Day: February 1, 2013

Hotels , airports , airlines and the fiscal deficit …. who is the culprit ?


Last month, I came across two interesting news , and I thought that I must put a comparison

29th January , 2013 in The Economic Times , it was reported that , Civil Aviation Minister , Ajit Singh has written 20 letters in 9 months for new airports in Uttar Pradesh to the Chief Minister , Akhilesh Yadav.

In the January 2013 issue of Forbes India , I had also read this interesting quote

“Atal Bihari Vajpayee use to narrate a story from the mid-1950’s when he was a young MP in a parliament led by Nehru. Parliament was debating building The Ashoka Hotel, India’s first luxury hotel t be constructed by the state. In one of the debates, Vajpayee said the job of the Government is to build hospitals, not hotels. Nehru was furious at the intrusion of the junior MP from a virtually non-existent party. He told Vajpayee that he didn’t understand anything and added that the state would build hospitals from the hotel’s profits. Decades later, Vajpayee would joke that the hotel was still making losses ( Shourie’s ministry nearly sold it ) and the state had failed to build enough hospitals .

We know that our current ‘Heavy industries minister’ Praful brought wide bodied dreamliners a few years ago when Air India was already grasping for breath, and last week , the ministry put out tenders for sale and re-lease of these dream liners. Should Praful be a minister or in one of the Tihar cells ?

You are the best judge as to what India needs ? A few politicians are just shooting from the mouth without applying their brains and causing billions of dollars of direct loss and much more opportunity loss indirectly

Shoot first ( without an aim ) ……principle of the Government


Centre for Participatory Democracy

With the UID scheme involving a Rs 5,000 crore rollout in the initial stage, now, it was felt the proposal be subjected to a more detailed examination by a GoM ! Can you imagine how the public money is being spent without having clarity ?  This is not just a blatant loot of the public money , but a plunder more brutal than what Mughals did !  On one side , we have 300 million starving , one the other side , this Government is throwing away the money on its whims and fancies in the name of a common man ?

The Cabinet discussion on Thursday ( 31st January 2013) revealed that , the ministerial panel was not immune from contradictory and blurred perceptions about Aadhaar, as UID is known, with some ministers saying they had received a card along with a number.

Confusion over whether the unique identity number is a number, a card or both, and concerns over UID and the National Population Register duplicating functions prompted the Cabinet to refer UPA-2’s ambitious project to a group of ministers.

Differences persisted as concern was also expressed over duplication or overlap between the National Population Register (NPR) and the UID. Both processes involve a similar collection of biometric data including iris scans.

And this is being done after spending thousands of crores of the hard-earned money, when we have a dangerous levels of external debt and fiscal deficit ?   Why have we not converted NPR into UID ?

This Government follows the principle ‘Shoot without a target’ in the name of the common man.

Most of the Government schemes have been executed with no end in sight and this is what is faulty with the Government .

Time to question this Government

Rajendra Pratap Gupta

http://www.commonmansblog.com