The System of Corruption and Helplessness of Common Man

Another news item in the paper inspired me to write this….! Last week, I saw a news that the Gram Panchayat (GP) Secretary of Pudussery Panchayat (This is an Urban Panchayat situated in Palakkad district) got caught red handed by Vigilance while accepting bribe from a proposed small scale industrialist. The Kanjikode New industrial area in Palakkad district partially falls under this GP and as a matter of fact, there are hardly any new industry commenced in recent years….!!

This news reminds me of another incident! One of my friends, who works in the capacity of Deputy Secretary in a GP (Name not disclosed deliberately), recently went on a long leave due to the pressure from the GP secretary to budge himself to accept bribe and pass certain bills which are highly manipulated…! My friend was not willing to budge to the offers and threats subsequently, but found it quite difficult to sustain in the office as he had no support!

In a moment of frenzy, he called me and asked for suggestion and I had asked him if he could verify the scope of work executed before passing the bill and gave him a case study like below and sought him answer before suggesting a solution….

“ Suppose, originally the estimated cost of the work is Rs.100/- and the inflated bill is for Rs.500/-, you shouldn’t mind sanctioning it in the current corrupt system, provided you get some assurance on the fact that Rs.100/- had been spent as per the plan and there’s no compromise in the quality of the work..! ”

Though this is not the ideal solution to be suggested, this is the only ‘work around’ solution practically possible in this corrupt system!

However, his answer was very complex and he told that though he is the one to sign the passing orders, he doesn’t have any authority to assure that the work is executed without compromising the quality, because it is checked and authenticated by somebody else (the so called technical department), who are also a part of the nexus…!! This is the point where I could empathize with his helplessness and asked him to go ahead with leave application as he had 180+ days of earned leave available with him!!

The corruption in our society is in such heights that these incidents are happening when there are huge debates going on in the media on the magnitude of the corruption in organizing the Common Wealth Games!! People are least bothered or just do not care about any of these developments as they all know that nothing much happens even if caught! Instead, acquire more money so that portion of it can be used to set you free in such occasions!!

This is shocking and disgusting! I used to draft out some pragmatic solutions to various issues whenever I come across and used to have that pride in myself about my ability to solve issues! Suddenly, I’m brought down to earth by the incapability of my thought process to bring about a solution and when I tried to put myself in his position, it was really paining…!! Moreover, he would be forced to return to the same dirt after completion of him leave period and face the same music again…?!!

The only solution to this cancer is removal of that part from our system, which in democratic terms, should be a rigorous punishment to those without any compromise through the law of the land, which may definitely require some additional legislation to make it tough for the tainted..! Then only a gradual change in the mindset of the people will happen and which will, in turn bring back the courage to fight..!

Having written this, I would also like to point out at the fact that there is a necessity to analyze the root cause of the corruption in our country as well and we as a society and the Governments need to interfere on other aspects of life, such as cost of education, cost of essential commodities and cost of health management to list a few…!! I believe a vigilant control over these very primary citizen rights will, to a definite extent, eliminate the unhealthy greed (need) to demand bribe from the common man!!

National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme – Vision & Implementation Blues…!!

Few days back I read an article in the front page of Times of India on an alarming fact….National Rural Employment Guarantee Programme makes liquor lobby richer?!!

Initially, I thought that it would be another scam in this country of corruption, but when I went through the article, it was definitely a thought provoking one..! The report says that the rural folks who started getting the guaranteed income, had started spending more on Indian Made Foreign Liquor (IMFL) and reach home empty handed…! Liquor lobby had given higher bids for license as they are keen and happy on grabbing this opportunity!

This is one among many sad stories in the so called Indian development cycle of last 60+ years, thanks to our Air Conditioned offices of the planning boards, planning commissions and high flying Babus. Many of our bureaucrats hail from influential families and they are hardly sensitive towards the lifestyles of our rural public. Many of them had acquired positions by taking advantage of the quota system based on their community..! If you conduct an audit you can easily find out except a very brilliant few, many of them are there by taking advantage of scientifically wrong representation systems, though they were neither eligible nor weak in any respect.

