What went wrong with India's freedom

India achieved freedom in peaceful way and created the example of non-violence for the whole world. India and Mahatama Gandhi become the icon of non-violence for the world. If we look back after 65 years of independence, the dream of our freedom fighters, the commitment of self rule made to British during the struggle seems to be shattered. Many of our citizens feel that British rule was better then our government and the government organization's were serving them better then what we see today. As a result so many anti corruption  and anti government movement has started. I feel issue is not the corruption alone but the whole culture of these organization's is in question. Some how these organization's does not have empathy to their customers, the citizens of India, to whom they are supposed to serve. Citizen feel these organization are not serving them but only to their masters. Let us try to understand what went wrong in our independence.

Post independence, India inherited most of the institutions (e.g.  police, judiciary, education etc.) as is, which in fact were established by British. Every organization had a unique culture which is the result of its evolution over a period of time. Longer the life of organization stronger the culture and interestingly difficult to change. More sudden the changes imposed, stronger resistance the members will put against it.When railway reservation was getting computerized there was strong resistance from employee that it will create unemployment and inefficiencies. But today those fears seems to be baseless.

Let us try to understand the police department,  which was build by British and nurtured to fight with India`s freedom struggle. They were trained for more then 300 years to suppress common Indian people. Their whole training was to intimidate people so that they will not raise their voice against the British. They build all spy organization to trace Indian freedom fighters. Now imagine 1947, same police organization with same set of employee but they have to start respecting the same very people, they were opposing. Did the executive of free India thought about it and decided the course of action to change this culture? People of free India expected different behaviour but the organization were not ready for it. Instead the police bosses took the different course to avoid the call for culture change, they became loyal to elected representatives instead of being loyal to country and its citizen. After years of distortion in the culture we can see the output where citizen are loosing very confidence in them.

Now it is a mammoth task to change these organization's culture. Time has gone where we can reform these institutions using the piece meal or small change approach and only way to change these organization is to do their surgery. Now political class has learned how to use these organizations for their interest and it will be close to impossible that politics will bring any change. 

My advice will be to start the parallel police organization from scratch which will perform very small subset of police responsibility. Develop the culture of this new organization with citizen as customers. Slowly increase the responsibility of new organization as it evolve. Later when culture of this organization becomes strong, start recruiting people from existing police organization to new organization. But question is, who will put the bell in cats neck? Do we have honest politicians who can raise above selfish interest and think about country first.

People involvement - Learning from recent power failures

Recent power grid failure has forced us to think on India's claim for infrastructure development. In India water and power are the two critical resources which need immediate attention. Here i am not talking how to solve these problems but the approach our government takes to handle these problems. Any crisis for water or power, affects millions of people to the deep of their soul and people are looking forward to work with government in finding the solution of these.

Post crisis many executives and ministers are explaining the cause, such as shortage of power generation because of lower rain, more consumer demand because of hot weather, etc.. We agree with their version of explanation but what we expect the government to have a dialog with people in advance about the shortage country is facing. All of the above reasons are known to the government in advance and it was not like a earth quack, which caught us off guard. If these reasons were shared with people before hand, it could have made the people careful about the electricity usage and we might have avoided the whole episode. Sometime i am surprised that we might need some one like Aamir Khan to run episodes on scarcity of water and power  in India because government machinery does not have the courage to talk people directly. 

What i feel is missing the link between government and people on critical issue. At a time when India faced food shortages in the past, one prime minister Mr.Lal Bahadur Shastri advocated fasting for one day so that food will go round to feed the huge population. This request was followed by millions of people at that time and helped the country at large. This is a classic example where leaders reached to the people directly about the problem.  If government thinks that people will believe them as incompetent that will be a mistake. India's population is much literate then the past and everyone understand that government does not have a magic want to solve all the problems. Instead sharing make people believe that government is serious about the problem and people will throw suggestions about them. It is like using the whole country a consultant to solve country problem. Media will cover it up on front page, there will be interviews of experts. People will discuss these problems and share ideas. These all brain storming among people will help the government and country in long term. We did not get freedom, instead Mahatma Gandhi mobilized people opinion for more then 30 years to work for common goal of freedom. We have to get rid of this old mindset that ruling class is elite and other people are not capable of understanding the problems. Instead we should take people along with them, which will not only give the government strength to take tough decision, also people will be more responsible to the country.

Suggestion

In my opinion our ministers should give quarterly update about the various problems their ministry is working on and what is the status of them. I will suggest to Team Anna to put this as a demand to the government.