Archive - May 22, 2008

Date

Who shall I vote for

Whoever has the following agenda should seek my vote in the next general elections in India
0. The education system in India was designed to produce servile clerks and has more or less continued from british era. It needs to be fixed to let people from young age be responsible for their own actions and choices. Right now horrible criminal acts committed by young people labeled 'ragging' go un-punished because the permissive society doesn't hold these young adults responsible for their actions. Start with removing the requirements for parental consent for anything and let the kids from a very young age learn to be independent and responsible citizens. This also entails removing the current discriminatory set of laws applied to women's hostels and making the institutes practicing such discrimination liable.
1.The justice system. Broken window theory. Let there be small number of simple rules and then let no crime go un-punished. And yeah remember the last refuge of law-makers in India for infringing upon freedoms like 'greater good', 'corrupting influence on our culture', 'public morality', 'hurt sentiments of any particular violent social group' etc. should be strongly done away with by equally applying the laws to individuals as well as mobs and by erring on the side of freedom.
2. The budgetary allocation system. Let no politician or bureaucrat decide the priorities on how and where the money should be spent. Follow the US system of spending the taxes collected with the consent of 'local self-ruling community'. If people want old-age homes or libraries or schools or parks or nuclear power plants , it should be left to them. No more robbing Shyam to pay Ram. If a local community doesn't raise enough money through taxes they don't get to demand government services. Monetary policy should have a clear goal of inflation targeting as opposed to pandering to multiple vested interests of exporters, bureaucrats and large businesses. An individual(or a small business) should be able to raise a loan on similar credit terms from a foreign country as a large company/financial institution using ECB route if they don't like the deal from India based financial institutions.
3. The election system: State funding of elections and out-sized pay package for politicians should remove the reasons for corruption and let students and young people aspire for a career in politics.
4. The financial system, especially make it easier to create financial institutions unencumbered by cost of compliance of outmoded and outdated ham-handed regulation.
5. The regulatory framework should be non-discriminatory and technology neutral. Too much micro-management of how and why things should be done by players creates non-future-proof regulations. Examples include the current telecom mess and the IT act, taxation laws, one time government activities bound with dates.
6. Empower the local self-rule of communities without letting them dictate how individuals should act though. For e.g. who decided that the office of police commissioner can dictate when people go to sleep or conduct business in a city. Maharashtra shop and establishment act(and similar laws) are retrograde.
7. Right to property be made a fundamental right.

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