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India Urgently Needs Social Reforms More Than Economic Progress
Sometime ago, I was at the Helsinki airport, waiting for my flight to Mumbai. It was 7pm and the swanky airport had a peaceful and luxurious ambience. Soon I learnt that the flight was delayed by then hours. As I settled down to read a book in the quiet atmosphere, I was rattled by the shrill noise made by a group of some 20 Indian tourists who ambled into the lounge. They were speaking, guffawing, and calling out each other very loudly. Soon, their children started running all over the place, as if they were playing in a stadium! Everyone in the lounge was aghast. The airline staff was polite, and duly arranged for meal coupons which were more than adequate even for a glutton like me! But my noisy brethren were hungry for more! They stormed into the airline manager’s cabin and asked to be shifted to a 5-star hotel. This when the flight was to depart in 2 hours. When that was politely declined, they demanded one more meal coupon for each passenger! When I said I didn’t need another meal, they said, “Le lo na, free mil raha hai..!” The best was yet to come. As soon as we boarded the flight, one lady took out mango slices from her bag and asked the airhostess to distribute them to the whole group who were sitting all over the place. In doing so, some mango pieces fell to the floor and we were watching in bewilderment. Contrast the image of Indians this incident must have created in the minds of all those present, with India’s image as a resurgent economic power. Newspaper columns and television programs are replete with discussions on how to grow the country’s economy, match it with China’s, and so on. Use of terms like the BRIC nations, double-digit growth, the demographic dividend etc. is commonplace. We are already a trillion dollar economy, and growing at 9%. And likely to be world’s third largest in 15 years! Our unemployment has been steadily coming down. Our per capita income, though still low at $900, has improved considerably over the last decade. We are selling two million new cars and almost 8 million two-wheelers a year. Our tele-density has increased from less than 5 to 65%. We have 75 million cable TV homes. Add to all this our achievements in science and space, and we seem to be doing pretty well. So? All izz well? Can we be called a developed nation even 20 years from now in spite of the robust economy? No chance in hell! Because money alone doesn’t mean progress. If it did, then most of the Arab world would have been called ‘developed’.Money, without real education, leads to a depraved society. Lalit Bhanot put his foot in the mouth when he said recently that our standards of hygiene are different from those in the developed countries. Earlier the Home Minister had to face the flak of the Delhi’ites when he said they must behave! But the bitter truth is that we Indians are an unruly, uncivil lot. Look all around you: the way we drive! There is utter mayhem on the road. If you reach the destination safely, it is only because Lord Brahma willed you to! Lane discipline? To many those white stripes only mean employment to casual labourers, if not to favour some paint company who may have bribed some authorities! While speeding people even open the door to spit paan masala. If you ever see a driver stopping at a zebra-crossing to allow pedestrians to cross, you are allowed to faint in disbelief! Such niceties are against our culture! Have you observed how we behave when we see a queue? The chances are we won’t join the queue. Instead we would walk straight to the head of the queue and then lean over the counter to talk to the clerk! In most cases we have more than one queue at the same counter! Our honourable political leaders and babus think queues are not for them. Urinating on roads for us is as common as defecating is for our bovine cohabitants! Ever since Independence, we as a nation have focused our discourse on removing economic poverty, but have done nothing to make the society ‘civil’. ‘Garibi hatao’ is deeply-etched in our psyche. As a society we have always measured our success in terms of the money one has. This, in spite of the fact that our ancient traditions taught us to value good behaviour more over material wealth. There is no doubt that the country is well on its way to economic progress and is likely to be a superpower by 2020. But with all this progress we are still not quite ‘there’ in the world order as yet. We continue to be viewed as a backward society. The problem is, no one is talking about it. India needs social reforms---fast. And they must begin at homes and early in schools. What should we do? 1. Introduce Social Behaviours as a compulsory subject in schools. 2. Set up a Centre for Monitoring Indian Society (CMIS) a.k.a. Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy. 3. Set up a helpline where anyone can call and register instances of aberrations. 4. Create a Civic police force employing fresh school and college graduates. 5. Air creatively-produced advertisements 6. Improve civic amenities such as toilets, drinking water. 7. Create a robust mechanism for issuing driving licenses after thorough training on traffic rules, and for enforcing them. And we would have to stay the course for a couple of decades if we want the world to accept us as an evolved society. In short, we must learn how to behave!
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