India Uncut
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Sunday, June 26, 2005
What's that smell?
Tavleen Singh writes:
There is something about this government’s grandiose schemes to guarantee employment and improve rural India that bring back, at least for me, memories of central planning and Nehruvian socialism. These memories are nearly all depressing because of the second-rate, shoddy quality that nearly everything had. Roads were bad, telephones looked like relics, airports and airlines had the dead hand of government stamped all over them, electricity and water came and went at their own sweet will, shops stocked goods of such shoddy quality that the average Indian was crazy about all things foreign and everything was always in short supply. People waited decades for a telephone connection, and as for domestic gas almost the only people who got it were those who knew an MP. The reason for this sad state of affairs was central planning and big government, and something about the Sonia-Manmohan approach to governance has a worrying reek of the past.For some of us, including me, this is stating the obvious. The rest of us don't care, unwilling to examine their received beliefs in the light of 58 years of reality. It all seems so pointless sometimes.
