Gareebi Hatao (eradicate poverty)! Has been the mantra for most political parties since the year 1947, when the British granted us independence leaving the country in utter poverty. (“In 40 years, between 1880 and 1920, British colonialism killed 100 million Indians and, according to research by economic historian, Robert Allen, extreme poverty in India increased under British rule, from 23% in 1810 to more than 50% in the mid-20th century.”) And since the last 77 years Indians have been striving very hard ONLY to eradicate poverty. But unfortunately even today at every damn traffic signal in the so called ‘Silicon Valley of India’ – you can spot a beggar asking for alms, and outside every God damn temple, you find a queue of paupers and homeless. Why is that?
Here is just one real time example (there are 1000 others right from the education system to the social evil called corruption, which I shall discuss with time), about how Indians and the Indian government fails and will continue to fail in its mission of lifting the average person’s lifestyle that they announce with major fanfare in every God damn budget or parliament speeches.
I moved into a gated community of 400 families (most of them were working for IT companies) in the year 2011 in India, which was far far away from the city limits. Back then the only Internet connection we had was BSNL (Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited) – a government owned Internet Service Provider – that was providing Internet connection since the year 2007.
BSNL spent money (the government money collected from the citizens in the form of taxes) on the infrastructure, labour, equipment, towers and succeeded in providing internet connection to the elite families in a place that was not any better than a forest.
Once shops started coming up, and the number of people residing around the community increased (in the year 2014) – ‘Airtel’ – a private service provider – came up with some fascinating offers and every resident moved to Airtel without giving a second thought. BSNL was abandoned overnight with no mercy whatsoever.
Things were perfectly fine till 2016 when ‘Jio’ – another private Internet provider of India – owned by Mukesh Ambani (who hit the World news with the most expensive marriage of his son Anant Ambani) came into the picture. Jio provided 3 months free Internet, with a speed better than Airtel or BSNL and all moved to Jio overnight. So logically, Internet came into India in the year 1996 (completely owned by VNSL, that was changed to BSNL later), and Jio took 20 long years to provide a seamless net connection to the people residing 10 kms away from the city limits.
I rented a small office just near my house, that was a stand alone house, and even today Airtel and Jio refuse to provide internet connection to small houses in my area. I had to go for BSNL once again.
BSNL (Indian government owned ISP) also lost the battle to Jio and Airtel on the mobile phone connection business. 5G spectrum was provided to Airtel and Jio before it was provided to BSNL (the only logical reason I could think for this foolish decision is ‘corruption’ that remains to be the spine of the sick Indian system). BSNL was stuck to 2G for almost 2 years.
Private companies donate crap loads of money to the political parties during their election campaigns, and the politicians in power return the favour by making offers that are bad for the government and its organisations but mouth watering for the private businessmen.
Who cares if BSNL is making a loss, or the employees’ salaries don’t increase, or they are not given enough budget to market or promote their services properly, or if they don’t stand as a tough competition to private players? The political party is here for 5 years, and after that people might vote them out – make hay while the sunshines!
On top of that the mobile towers that were built by the BSNL (using public money) were allowed to be used by Jio (private businessman), which otherwise could not afford to or would have decided not to build on its own. Wow!
In this scenario how could any Indian government company survive? Or make profits? Who would want to join a government firm? How can government provide more jobs if the existing once make loss due to bad business decisions? And why wouldn’t the creamy layers leave the country to fly off to the US or Canada or UK? Everything is connected like the BSNL tag line reads – Connecting India.