Coming back to the issue, the Govt. move to provide guaranteed employment to the rural public was one of the dynamic decisions of ages and welcomed by one and all. Every serious and sincere citizen of  India, who looks forward to inclusive growth had visualized this as a legendary move towards such a goal, but our defunct planning and implementation ‘legends’ left enough loop holes in the entire programme, which directly or indirectly encourage different kinds of social evils at different parts of the country…!

Every company launches products after extensive market research and after checking & understanding the real requirement of the targeted users/ consumers. Can anyone refer to a single Govt. scheme which was introduced after such an extensive home work? They neither have the habit of studying what matters for the beneficiaries nor they adopt any scientific method to find the development gap..? These social evils arising out of such schemes are the classic examples of the lackluster attitude of our planning folks …! As per a World Bank survey conducted as early as in 2000 – 2001, over 70% of the rural communities who belonged to BPL, were under the grip of money lenders and their abuses..! Of late, there were mushrooming ‘Micro Finance’ organizations who took the debt over from these abusive money lenders. Though there are still some exceptionally good such micro finance organizations, many NBFCs have formed NGOs to operate their agenda as the interest rates they charge are no better than the money lenders!! Of late, the multiplicity of such organizations led to unhealthy competitions between these organizations and guided beneficiaries towards a multiple debt trap, which resulted in suicides in certain areas and thus inviting Govt. interference and regulations….!

However, there are a few such organizations which have been doing extremely admirable job in empowering micro entrepreneurs by constant micro monitoring (not micro managing) and by hand holding them till they become successful. In the process, they have re-financed them multiple times to achieve self sustenance!! This contrast between these organizations is a classic case study of the importance of understanding the unique nature and sensitivities of various rural communities to make them succeed and as a result to achieve the actual objectives of the programme.

My experience with coconut farm labourers in the Kerala – TN border in Palakkad district of Kerala is that such people are vulnerable to financial exploitation primarily due to alcoholism of husbands and the end sufferers are the women folk who are abused and misbehaved at, by the money lending lobbies. As a matter of fact, the average earnings of a male used to be Rs.150/- per day and not even a single penny reaches home as they spend everything in liquor – be it toddy, arrack or IMFL..?! When I was working close with them during a state poverty eradication mission project, I made a scheme, where I used to pay these guys only Rs.50/- per day and release the balance payment on Saturdays directly to the women folk! This had fetched double result as the absenteeism became almost nil as the women folk took extra care to send these guys to work and they could resist the exploitation of money lenders!!

As a next step, I could strike a deal with some rice mill owners to supply rice at the miller’s rate (which used to be about 20 – 30% less than the market prices) to these people as it used to be a huge weekly off take for him. This eradicated starvation of the children and women of these households as good quality rice was always available at home…! We used to make the payment from the accrued balance of their earnings and they get an additional discount from the miller..!

I quoted this experience here to reiterate my conviction on the need for our planning ‘Bureaucrats’ to understand the practical needs and social evils existing in each part of our country apart from the general socio – economic background of each place. A carpet policy shall be at the macro level and a fine tuned adaptation needed at the micro levels for implementing each programme. If the authorities don’t do a social audit and take corrective action, the NREGA will become another such scheme which may disrupt the harmony of existing social system by encouraging the liquor mafia which is waiting in the corner restlessly calm, salivating to suck the blood of these poor households …!!  

What is Google Chrome OS?

Our pseudo culture and politics

This is to remind each of us to stop being hypocritical about our expectations on the Indian politics and the political culture….!

We are traditionally a society with pseudo culture and practices. I would like to underline the word ‘we’, because I don’t exempt myself from this….it is definitely including me and this note comes as a result of my ‘self criticism’.

§  We don’t express ‘No’ to any one even when we really don’t like something! – The whole thought came from this point and I realized that the culture in which I have been brought up, where I am trained to say ‘Yes’ to avoid hurting others, it is very difficult for me to say ‘No’ in many occasions to avoid heart burn for others…! The negatives of this are that we put ourselves in lots of stress and lose interest in what we had taken up with half mind and then as a result, we don’t peak in our performance. The positives are that we respect others’ desires and expectations, thus obliging to the social pressure!

