Good intentions

The Central government is now planning a Rs3400 crore infrastructure upgrade for 34 of the worst Maoist-affected districts of the country. On the face of it, this sounds like good news.

Negligence and lack of development are the two prime reasons why the Maoists managed to gain control of a third of India’s territory. The less the government did, the better the case which the Maoists could make. Access and awareness are essential if underprivileged and suppressed people are to attain progress.

The government has also realised that its strategies will not work if they are limited to containing Maoist violence without also concentrating on the core problem.

However, having discovered the importance of development to fight the Maoist menace, the government has a much larger task on hand. It has to ensure that the money actually reaches the projects it is meant for and that these projects actually take off. We are all too aware of the enormous gap between the cup and the lip when it comes to implementation in India.

The country’s two biggest cities are still struggling to complete basic infrastructure projects. Building a single bridge or flyover can take anything from two to 15 years. If Delhi has the slight advantage because it is the national capital, the unnecessary delays in the work around the Commonwealth Games shows once again how difficult it is to get anything done, even when failure would be a matter of international shame. Mumbai’s great new icon, the Bandra-Worli sea-link took over 10 years to get completed and is only the first of a four-leg project.

Along with this allocation of money, we need checks and balances to ensure that it does not get left behind in as many pockets as it usually does, and a definite time plan which is open to public scrutiny. Otherwise, the corruption carousel will benefit as it always does, the nation’s treasury will have been emptied and the people suffering in Maoist areas will remain exactly where they are.

This plan to improve or more correctly provide infrastructure to the country’s most deprived areas is definitely an excellent intention. But if it fails, it will set these areas back even further. If the only beneficiaries are panchayat heads, lowly government officials, local politicians, police officials, the local timber and poaching mafia, then we have lost one more battle to combat the Maoists before it has even begun.