Winner 3, Mockingbuddha, in response to Should India be a soft state or an assertive one?
A little bit of history.
America faced this problem while it was growing big, in fact one of its Presidents got elected for saying that America will stay out of world politics. They even tried to stay out of World War II.
As we can see, circumstances forced them to a bigger role, and to say the least, they have acquitted themselves pretty well.
India too can, and will, when the world stage calls for it. Till then let us stay content playing second fiddle and minding our own business…
We got a million problems to solve.
Winner 4, Sushil, in response to multiple questions:
The role of the government very simply put should be to use the countries resources for the betterment of the country (not themselves).
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Next Generation:
Rather than teaching them that this is how it works, we need to take the initiative to tell them what is correct.
Most people who break traffic signals on a daily basis are educated urban people. So clearly education is not only what we need. There is a higher social responsibility that we have !
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1)introduce age limit for politicians
2)minimum qualifications,
3)use e-governance extensively
4) police and judicial reforms
5)bring all including PM under empowered Lok Pal
6) plug loopholes and leakages in expenditure.
7) computerise land records
8)connectivity on top priority to remote villages-
9)grid independent per generation and distribution
10) use communication technologies to provide distance education, health, information, training.
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India needs economic reforms in almost every field, but the 2 major ones in my opinion are infrastructure and agriculture.
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The government-citizen model should be that of coaching (selection) staff – cricket team. The coaching staff (citizens) will propose changes, corrections, improvements in their own right, but the final execution is that of the cricket team (government).
Accountability and performance is the only way that the government will keep working.
That said the selection committee/coaching staff should be specialists in their particular field and should be representatives of a bigger society.
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What I am suggesting here is that every farmer should not be given a tax break or free seeds or fertilisers … It should be directly proportional to their incomes and farm outputs. Today there are farmers who drive in the fanciest of cars and have incomes of more than 1crore from farming, but still use all the incentives.
Also there should be a timeline or number of times that the same family or its generations can use “right/incentives”. WE need to make them “self-sufficient”
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Power generation has to be focused on renewal energy sources. For a country like India where we have sunlight for 10 months of the year, we have been extremely poor in investments for research in Solar Energy. The government needs to come about with revolutionary investments and incentives to make solar energy attractive for the common man and not just a Tax Deduction for the wealthy few.
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Indian agriculture needs everything that we can give :
1) Better seeds, fertilizers etc.
2) Better water supply systems so that there is less dependency on “Rain”
3) Cheaper loans and freedom from “loan sharks”
4) Better storage facilities – warehousing/cold storage
5) Centralized markets for fast selling of produce and hence reduction of losses.
Continued tomorrow.
