Why Limit Auctioning to Coal Blocks?

In one of the most landmark judgments of this decade Supreme Court of India, in the month of August, cancelled arbitrary allotment of coal blocks. The court held that it’s a national asset and should be auctioned off at the best possible price. This lead to a huge set back as it was a retrospective order and changed the way Indian Government could function.

While the idea of auctioning is a good one and will help to add to the national treasury and make our country richer, my question is that why auctioning should be limited to coal blocks? There are so many other items that can also be auctioned in the same manner. These are the following areas that are also using national assets / resources either directly or indirectly and they can also be auctioned.

Here is a partial list:

1.       Railway tickets – The entire system of allocating the tickets of the world’s largest railway network can be auctioned. People need to pay more for preferred seats and facilities.

2.       Air India tickets – The national carrier does have offers and facilities but they can be added to and more money can be charged from those who are willing to pay more if they get more. This will help to improve the entire infrastructure of the company.

3.       Puja at temples – A religious country like India where people spend hours waiting in a queue for performing puja, needs auctioning of special darshan, no queue privilege, special Prasad and so on. Even this extra money will help to clean the places of worship.

4.       Room bookings at govt hotels – Some rooms can be kept reserved for last minute bookings or privileged booking and with the extra income the government can maintain their guest houses better.

5.       Parking spots in cities – Now people pay almost the same parking fees whether they park in prime areas of the city or in the suburbs. Increasing the parking fees in prime areas and allotting them on on realtime basis wherein one pays by the hour and can even book a parking slot online, will definitely do two things – increase government’s income plus reduce the number of vehicles in the congestion areas.

6.       Advertisement space in airports / trains / buses / bus stops etc. can be auctioned too and can have varying prices.

7.       Public sector services like banks can have auctions of real estate or vehicle when purchasers default payment. Auction of the seized properties does happen even now but it is pretty much behind closed doors.

8.       Power to industrial units – The idea is the more the profit the more should be the payment

9.       Govt run eating joints – While leasing out to interested parties, auctioning can be done.

10.   Vehicle license plates with fancy numbers and even the non-fancy ones can be 00% auctioned.

11.   Appointments with govt officers – The usual trend of waiting outside government offices can be broken by auctioning visiting slots.

12.   College/ school seats – Even educational institutions can have an auction of their seats, even if on a limited basis to begin with. This is different from donation or capitation. The person paying more gets the seat. Simple logic!

13.   Telephone number in BSNL / MTNL – Auctioning of telephone numbers of landlines can also be held.

14.   Govt real estate – The government owns real estate in prime areas of the cities which they can auction and sell at higher prices.

When people pay more for facilities, the quality of the system can improve too. Reasonable enough to expect people to pay more only when more is being offered.

All the excess money earned by that particular department should not go to the “treasury” but should be used to upgrade the facilties, give staff bonus and part of it should be held as reserves for future use. They can begin with a reserve price and then the excess may go to such kind of “extra profit fund”. This way there would be a competition amongst departments on who gets more money…

Clean India: A Design Problem First, Habit Inculcation Later

We are all very committed to clean India, literally from the dirtiest nooks to swanky buildings. Following the Prime Minister’s campaign which kicked off on Gandhi Jayanti, we have taken to the roads too – literally! Those who have been following a clean regime for the past so many years, even before the Swachch Bharat campaign was launched, may be aware that it is easy to maintain a well-designed place where as cleaning an area that has a faulty design is not so easy.

Let me follow up the relationship between cleanliness and designing with examples.

One thing that we notice which most developed cities abroad has, and India lacks, is the use of pavements and paved areas that border the roads. Due to the well-laid pavers there is no scope of mud or dust accumulating on either side of the roads. This helps to keep the roads clean with minimum effort and lessens the dust that enters our house and reposes on our belongings. The overall appearance is neat besides being clean. If we pave each and every road of India and have a pavement beside the roads, not only will pedestrians walk safely, the roads will be spick and span too.

A very popular maxim that we hear all the time and blush in shame is ‘why don’t Indians litter and break queues when they go abroad to countries like Singapore, as they do in their home country?’ Maybe this has got little to do with bad civic sense or fear of penalty, and more to do with the ease of keeping an already clean and well-designed place clean. If a place is scrupulously clean with not a speck of filth not a single person would drop a crumpled paper or plastic there. They would dutifully look around for a dustbin.

Now, this is another point I want to make. How many dustbins do we come across on our roads and public places? Only the malls seem to have got a fair dose of them and undoubtedly malls are one of the cleanest places we see in our country. I have taught my kid not to litter but recently I had to teach her a new policy. It is ok to litter in corners where existing litter is there. At least she doesn’t go about littering the rest of the place or carry around dirty wrappers in her bag as she used to do before I taught her the new policy.

The public washrooms in India leave much to be desired when it comes to cleanliness. Although our population is burgeoning with unemployed people, we seem to have a scarcity of cleaners or even if we have they do not do their jobs properly. When we enter a dirty washroom we have no compunction about leaving it dirty too. But when we use a spick and span washroom, we automatically try to maintain the cleanliness. Maybe redesigning the public toilets and using materials that are easy to keep clean, like vitrified tiles, would be a good solution to this. Even water usage in cleaning would be considerably reduced.

When we move into a new apartment that is a part of a clean and sleek complex, it creates a feel good factor and we tend to keep our house cleaner than the dingy bungalow that we moved out from that had mud all around and uncut grass. We seem to change our mentality about quality living almost overnight. It is a housekeeping challenge to keep a design that easily accumulates filth clean. The same is applicable to the world’s largest railway network – Indian Railways. The interior design of the bogeys and the materials used is not conducive to easy cleaning. So a person who is predisposed to dirtying will do so without any inhibitions.

Basically, the bottomline is what looks clean and is easy to clean is kept clean. It doesn’t matter whether we are in India or Singapore. Another thing is when we practice the habit of cleanliness over a period of time, we simply cannot go back to being unclean. It becomes a habit of a lifetime. So we should aim to instill such unbending maxims and make them a part of Indian culture.