Letter to Arjun Singh

Dear Mr. Arjun Singh,

Ever since the Five-year plans came to be used as a guideline to channelize our nation development endeavors, every plan has been treated as just another tome, left to gather dust, with no comprehensive efforts to ensure that the recommendations of the Plan be implemented. Instead what you politicians do is to play along with centuries old problems by aggravating them and not solving them to ensure that you can hold on to your vote banks and have sufficient irrelevant topics for your election campaign speeches. I don’t know what it takes to get you people to realize that proper development efforts in the right sector will help you garner more votes than anything else as the effects of such efforts have a far more widespread impact than anything else. As in your position as the Human Resource Development Minister, you seem to be highly devoted and overtly enthusiastic about projecting yourself as the messiah for the upliftment of the underdeveloped masses of our country. Since you have chosen education as the tool for social upliftment, let me remind you of the education-related monitorable targets of the current five-year plan (2002-03 to 2006-07):

Ø All children in school by 2003; all children to complete 5 years of schooling by 2007

Ø Reduction in gender gaps in literacy and wage rates by at least 50 per cent by 2007

Ø Increase in literacy rate to 75 per cent within the Tenth Plan period

We all know that India is nowhere close to achieving these targets by the end of year 2007. In the face of your recent proposal to introduce 27 per cent reservation for the other backward classes for so called social development, I ask you the following questions:

Ø How about spending the Rs. 8000 crore for accelerating the efforts of the government (if any) in the achievement of these targets?

Ø Is it an unwritten rule that every Five Year Plan has to be a failure?

Ø Are Planning Commission and its formulated five-year development plans only a farce?

Let me tell you that India’s development targets in the tenth five-year plan are far more ambitious than the Millennium Development Programme of the UN Development Programme. It is high time that we (government and the people of India) take our Plans seriously and work towards making them a grand success so as to ensure the enhancement of the standard of living of the Indian people. The Human Development Index rank of India is 126 on the Human Development Report, 2007. 177 nations were surveyed in all. Shouldn't we be aiming for a more respectable position, as even nations like Saint Lucia, Namibia, Vietnam, Cape Verde, Guyana and even the Occupied Palestinian Territories have better ranks? As a proud citizen of India, who had the privilege of having great scholars like Dr. Abdul Kalam and Dr. ManMohan Singh as President and Prime Minister of my nation respectively, I hope that you will resort to real knowledge based development programmes at the grass root levels to ensure social justice and development and understand the fallacies of the hike in reservation which won’t lead to any major social gain.

Yours truly,

N. Hule

(A CITIZEN WHO BELONGS TO AN OBC CASTE BUT REFUSES TO USE THE RESERVATION FACILITY AS I HAVE A DOCTOR FOR A FATHER AND A LAWYER FOR MOTHER. I WOULD NEVER LIKE MYSELF TO BE CALLED BACKWARD IN ANY MANNER.)