Sunday, March 23, 2014

The Gap!

Finally today, Aamir Khan had tried to explain the people of India on why and how the corruption in India impacts every citizen irrespective of their caste, religion and financial status through his satyamevjayate program. Many in the audience thought they do not pay taxes to government, in their understanding  tax means, the tax that you pay on your monthly income/salary. But he explained with an expert that the govt collects taxes from every single person in the country indirectly when they buy anything like a mobile, tooth paste, toothbrush, mobile bill payments ...etc. This indirect tax accounts for 67% of the total tax that the government collects! and the rest is the direct tax which includes the income tax. It is this tax money that the government spends in the name of budget every year to run the country. Basically every citizen is paying the government for it to run. This is how the government becomes servant and the citizen becomes master who pays.
But how many people would it reach? in fact Kejriwal had tried the same through his road shows even 10 years back.
Why is the people of India not aware on any of them in the first place? Be it on tax, economy, government, policy...etc. Why do we need Kejriwal or Aamir Khan? Isnt it all basic expected knowledge just like the knowledge to use our limbs and senses for survival?
Fact is, neither Kejriwal nor Aamir Khan can educate the whole India on everything. But, this is better than nothing though. We should acknowledge the beginning! So what should be the next step? It is very natural to say the next step is our education system, it is terribly bad that our education system ends up leaving us all handicapped understanding on all important fields of the nation that directly impact every one of us. Neither many realize that the scams unearthed play the major role for their suffering nor they understand the contribution of so many social activists who sacrifice their life for all the ignorance of the general public
Education system revolves around  getting the marks, but not really on education. I personally had one aim when i  was in school, that was to get a good score and find a great job to get my family out of debts. The majority of the population i believe falls in this category. Another section which is wealthy enough do not worry even on that. There is also another section which is not even fed enough to think about anything other than their basic survival. Meanwhile politicians get smarter every day in looting, they have evolved so much from giving 100/500 rupees to giving freebies like, TV, mixie, fan..etc once in a 5 year to loot the public every day and every minute for the whole five years! Yes, public gives them the license to loot! The loots evolved as well from mere thousands/lakhs to lakhs of crores.
The welcome change is that, as you see i have already started talking about all these. Thanks to the social media! but i still see that the reach of social media is not good enough to trigger a revolution that our country needs so badly at this hour. There is still a major percentage of people whose minds are insulated thickly by ignorance that they do not realize where the country stands today and why they should change their course in top gear.
With the nature of the insulation which the mind of the society has today, even a complete revamp in the education system will fail to have any impact unless the insulation is broken.
In these times when an year of governance by a bad party could sink the whole country forever, we should all realize the sense of urgency in our transformation. It is very important we see revolutionary changes both in the education system and the mindset of the society to understand the functioning of the nation. Corruption, riots, injustice, rapes, murders, theft ...etc everything reflect the functioning quality of a government and the government will respond only to the quality of awareness of the public!

To give a simple example of how a scam had it been prevented would have helped the people, just imagine the 1.76 lakh crore from 2G scam, had it been used to subsidize the price or reduce the tax on the petrol/diesel , the country would have seen a lesser inflation, for the fuel cost directly impacts the price rise of all commodities especially food. Mind you subsidies are neither always harmful nor always beneficial. The cooking gas has been subsidized already for more than Rs. 300 every cylinder. Decision on subsidy should be taken ofcourse taking into account its impact on the economy. And the tamilnadu freebies have already put the state at 1.7 lakh crore debt!

Every citizen should start giving same or better importance to the politics and functioning of government like we do for the cinema or cricket stars. Similar to tracking the number of centuries of cricket stars, we should track/debate the policies and laws brought in by the netas. People who already understand the impact of the politics should encourage and initiate discussions to help others who fail to do so.

There is already a beginning which I hope everyone acknowledges, I only wish  it shapes itself to a revolution the country has been waiting for