Now that the all-important Legislative Council election that has secured the throne of Chief Minister Uddhav Thackeray is now behind us, can we the people of Maharashtra have some Governance now?
The rising number of positive cases and deaths, especially in cities like Mumbai are a matter of great concern. With days and a month or so remaining for the monsoon to arrive in India and Mumbai, the challenge is to ensure that the perennially water logging prone metropolis does not cripple once again at the slightest sneeze of the rain gods. The monsoon season will present an even more challenging task for the government to contain and control the COVID-19 pandemic.
The clichéd financial capital of the country is facing its existential crisis as the government plans to move its upcoming International Financial Services Center (IFSC) to neighbouring Gujarat. We care less about the implications of turning big ticket infrastructure projects or national calamities into political football matches.
No government can ill afford to allow the situation to drift endlessly and let economic activity suffer, just because some people are behaving as if they are above the law. Those who are suffering economically are bound to raise questions about the government’s inability to control the situation. It is too premature to judge whether the adequate back-end precautions and arrangements were made in advance to deal with the emerging crisis.
Some decisions like strict enforcing of the lockdown norms, ensuring essential services remained unaffected, taking the people into confidence and reassuring them, deciding on priorities between liquor and food, migrant labourers and above all re-starting the economy with stimulus or revival packages, beg some serious answers.
We have been repeatedly stating that urban development has never been our forte. At best it has served as a milch cow to our rulers. The pandemic has exposed our inefficiencies, corruption and nepotism in our civic, public health care and overall administration. It has also exposed our shamelessness with which we try to exploit human miseries for our narrow political and social gains and by turning them into publicity stunts.
No thought has ever been given to things like having large shelter facilities where people, migrant population or the homeless can be shifted not just in times of pandemic, but also in times of other natural or man-made disasters like floods, epidemics, wars, earthquakes, cyclones and other such major calamities.
World over there are Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) laid down while dealing with such crisis, whereas we tend to evolve them as and when the situation arises. After having enforced the lockdown, care should have been taken care of the migrant and homeless population. The porous and corrupt public distribution system has resulted in hungry migrant labourers hitting the road back to their native places.
The inability of the administration to enforce the lockdown in major cities, allowing people to walk their way back home after considerable delay is an open invitation for letting the pandemic spread to remotest villages. Was Revenue out of liquor more important so much so that social distancing could be thrown to caution? Or feeding the hungry was more important?
Announcing stimulus or revival packages is one thing, but to strictly enforcing them so as to ensure that they reach the intended targets is quite an another thing. Every other formal or informal sector worker is now demanding for economic revival package. The porous, inefficient, corrupt, nepotistic system ensures that these revival packages line up the pockets of the politically high and mighty, with the poor having to be content with some bread crumbs thrown at them.
The pandemic has also exposed the perils of not ensuring equitable distribution of economic, agricultural, industrial and other resources. Concentration of all such resources in one place has led to impoverishment and other socio-economic maladies that it brings along with it.
Part of the blame also lies with the people, the lack of awareness about ones rights and duties, treating elections and democracy as once in a five year event and lacking in political and social awareness. It is because of some who believe that they are above the law or the Virus cannot affect them and hence indulge in acts that not only endanger themselves, but also other fellow citizens.
As everybody awaits the fate of the lockdown, one thing is becoming evidently and abundantly clear our own actions will determine how safely, how well and how soon will we be able to overcome the crisis. Surely life and things will not be the same as they used to be before. But are we ready for the changes we will be required to make in our lives? Governance also needs to reboot itself and at least now can we have some serious governance now that political expediencies are behind our rulers?