We expect our politicians to be Gandhijis with simple life styles and high moral values. But what we conveniently forget or deliberately ignore is the fact that except one ‘Mahatma’, many of his contemporaries had many whims & fancies with respect to various things in life and we never bothered much about those during their lifetime as we were focused on the deliverables of each of these individuals…! Nehru, AKG, Indira, Patel were all having their own choices of life styles and fantasies!

Now, as Carl Marx rightly said change is only a word which does not change and as an irony the party which follows his ideology had time and again shown their intolerance towards change!!

Now, at least for God’s sake, let’s accept the fact that those days ended to exist, where you can find people who are in politics with this so called ‘Simple Life’ in real terms. Now we have only pseudo advocates of simplicity and live in ‘make-up’ to show us their austerity. As we are used to this hypocrisy, we get offended when someone in politics become frank and bold on his/ her fabulous lifestyle!

As a matter of fact, how many of us took pain to understand their lifestyles and assess each one of them? How many of these so called investigative journalists took pain to bring out details of the life of these public figures? In fact, no one really cares how they all live until some controversy erupts and that’s the way the life is…! For us, we are comfortable on the thought that ‘All is well’ about our ‘masters’ and their dirty habits as long as they do everything secretly! Our pseudo culture does not allow us to accept this in public!! What I’m trying to say is that if a politician travels in Mercedes Benz, it’s his choice and only thing what we should be bothered is whether he’s doing it at the cost of ex-chequer? For this there should be a mechanism to publish expenses of the ministers on a monthly basis, at least in the web. The public being the boss of these politicians in a democracy should have the right to do a social audit to assess, analyse and correct these politicians and their habits.

We come across stories of misappropriations in many of these ministers’ offices and stories of politicians getting caught on spy cameras in compromising positions is common news item nowadays…! Still we expect our politicians to be “Ramas and Lakshmanas”! Very sad…! Have you personally kept up the sanctity of the institutions of morals to poke on somebody’s private life! Unlike yester years, politicians are no more ideals of our young generations and you need not worry about wrong influence on the youngsters…! During his life time, Jesus Christ had insisted to the one who didn’t sin to throw stones at Madam Magdalene, just to teach that it is important to keep ourselves clean, before pointing out dirt on others…!

If a social worker who works in NGOs can take a salary, why it is considered a sin for a politician to be paid? My personal suggestion to all these political parties is that to form a corpus fund (Could be partially funded by Government and partially collected from sustainable activities and opportunities created by the party) and create a payment structure for hierarchies and recruit people in those vacancies with certain entry criteria….Attitude,  Aptitude & Some Minimum Qualification. This will push youngsters to study before getting into politics! Promotions in the hierarchy should be based on the good work he does in his portfolio and a social audit is made in this effect for his/ her appraisal. The criteria of social audit could be Mileage for the party; Utilization of funds allocated to him and of course, the beneficiaries’ feedback on the individual’s performance.

The social audit should be on their action on set/ promised target achievements and not on his personal life and lifestyle! Definitely there should be respect for the moral values and personal/ professional integrity, which our country had been proud of…! However, by forcing our pseudo morality, we are encouraging them to pursue hidden personal choices, which many a time happens to be illegitimate!!

It may sound impractical at this point of time, but I’m sure it is going to happen in our system as we are shrugging off our nature of pseudo culture as we are getting more and more exposed to global scenario, where they call a spade, a spade! 

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The food safety of “Young India”

This note of mine has reference to my earlier article titled as “The Grain drain may touch our lives any time…” and an article of Ms. Suzanne Daley appeared in ‘The Hindu’ regarding the situation of the jobless in Spain, where opportunities are denied to get back to work in agriculture sector! The crux is that during the boom in infrastructure in Spain, people who were engaged in hard labour of farms upgraded themselves to softer jobs in infrastructure sector…! As the boom is over and jobs ceased to exist, suddenly many of them find it difficult to get back to their old jobs as it had been occupied by immigrants from countries across Eastern Europe and Africa. Now, the farm owners are not willing to induct these old employees back since they don’t want to jeopardize the current equation. Another aspect is the doubt that these locals will not be able to work as hard as the foreigners, as they had been doing softer jobs so far…!

