So.. After a long time.. I’m back blogging…
It’s because of my exams and stuff like that…
So…before I delve into the topic, I wanted to give some strong foundation which is wy the first part may seem like bit of belabouring…
After being in this country(Singapore) for about 6 months so far… I’m just amazed by the initiatives this Govt does in this country. Before I deal with more on this, let me give you some examples of how “bad” this country would have been if it were not properly maintained.
On the right is a photograph of a small pedestrian walkway which is kind of clean everywhere else except for that area where there is a water seepage. Singapore is a country that gets abundant rainfall. Infact, it rains nearly everyday in Singapore. So it should not come as a surprise to see water flowing across like this. The road you see on the right is near a small hill inside my college.
Because this road is kind of “not maintained” well, within a couple of days, it turns mossy.
The one you see below is a tree in that “forest”.
To prevent formation of this moss, the govt, literally has to “fight against nature” as its extremely humid here and cleans up every pedestrian platform, roof tops of all the bus stops, schools, public buildings etc., etc., You don’t have to do this in India, still, our infrastructure is not “World class”.
Now to NYC…
I’ve not been to this place, yet I’m just reflecting my opinions on what people say about this city.
Here too, the govt cleans up the snow that has fallen overnight failing which literally no road traffic can move. A picture from wikimedia commons is shown below for reference.
Again, you don’t have to clear snow in India (atleast in many parts of the country) which means less work for the Government.
Nearly every developed nation I knew of became 
powerful not because of the people (Yes, Japan is an exception) but because of either a very charismatic leader (like in Singapore) or a very efficient government (like China)… It’s painful to say that India has neither of them and after 60 years of Independence, our country is worse than it was during the British period.
Moreover, because Singapore is humid, nearly every thing that is left exposed is affected with Fungus. The image below shows my mobile phone data cable that has a fungal coating on it. It’s next to useless now.
Another photograph of my shirt that I forgot to dry it in a hanger after wearing it on a sunny day…
Hopefully, I could clear the fungus off by washing it again…
But, so far, I haven’t seen a place, a seat in the train/bus in Singapore that’s mossy or fungal coated.
In India, We don’t have to “plan” in advance for anti-fungal protection, Yet, our bus/train seats are so unclean.
Now, a lot of time, when I make a comparison between India and Singapore, people always say, Hey, Singapore is small.. you can do anything over there. But atleast when population density is taken into consideration, Singapore’s density is atleast 20 times that of India!!! and I’m serious… 350 persons/sqkm in India vs 6000 in Singapore. Even otherwise, I’ve made comparisons before with a “big” country, China here.
Why is our country still a “developing country”, when a lot of countries(South Korea, Taiwan, Japan, Singapore… etc., to name a few…) around us that were poorer than us became very rich and developed?
The number one reason that I think is internal commotion. Though we are a country that speaks over 20 different languages, we are not united on a single language. Migration between states becomes more difficult that migrating to a different country. A person coming from a nearby state is often treated as a foriegner to their “land”. During the early days of Independent India, there were some “initiatives” to make Hindi the common language of India. Somehow, it has not got widespread acceptance atleast in the Southern states. Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew was brilliant. Though the country had predominantly higher Chinese population, he did not force the others to learn Chinese. Instead all of them learnt English and accepted English as the link language. But unfortunately it did not happen like that in India. Hindi, which was spoken only in three states (UP, MP and Haryana) was imposed on the remaining 22 states just because Jawaharlal Nehru was from UP. As a result, till date, we fight among states owing to lack of unity. To this date, the central govt is pushing everyone to learn this language by various means. For example, to enter politics, it’s mandatory to know Hindi. To ace the IAS, it’s mandatory to know Hindi and so on… (Another reason why central govt is sparsely populated with Southies) This has only incited a feeling of hatred and not unity as the govt expected it to be.
Secondly, the government is defunct and does not know to manage funds. Because Kerala is small, very little funds are allocated to Kerala for industrial development. A state with 100% literacy is far behind in industrialization and no one is simply cared about it.. (PS: I’m not a keralite). The same applies to our seven sister states of the North East. When they migrate to other parts of India, we casually mock, “hey you look like a chinese, are you really a Indian?” They look like chinese, because they are of Sino-tibetian origin unlike Indo-aryans or dravidians and it’s a part of our multi-ethnic culture. why should we ignore them?
Third reason is very high income inequality. Maharashtra boasts that it’s the richest state in India in terms of GDP per capita. But I doubt that. If we ask Ambani’s family, Salman Khan and Sachin Tendulkar to migrate to Bihar, then probably Bihar could become the richest state. According to World bank, any one living with less than 2US$ a day is deemed to be struck with poverty and according to that statistics, over 80% (or approximately 800 million) people live with income of < 100 Rs a day. What did the government do to uplift them? I fear none. But, Yes, it did one smart Math. According to India, anyone earning less that 0.4$ a day (15Rs a day) is deemed to be poverty struck and by this figure, only 30% of Indians are poor. This 0.4$ is calculated using nominal GDP by India. But owing to very high inflation nominal GDP figures is often misleading. Infact India is third richest (richer than Japan) country in terms of nominal GDP which shows the extent of mislead nominal GDP calculations can have.
Fourth is the Lack of Population control: China has a one child policy in place to control population. They understood the negatives of a high population. We are nearly 90% of chinese population yet our land area is like one-third of China and still our government does not bring in any reforms here.
Fifth is Literacy: When Kerala has a whopping 100% literacy, other states should learn from it and try to implement a similar system in their state. But our tendency is, “Why should we imitate that puny little state? my state is great.”
There are even more, but I don’t want to sound like a negative critic. Nearly everything goes the wrong way. A govt that does not care about the citizens but do care a lot about their seventh heir. An anthem that does not praise the country, a pe
rson who does not deserve to be called “Father” is the “Father of Nation”. (I believe that we got our Independence because of Nethaji) etc., etc.,
Because we’ve already lost a lot of opportunites in the past, we now have to work really hard to restore it. I strongly believe that a good and a high quality education is the only way for resurrection and I’ve already blogged about that here. Another sulekha blogger, sujim, has put his thoughts here.
May be if you have more to say, feel free to comment on this blog…
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