Latasinha's Weblog

How to deal with Issues

Never play with the feelings of others. Because you may win the game but the risk is that you will surely lose the person for a life time.  Shakespeare 

Correct diagnosis is necessary for curing a disease. If diagnosis is not correct, it would be difficult to treat the disease properly. Similarly if a nation is not able to assess correctly its weaknesses, which are putting hurdles on the way of its development, it would become difficult for it to achieve its targets within time and cost parameters.

India has everything, a nation needs for its development – like tremendous amount of skilled and unskilled manpower, all kinds of raw materials in abundance, a good legal system, a huge market and potential to export virtually everything, provided cost of its inputs are kept at international levels. Still success is far away and still much more is required to be done to achieve its desired goals. Everything depends on how those in the realm of authority perceive and handle them.

One of the main reasons behind it is that there is difference of opinion amongst decision making authorities about the issues to be tackled on priority basis and its possible solutions. Like “Four Blind Men and the Elephant”, different people and groups in power echelons or leaders of political parties perceive and project disparate parts of nation’s issues differently. Usually they ignore harsh realities/facts and see only those aspects of a problem what pleases them ignoring the root cause of the problems or bothering about the psyche of the common men. Damage is usually done by vested interests of various pressure groups, which usually form opinions on half cooked knowledge or incomplete data. They are interested in short term gains.

It is easier for the authorities to play on emotions of the populace rather than to make efforts address real issues. To  divert mob attention from real issues, most of the politicians put emphasis on abstract ones based on the emotions of the people, like “Equity”, “Secularism”, “Social Justice”, “ reservation” etc., which gives at-least some hope to the people. But the end result of all this is that instead of bringing prosperity, it has incited people to pit emotional venom against each other, bred in them intolerance, inflexibility, narrowness, unadulterated materialism or/and feeling of otherness/estrangement. The result is persistent backwardness and endemic instability.

Development of nation demands awareness and a sense of responsibility amongst masses and amongst its leaders will to find out honestly the real issues posing challenges before the government rather than wasting their efforts on peripheral/abstract ones for short terms gains. Authorities should make sincere efforts to address basic problems.

Until and unless basic issues are analyzed and tackled sincerely and honestly taking the total scenario in view, it will be difficult to find out proper solutions for the sustainable development of the nation as a whole. 

August 15, 2008 - Posted by latasinha | Bureaucracy/Civil Services | Effective governance