I would like to compare the Indian scenario with this….India is currently undergoing infrastructure boom and unlike other places, we have a large unorganized employment sector, which amounts to 93% and this sector attracts predominantly people from the agriculture sector. To my own knowledge and experience, both farm owners and farm workers are slowly becoming species which are in the verge of extinction…thanks to unviable farming business model, exploitation of middle men and a huge real estate lobby! India is now a young country and expected to remain so for at least next 3 – 4 decades..! As of now, the agriculture sector is still the primary employment provider in our country. However, the growth and boom in the economy is bringing in lots of radical social changes– both good & bad! As of now, the generation who are employed in the farm sector seems to be the last to exist and their next generation does not want to undertake hard labour in the farms as they have multiple easy opportunities available during this growing economy even without much skills. Apart from this, multiple initiatives from the Government also guarantees a fairly reasonable livelihood for rural sector. However, the social change emerging from these initiatives will be non – availability of man power for the hard labour in farms and thus bringing in a huge vacuum in the already hit agriculture production!

The fears I mentioned in the previous article in this blog (The Grain drain may touch our lives any time…) had become order of the day as agriculture ministry started importing various grains to bring down the prices! We were a country boasting of huge food reserves till 2 years back!!

Now to understand the eroding human resource supply in agriculture sector, listen to the story of social change in a village….

There is a Gram – Panchayat which had shown the world that the Govt. employment can be assured to one member of each family in the village through focused preparatory classes for the ‘Public Service Commission’ examinations. Over a span of less than a decade, they had achieved their goal of having at least one in every family getting employed in Government sector! However, pit fall of this social change is that the elders of these families who were very efficient farm workers despite their age had taken an abrupt retirement as their children genuinely wanted them to take rest..! It’s a significant change in the existing social system and though it is a welcome change in terms of a reliable income source for those families, there is a gap created in terms of farming sector manpower requirement is concerned…? Every good social change can backfire if not planned well in advance!!

Now, let’s look into some practical answers….

We need to accept the fact that the country’s economy is in a growing spree and it will definitely induce more opportunities in various sectors and the brunt will be on the agriculture sector…?! In the above mentioned scenario itself, the young population of India, who had received basic education avoids hard labour and prefer softer opportunities, which are available in plenty..! Leaving some exceptions, those who stick on to farming (Be it farmers or farm workers) are mostly uneducated and unskilled people. This is the very basic problem of the sector! 

In this context, our Governments need to address this issue by attracting young efficient people into farming to improve our production and granary reserves. Call it a second green revolution or whatever; the thumb rule of attraction is to make farming a viable business model with less dependency in man power, especially by eliminating hard labours through intelligent automated solutions.

To achieve this, there should be a multi pronged approach to address each issue in the sector at micro level…

• To devise a fresh credit policy with a strong monitoring system for any agriculture sector projects with preference to induction of advanced technology to optimize the results.

• The application for credit should be accepted and evaluated by a ‘single window’ central agency and then asked to service it by local banks distributed geographically across the country, thus eliminating the delay in the evaluation process at the banks.

• Enough thrust should be given by the RBI to the banks to avoid further delay by the banks in servicing and disbursement of credit for such recommended projects, even after the approval of this ‘single window’ agency.

• The successful models of precision farming should be replicated across the country by educating youngsters on such advanced farming methods & techniques by introducing rural technical training hubs (knowledge centres) across the country.

• The Government should envisage a target change in the sector in terms of making it more organized and soft labour oriented.

• The micro tools depending on the area and the people, should be developed through participatory research programme by initiatives from premium institutions of the country and also with the technological affiliations from countries who are well advanced in agri-tech & research.

• The training content should be prepared in such a way that it inspires the youngsters to take up jobs in the farm sector. It should inspire more youngsters to become entrepreneurs in the sector as well.

