There is something wrong with societal values if the pizza delivery boy arrives sooner than the ambulance does

The results of the recent elections in country have raised hopes, including in business circles. Hopes have a habit of not coming home, unless they are structured or defined. The present business situation in India requires clarity of thought. It runs at least at two levels.

First is the level of daily chores. It includes unmitigated exasperation often caused by inadequate information, poor infrastructure and insincere, incompetent servicing. It makes the life of every Indian citizen painful just to pay the bills of water, electricity, telephone, schools, license, not to talk of insurance and similar installments. Keeping up with them on a daily basis is a challenge which would beat the patience of many.

The solution lies with resident welfare associations, colony administrative units, village Panchayats and the sheer connectivity of communication. The landlines must work and the mobile connectivity needs to last more than 10 seconds.

This brings us to the second level of problems, that is, infrastructure. Forget the big talk on 2G Spectrum and more. The pilots need to be having appropriate   licence. The engine drivers should get into their posts in a sober frame of mind and the taxi when hailed must turn up. The long and short of it is that the private citizen cannot create this infrastructure. There has to be some semblance of local self-Government. The authorities have to accept their fair share of the responsibility as well.

The bottomline here is that this is not a case for citizens’ actions or a subject which can be taught at the school level. (These two solutions are once too often projected as panaceas to unrelated problems.) Perhaps talk of NGOs in this regard has caused more confusion than solution. There are other ways in which the confusion is added.

This is by terming them as ‘management problems’. In that broad sense, everything is a management problem including reliability, keeping one’s word, keeping time and preventing wastage. But common sense and management are two different things.

The solution lies in making our institutions fulfill their brief and measure up to a bottom line of efficiency. That may be nothing grand but it is great. It is the bottom line of civil society.

There is something wrong with societal values if the pizza delivery boy arrives sooner than the ambulance does.

The hope that we voted for in the recent elections was a vote against rapacious gentry. If the Indian businessmen had started investing abroad in a  big way, it was a response to loss of hope at home.

No business can run with non-remunerative investments. Even if one puts aside ethics for a while, how long and how often can one keep obtaining basic life facilities on graftIJ The power dips and the power of the bulb is reduced to five watts. The electrician turns up late and he wants money and mithai from occupants of the lane! One is really at a loss of words to describe this phenomenon.

The process is almost endless. It is about time we put the lid on the talk of innovation and focused on the basics. There must be basic safety for all. Of course, the women and the children need protection. The old and the infirm too have to be taken care of. For that matter, even the young men and middle-aged persons are no less vulnerable. Organised crime cannot be resisted with the bare hands of a private citizen!

The security climate has to change. There is so much to be done with ourselves, with our families, with our environment, and the framework in which we operate. No business can successfully run till these basics are ensured.

Only because it is everyones job that it has become no ones job. Business will not grow and the gross domestic product will not escalate in infirm times. We need to put advocacy and responsible behaviour at the centre of the stage. This alone can make a change.

It’s time the governance processes accepted this creation of awareness as a core concern of their programme. The individual citizen is as helpless or powerful as his environment permits him to. The rest is talk of martyrdom, meant only for exceptional people.