler used bicycle as the mode of transport. Development happened at snail’s pace. Perhaps this is current Government’s way of warning us that the progress now will be proportionally slower - may be at the pace of a bicycle?

If the idea is to cut down wasteful expenditure, here are a whole bunch of other ways.

• Cut down the list of people getting Z level (and the levels below that too) security.
• Have only people like current President, PM, Cabinet Ministers, CMs, CJI and Armed Forces chiefs alone be classified as VVIPs. They loose this when they no longer hold the position.
• Reduce the number of ministries. Why does a democracy need Information and Broadcasting ministry? Certainly we don’t need Government to dish out film awards!
• Pass a law banning public expenditure in (re)naming public property (includes cities) and in building memorials - whether it is for elephants or mahouts.
• Sell off PSUs (Public Sector Utilities) that have not produced any reasonable output. We’ve been chasing the pipe dream of being self reliant, but it doesn’t help if we take 30 years to make a technology that was obsolete 20 years ago. Why does a Government need to run airlines, hotels etc.?