• The agriculturists, agronomists and scientists should revamp the traditional image of the sector to make it more like a business option by building up a viable business model with very transparent and practical projections.

• Like in every other sector, the farmers should be trained to do product costing before they fix the pricing for their produces taking into account of the production process, percentage of wastage & defectives, the input cost and the marketing cost. A similar approach should be taken to attract the young farmers to plan & optimize their production.

• The production should be controlled based on the market trends and demand – supply studies in farming as well. This is possible in technology enabled farming like ‘precision farming’ and through various micro processor based technologies with controlled ‘fertigation’ models.

• Controlling of the prices should be handled by the farming community based on the market demand and supply chain challenges.

• The Government needs to set up a Farm Produce Price Regulatory Authority (FaPPRA) in line with TRAI and IRDA in order to control and audit abnormalities and exploitation in the sector.

• There should be a continuing education programme on ‘Post Harvest Handling’ and marketing. There should be awareness and support programme to inspire group initiatives in food processing projects.

• There should be micro monitoring system (not micro management) established under ‘FaPPRA’ to support and execute such projects vide credible NGOs working in those areas with strict accountability norms.

• Though linking of technology to the farmers seems to be the biggest challenges now, it will become much easy once the youngsters take it up. They will drive the change in the sector in positive direction.

So it becomes all the more important to attract youngsters to more organized, scientific and precision farming by facilitating infrastructure for such a revolutionary change in the sector!

As a hand holding initiative, Governments can link the PDS outlets procurement to such farming groups under the guidance of ‘FaPPRA’ through long term procurement contracts, which should envisage both interests of the farmer as well as the consumer. This will induce price stability and eliminate middle men’s exploitation. 

However, if the Governments do not act fast, we’ll be left with no grains for the youngsters and there will be a generation who will look up to other countries to produce and feed them!

Development agenda and importance of enthusiastic professional politicians

What is the qualification required to become a successful politician in India?

Minimum:          3^rd Std failed or No school

Maximum:         3^rd Std passed or No school

I know our beloved District Panchayat President Sri. Thankappan Pillai since my childhood days. The first time I knew him was as the one who loudly reads news paper for those labourers of Beedi manufacturing unit on my way to school..! He must be a 4^th Std drop out and no one was bothered to know about it. For his service of reading news papers to his employees and thus saving their productive time, the owner of that beedi manufacturing unit used to reward him with ‘4 Annas’ (close to 25 paise) in those times. Thankappan Pillai became aware of world affairs through those numerous news papers and he started quoting those news bits in relevant and irrelevant contexts. Most of his audiences were either as less informed as him or much lower literate than him! So, for them he became genius and an expert in world affairs!

Over a period of time, he had grown in stature and as he neither can think of doing any hard work nor does he have any skills, he found politics is the easy and apt profession for him. After having multiple tenures in Gram Panchayat as its president, he was elevated as Block Panchayat President and eventually he became District Panchayat President in these revolutionary times of ‘Panchayati Raj’ and de-centralized development!!

Thanks to Thankappan Pillai’s brand of development that it was never beyond his capacity of thinking and even after years of tenures, the villages remained as primitive as it used to be…! In his capacity, he allowed illegal metal quarries and sand mafia to thrive..! When it became intolerable, some of the responsible citizens went and got a stay order against such illegal mining..!

As responsible citizens of India, we all should realize the serious deficiency of our system in terms of attracting qualified brains in participating in the process of policy making for the development of our country! Like innumerable superstitions and blind-beliefs of our country, we all are prejudiced about the way politicians are supposed to behave…?!! We all say that’s the practice followed by our ancestors and any deviation from such a pattern is seen as offensive behaviour?!

In this context, we need to analyse the rise and fall of a Minister of Tharoor’s stature , who has a strikingly bright professional background, internationally!

When today’s opposition was the ruling party in centre, another minister for State in the Ministry of Railways, who hails from Kerala gave a letter of reference  requesting HRD Minister to consider my friend’s  application for a ‘Jan Shiksha Sansthan’ (a continuing education centre) for our Panchayat under the NGO represented by him. Understand the fact that he was trying to help my friend; just because it comes to his home state (He was not even representing Kerala). As a matter of fact, my friend didn’t get this institution as two out of the proposed three centres were allocated to HRD Minister’s state and another one was allocated to one of the North-Eastern states!

