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Swachh Bharat was started with much fanfare in the country- a very popular cause in the electronic age-but it turned out to be a fad. Same thing happened with other schemes. Skill India, Start up India, Make in India, Acche din, Smart cities. The list is endless. They all have partaken far too much of the nature of fads. As causes, they have been undertaken too much in ignorance, powered too much by impatience and lots of short term enthusiasm. Not much homework was done on the social vision or long term deliberations. Thousands of crores of public money was wasted on these fads. The present dispensation has only created organizations with abstract causes and too little personal involvement. If during its entire tenure of ten years, it had focussed on just one or two causes and got itself fully involved in them, maybe a better India would have evolved.
Rather than making it a public cause, if these had been made private causes involving every citizen of the country- and not restricted to public talks in the media and projecting it as fashionable-some positive results would have been there. In ten years, the energy of present concern has been restricted to a series of public gestures, empty laws and in the process a great opportunity was lost.
Hope the new government which comes into power after the elections is more cautious in its approach and does its homework thoroughly before implementing a scheme and creating new organizations. Posters, slogans, interviews look good but the ground reality remains unchanged. Maybe we need statesmen to run the country and not politicians. A politician is a politician in the electoral field but the moment he steps into the role of a minister or a prime minister, he has to behave and think like a statesman. He has to wear many hats in his various roles.
Wishing just the best for my country.
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