Recent times I’ve noticed the emergence of the term”India,Inc” especially during interviews with businessmen and what follows the term is always a satisfactorily pretty picture. The term is however seldom referred to in the context of India as a welfare state and no questions are asked or print space devoted to what India, Inc is doing in the state welfare space. I think this is so because that is where the stories of the teeming millions who make India,Inc work would have to be told and their stories may not be satisfactory. A story of the agrarian rural class is still struggling for fair prices for produce, more farmer suicides are swept under the carpet that dealt with. A story of the urban middle class who spent a lifetime chasing a shelter against the ever ballooning real estate prices, the tax payers of India who silently watch their money being put to every imaginable abuse on the tube; the migrant middle class story who finds it difficult to re-establish their identities in an alien state in terms of electoral rights, ration cards and gas connections. The PAN card being the only exception to the earlier category.

The BJP wrote the prologue to the “India shining” story and the myth is being propagated by congress now. The truth being that I as a tax paying adult citizen find it as difficult to ‘deal’ with my country’s govt as my father found it30 years back. A generation has changed but the citizens “customer experience” remains the same. So yes India is in effect a rich country where a lot of poor people live. Where people still grapple with the horns of the ‘welfare mechanisms’ of the state.  Every working day of my adult life I spent 3 hours toiling so that the scamsters/ fraudsters can fill their pockets,  so that justice can get perverted in a court of law. I firmly believe that my entire ‘tax paying’ adult life will pass me by but I won’t see a single national level political scamster ever  behind bars for misappropriation of public funds. This my dear actors in the “other side of India,inc” is our reality check.

Related posts:

1. India at 60 – What makes democracy tick?
2. Air India experience – Maharaja Reloaded.
3. Customer experience in Govt of India undertakings.

Filed under: India, India politics happenings