In this context mentioned above, can anyone say that the minister who gave reference letter had misused his good offices to lobby for us?! The local president of their party was with my friend as one of the advisory committee members of the NGO…! Can anyone say that this person got the post under any shady deal? Nowadays, to get a confirmed railway ticket, you carry MP’s letter…how do you qualify that?

It is clear in the case of Tharoor that he called to find why the signing process was delayed for no reason? This call would have been made by any one of us, if we were enthusiastically involved in offering moral support and help…!  Not just to IPL commissioner, for that matter to anybody, when you suspect there’s a foul play…! Call will be actually made by you as an individual, regardless of the position you are holding!

We need young dynamic people with intelligence and transparency in public places, who should bring modern thoughts and bold new practices in their respective places. Our system is such, there are lots of Thankappan pillais who neither have the capacity to envisage better quality of life nor have exposure of the development happening across the world!!

Given the situation, it is time for Tharoor to re-invent himself to focus on keeping in touch base with the common people by continuous interaction. I feel he should come up with an action plan on the development agenda he has for his constituency and for the state and then for the nation..! If he can publish it in the site and update it with the ‘target vs achievement chart’ in simplified, illustrated form which could be understood by the youngsters of this country…I’m sure he’ll win many hearts!

Though at the cost of his designation, Tharoor controversy became a positive initiative towards cleaning up the IPL and its systems apart from the individuals. However, with the kind of mentors Modi has, he never thought it would become the end of the road for him so soon..!

Three Idiots, Five point Someone and me….!

This is an open thought for all of us to think, think and keep thinking before decide or conclude!

Nowadays, it has become fashion for everyone to talk in length & breadth about the lacunae of the education system of the country..! Everybody agree that there are lots of problems with the system of education & examinations. I too have been advocating the need of liberation and focus needed on grooming the self learning process in young minds. Apart from my own experiences, the books of ‘Paulo Coelho’, ‘Chetan Bhagat’ and so on, had also influenced my thinking process! Another important influence was my friend Vinod, who is the founder of ‘Mazhavillu, the alternative school’. All these points of view are acceptable and there is a huge movement initiated among educationalists, institutions and educational regulatory/ advisory bodies (from NCERT to ICSE in Indian context) to reform the prevailing system…

Now, I would like everyone to do some serious action to visualize in our minds about the change required in the system….!

We all say the following three points quite often…

1) There should not be pressure for our kids at the young age….!

2) We should allow our kids to choose their career path based on their passion…!

3) Our education system should be more application oriented…

Let’s have some honest analysis of the same…

Though we say that there should not be pressure, we enjoy a lot when our children get 1st Rank since class-I and when they don’t get good percentage, we put pressure on them to improve the marks…not their understanding!

Why do we want our kids to score more marks? Because, in India, due to exploding population, our limited number of institutions and infrastructure, kept the percentage of marks scored as a filtering mechanism for the admission process. Over a period of years, though there had been a phenomenal improvement in the educational infrastructure, we follow the same mechanism to filter instead of a well balanced, scientific and appropriate aptitude analysis! Thanks to our old generation of educationists, who still resist the change in the name of credentials of our system (The same system, which is not indigenous, but just a ‘left over’ from British of 19th Century) quoting examples of Sir C V Ramans and other Indian scientists, who made a mark of their own..!! Most of these scientists made their presence felt when they could go outside India and if you analyse the statistics, not even one of our premier institutions could register any patent for years together…! But still our society is keen to push our kids into IITs & IIMs year after years!! A recent revelation by a group of alumni of one of such institutions is that there was not even a properly working ‘CNC Lathe’ in their lab, which is a shame for a country boasts of 6+% growth during when the whole world is under the grip of recession….!!

