UPA: Unreal Plan of Action

The UPA government is off to a flying start. I absolutely love the action points they have for their five year tenure, actionable within the next 100 days. There's a firm agenda andu00a0 timetable.

The worry is whether it will be achieved. Sure, they'll spend 17,000 crores in procuring rice at market prices and selling it to 260 million people at Rs 3 per kg. But will it actually reach the people it's meant for? Or will it find its way back to the open market profiting only those who canu00a0 usurp the distribution system?

They'll set up the infrastructure for secondary education, but implementation will probably be a mess.

Ramshackle schools, absent teachers, less than basic teaching we'll end up having kids who are educated in theory but illiterate in practice.

The plan is to raise power generation capacity by 13,000 MW every year. Best of luck with that.

Let me revisit an old theory. It's pretty easy to foresee years in advance the generation capacity a country will need. The Planning Commission has incorporated these figures in all its plans. We have never reached our optimum generation level. Just because it's being planned again doesn't mean it will be implemented.

The action plan aims to have a slum free India. It's never going to happen when the same government has legalised slums in the past.

I want all of this to work out, it makes the country a better place and makes my life better. But I'm simply going by past experience. Perhaps I'm a pessimist, perhaps I'm a realist.

Things have gotten better, poverty is down, literacy is up, economy is growing, infrastructure is being built. But if everything that was planned in the past had been implemented, India would be much closer to where we want to be.

If corruption and accountability were given priority, half our problems would not even exist. Pity those two points are not on the UPA's grand agenda.