We live in depressing times. How many of you felt that India
was the worst country to live in the past 6 months??How many of you felt that
the government in India is the most useless and government servants the worst
that one could imagine? I am here to make
you feel better for being Indian and change your perspective on how the
government servants work. To help me do that Iam going to cite the event of
Kumbh Mela. I want to give a disclaimer, I am not here to campaign for Congress
or the Samajwadi party.
The Kumbh Mela is the Hindu event to commomerate the
alignment of Jupiter aligning of Jupiter and the Sun. It is believed that dipping
in the Ganga will relieve of all ur mortal sins. The Mahakumbh mela is held
once in 144 years. This year the MahaKumbh was held in Allahabad. 80 Million
people participated in it. I read an article which was ranking the gatherings
in the world according to the number of people attending it. The MahaKumbh came
first with 80 million people. The next biggest event was attended by 16 million
people in Iraq. Interestingly the 3rd biggest event happened to be
the funeral of Anna attended by 15 million people.
To put things into perspective Germany has a population of
81 milloion people, France has 65 million people and UK has 63 million people.
In short the Govt of UP and India has together handled a crowd larger than the
whole population of some of the developed countries.
How does the government handle all this crowd? They have
built a mega city of of 7 lakh tents with 31 police station and over 40 police
check posts, 36 fire stations and a mega super speciality hospital. This is a
city which is bigger than London, Paris and New York put together. This is a
proper city with sanitation facitilies , full electricity (yes people they have
power there), divided into avenues and well designed pathways.
Iam not telling this to you to extol on the achievements of
the UPA or the UP govt. I feel sad when educated people like you and me sit in
the cafeteria and pronounce judgements that Indian government is worthless and
India itself has no future. What was achieved in Allahabad in Jan 2013 is
nothing short of a miracle. Harvard University is sending a team to
study this "phenomenon". On the other hand the whole media is obssessed with the most depressing news, as they say no news like bad news.
Another statistic which I would like to cite is India
has an average of 1628 govt servants per 1 million people. While US has over
7200 govt servants per million people,In all developed countries it is around
6000 to 8000 govt servants per million people. In comparison the US govt does not handle the world's densest railway network, one of the most functional universal public distribution system and many other services which are provided by the Indian govt. Still they have 4.5 times more public servants than India.
Contrary to popular belief the Indian bureaucracy is not a bloated elephant, no my friends it’s a mouse, and it is
doing its best to move mountains.
