Sinning against Sinha

Sinning against Sinha

The Finance Ministry is deadly serious about cutting costs. Every budget speech is peppered with homilies about the need to tighten belts and circulars are regularly despatched to government departments about cutting out the flab and observing financial discipline. All excellent intentions and Finance Minister Yashwant Sinha should be congratulated for his sense of propriety and commitment to the idea of a lean government. But it seems that the more the Finance Ministry talks about accountability, the more impervious is the system to such a suggestion.

This newspaper reported on Tuesday the amazing story of the joy ride that the parliamentary committee on railways is currently taking around the countryside. The idea, ostensibly, is to educate the MPs on the finer nuances of scrap disposal and railway catering so that they acquire the collective wisdom to make things better. The reality is that the ``study trip'' has become, more or less, a free pilgrimage at State expense, with helicopter halts at Vaishno Devi and a thoughtful stopover at Puri in time for the rath yatra of Lord Jagannath. By the end of this exercise, there is no certainty that these worthies would have acquired expert knowledge about unmanned level crossings but the Railways, almost certainly, would be poorer by Rs 10 lakh and the four senior Railway officials accompanying the MPs would have wasted a lot of time. Meanwhile, under the possibly mistaken assumption that MPs have the potential to become an Internet-savvy breed, it has been ordained that each one of them will now be eligible to50,000 additional free calls for surfing the net, apart of course from the two telephones and one lakh free calls they are already entitled to. The Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha secretariats or, rather, the long-suffering Indian tax-payer, will foot this bill.

What is intriguing is that even as these freebies are announced, there is no commensurate move to put a system of accountability in place to ensure that they achieve the objectives they are meant to achieve. People would have no quarrel with an MP suddenly being entitled to 50,000 free telephone calls if they can be sure that it is helping political connectivity and information gathering. What is more likely to happen, however, is that it is someone's grandson or nephew who will get to utilise those free calls for their personal net-surfing requirements. It is the twin syndromes of State-as-milch-cow and I-am-a-VVIP that are the enemies of rational spending and sensible lifestyles. A few weeks ago, the chief minister of a northern state disdained to walk on the railway platform in order to board a train like lesser mortals normally do and actually had his car driven up to the railway platform! Truly is it said that while a statesman is a politician who places himself at the service of the nation, a politicianis a statesman who places the nation at his service. India, alas, is a nation ruled by politicians, not statesmen.