Sunday, 12 January 2014

Shared Responsibility or Janata Darbar?



How much weight can you lift? If you are strong, you may lift 50-100 Kgs. Even Hossein Rezazadeh  of Iran who holds the world records for lifting weight could lift only  472 kgs. Now suppose you wish to lift a weight of a ton (1000 Kgs) or may be a hundred tons? If you commit the mistake of lifting the entire weight alone, you are likely to be totally crushed under the weight.
Yet any amount of weight can be lifted if you have the support of a large number of people and you have the powerful machines like cranes with you for assistance.
Sometimes, political leaders, in order to reach to the people try to lift the entire weight of the administration  on their shoulders which is other held by thousands of people in the Government.  Recently, Arvind Kejriwal government organized ‘janata durbar’ (public hearing) on the streets across the Delhi Secretariat where many thousands people gathered to submit their complaints to the Chief Minster directly. The result was a scene of utter chaos with uncontrollable crowds thronging the venue. The Chief Minister had to disappear on the advice of the Delhi Police, leaving his Cabinet colleagues to handle the swelling crowd. 

 Great works can never be performed by a single person. An old Hindi song says “Sathi hath badhana. Ek Akela Thak Jayega, Mil Kar Jor Lagana” (Friends extend your hands for support. One person will get tired. Let’s all work together).
However, in order to ensure many people to work together, you need trust. If you believe that other people are not trustworthy,  corrupt and inefficient; you can never take them along with you and perform great task. A Chief Minster (CM) is supported by a large number of officers and staff and many of them are competent and willing to work with the CM for the welfare of the people.
It would be better that each person is made responsible for his job and each Head of Department must take responsibility of his/her department. They may conduct public meetings every day or every week to listen to grievance of the people. They may be directed to solve the problems within stipulated time of say 15 days- 1 month. If the problems are not solved within the period, the aggrieved public can appear before the public meeting of the concerned Minister. When even Minister is not able to solve the problem, then the citizen must approach in the Janata Darbar of the Chief Minister. In the process, it should be ensured that the officers/staff who deliberately delay the work or refuse to do the work as per the law are punished severely.
A prudent approach is required to solve the problems of people, which is enormous. It may be dangerous to increase the expectation of people to a level which can’t be met by any human effort.

1 comment:

  1. Why does a chief minister of a city-state like Delhi need to sit in the middle of the road to hear the public? Is the CM a beaucrat who has to deal with applications? Or does he consider himself the final court of appeal capable of dispensing justice at the push of a button? If the answer to any of these is yes, we need a re-poll in Delhi. In a thriving democracy, with a huge executive, if an aam aadmi has to travel right up to the chief minister, it indicts the entire system for failure. It shows that every tier of executive has become dysfunctional. Frankly, what is it that Kejriwal is trying to achieve except some publicity and TV time? It would be insane to believe that he would be able to solve every petitioner’s problem just by personally hearing him. Instead of forcing people to jostle with each other for a minute with him, Kejriwal should ideally work on strengthening the existing system. The focus should be on ensuring that problems are solved at the lowest level of the administrative hierarchy. Instead of making people come to his door, Kejriwal should create a system where the administration goes to the aam aadmi to solve his problem. Kejriwal needs to repair the existing pyramid, instead of turning it upside down. Even if he is keen on interacting with his janata, Kejriwal should use technology—heard of emails, text messages, helplines?—instead of sticking to ideas that looked innovative 500 years ago.

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