No control over government treasury

We have no control over government funds which is but taxes collected from the citizens. Our needs and necessities are ignored when plans to spend the collected money are made. We are not even told where and how the money was used.   

In the name of CWG Rs. 70000 Crores were squandered in Delhi. The roads were dug up and re made. Tiled Footpaths were unhinged and retiled. According to a newspaper report Rs. 400 Crores were spent on such footpaths.  

 The NDMC is riddled with contradictions and controversies. Sanitation workers of the municipal corporation have not been paid salaries for three months and certain contractors have not been paid for the last five yeas. Yet funds have been readily available for the construction of a helipad on top of the Corporation building to help political leaders land their helicopters there. 

When we go to the same Corporation with a genuine problem, we are told that there are no funds available. For example, Sundarnagri is a slum colony of New Delhi. The people do not have drinking water. They do not have a secondary school. There is no sewage system and the government claims that it does not have money to provide the same. But some years back fountains were made in the same area at a cost of Rs.60 Lacs. It was ironic that there was no drinking water but there was water for the fountain.  It was a joke that went sour for the red faced corporation was not able to provide water for the fountain even on the day of the inauguration. 

It is evident the government has money but it is used for wrong things. The money is not used for things that the people need. The wish of the people is not taken into consideration.
The problems of villages are different. The amount of money that goes there goes under some weird schemes. Policies are decided in the State capitals and in new Delhi by politicians and bureaucrats with a blinkered view of the problems that are faced by 120 crore people of India.  Their needs and necessities are never taken into account. The Neta thinks he knows the best.  There are several schemes like old age pension, widow pension, public distribution scheme  and others which are made by Politicians and officials located at state capitals and the centre that are divorced from the real people and their needs.    

We visited Khijuri village in West Bengal, where the Sarpanch told us that though the village had received rupees six crore from the government, they could not construct a school which was badly  needed and would have cost them only  rupees twenty lakhs. This was because this money was tied up under various scheme of the government, for instance, the pension fund or construction of houses under the Indra Vikas Yojana or for some other scheme.  
Our needs are not decided by us but by the politicians and bureaucrats at the centre.  The farmer might need money for irrigation, or the people need a hospital but if the government thinks  otherwise, then the farmer and the people and their needs can wait..  

We went to a village in Orissa where sixty three families were suffering from Plague. The village had rupees six lac available to them but that money was not free money. It was tied to one or the other of the government’s schemes. The nearest hospital was fifteen kilometers away from the village. In spite of the fact that so much money was available yet that money could not be used even to hire a vehicle and take the poor families to the hospital. The consequences were inevitable. Seven people died? 

What use was rupee seven lac if it could not save the life of people in that village?
Let us take an interesting example. It seems that one day an officer of government of India stationed at Delhi saw a dream. He saw that if people of every village started to collect water in their own village then the problem of water would be solved in the country. An order was passed regarding launching a scheme. The scheme had a slogan that ran something like “Our village our water”. If villages were to construct tanks to collect water then the village would be sanctioned rupees sixty thousand to one lacs for constructing the same. The scheme started from Delhi, was accepted by the state governments and then through circulars was sent up to the district magistrates for implementation. In one district, the
collector informed all the sarpanchs about the scheme under which funds could be sanctioned for construction of structures for collecting water. In a certain village when the sarpanch collected the people and informed them of   the Centre’s scheme about the allocation of funds against collection of water, the people laughed.  These villages were actually flood prone and needed no such grant or assistance or funds of the government. They did not need money for collecting the water but for throwing the water out of their villages. 

These are ridiculous schemes far removed from what  is needed by the people. There are specific problems in specific areas. There are different needs of different groups of people separated by geographical and cultural boundaries. The solution of problems cannot be measured by   the same yard stick.  Even two villages which are next to each other are bound to have different sets of problems. How can someone sitting in Delhi take decisions for them without knowing what they want or desire?  You cannot think up of solutions in isolation.