Now, it’s a vicious circle, here in our country…! More & more middle class push their children to these premier institutions because the country’s corporate world (The India Inc) prefers to induct their workforce from such institutions! So, in effect, entry to such institutions is considered to be a passport to the best business houses of India. Kids stop living from 9th Class onwards by starting off preparing for ‘Entrance Exams’….can you believe it? The youngsters curse their parents and those who make it to such places acknowledge their parents’ extra ordinary efforts. But only a few discusses candidly about the lacunae of the system, which produced them …!

So, the reforms we speak about should happen not in the education system prevailing in the country, but in the minds of those parents who push their wards so hard and in the mind sets of the ‘India Inc’, who feels that if they recruit from the premier institutions their organizations will be taken care forever..!! In fact, the change in the system should start from the attitude of such organizations first, which will reduce the insecurity of the parents and their wards thereby, of course, as a repercussion, it will bring in welcome change in the education system as well.

When we have this reverse engineering in place, we will not pressurize our young kids too much and we’ll be bold enough to allow them to follow their respective passion! Our educationists can bring in aptitude analysis and guide each individual to follow what he would like to pursue in life….! And if these institutes, in association with the boards & universities, can bring in application/ skill oriented system of education, the same ‘India Inc’ will prefer recruits with application based skill sets.

Technological Innovation - The charger gets ejected when fully charged!

Outlet Regulator Video from conor klein on Vimeo.

The change and resistance

“Change is the only constant in this world” – Though we all know and quote this on every given occasions, when it happens in our lives, we resist….to the extent that we break ourselves!

I had already written a short article on how to manage change from organizational perspective and now I would like to add on the same from life perspective!

I had been interested in innovative initiatives in culture and technology for the betterment of common man’s Life standards since early college days…! This nature of mine helped me in initiating many such projects/ programme in my life so far….! Though some of them died down after I moved out from the concerned positions, many have set trends and were continued by my successors and the very ‘thought’ of such initiatives gives you instant inspiration to move in the same direction! As a matter of choice, for last few years, I, along with my associates, have been doing, in professional terms, ‘Market Gap Analysis’ and conceiving various projects of technological innovation, which would help change the standard of living of common people…!

In the process, I had numerous setbacks and few successes. However, I continue my pursuit to unlearn, understand, learn and analyse newer horizons, which gives me immense satisfaction and joy!

When India is growing globally in terms of GDP perspective and in terms of recognition of our rich cultural heritage, one point we all (The citizens, the politicians and all other eminent individuals) need to manage this growth very carefully, as individuals, as society and as a nation! My experience vouches that ‘Growth which is not managed well can kill an organization’!! This is applicable to our great nation as well and we all have lots of duties to expedite cautiously to make our nation achieve inclusive growth…..which I doubt at this point of time?!

Our country’s development came after a long wait…! Now, if we don’t manage it properly we may get into deeper troubles than yester years.

In 2006, when I was driving through the ‘Golden Corridor’ 4 lane high way (Then it was new), it was really quite an experience! However, I could observe that I had to drive cautiously though I was driving in the faster lane, as I encountered vehicles coming opposite to us!! At last, somewhere near Bhubaneswar, I lost my cool, when a two wheeler came honking towards me with lots of abuses?!!! While I was arguing with him I was shocked to realize his perception about these four lane…..Instead of 2 lanes going towards North and 2 Lanes coming towards South, separated by a divider, he understands that in each side of the divider, there’s two way traffic allowed and according to him I was coming on the wrong lane as it was supposed to be my right lane…!! This incident reminds us that along with the development, how important it is, to equip the common man to manage such a change by disseminating information to the grass roots levels!

Every new initiative will face resistance and bulldozing such resistance should be done by tactfully bridging through lot of consensus among resisting elements and this is where imparting

logical reasoning will be essential! Now, when we discuss about change, I myself may not be able to endorse every change, which is happening in our society! If you analyse history, every change which brought in ‘Social Evils’ were crushed by the mother nature over a period of time…The maximum life span of such changes are between 2 – 3 decades in the modern times, though earlier, it used to be much more…

So, let’s be prepared to change and understand that the resistance never succeeds on a longer run….!! How to manage these changes is our challenge and we should wake up and move on….!!