Shameless parasitism

An enduring outcome of post-independence India™s neta-babu socialism which has bled the country white during the past six decades, is the huge 18 million strong parasitic incubus of government employees accustomed to feasting off the state which has grown within the body politic. A case in point is former three-term Delhi chief minister Sheila Dikshit who beneath her benign maiden aunt image, has exposed herself as a fantastically greedy, corrupt and self-absorbed typical Congress politician. After the crushing defeat of the Congress party in the Delhi assembly election engineered by the neophyte Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) in December 2013, an application under the Right to Information Act revealed that during her term as chief minister of Delhi state, she had installed 31 air-conditioners and 25 electric heaters, 12 geysers and 16 air purifiers in her seven-room official household (since appropriated by retired prime minister Manmohan Singh for his already forgotten contributions to Indian politics) in the highest rent Lutyens zone of the national capital. In the last few days before the Congress-led UPA government demitted office in New Delhi, this Nehru-Gandhi dynasty loyalist wangled a posting for herself as governor of Kerala, presumably to continue to enjoy the lavish lifestyle to which she has become accustomed. And subsequently, even when the newly-elected BJP-NDA government made it plain it didn™t want her as the Centre™s representative in Kerala, she stayed put citing the law until she was transferred to Mizoram where the lifestyle isn™t as lavish, whereupon she has reluctantly resigned. Unfortunately, public leaders accustomed to offices of profit under the state with no outcomes to report, are the rule rather than exception (see book review p.238). Nothing is too good for them and no depths of poverty and despair can™t be endured by the people they represent. Neta-babu banking The arrest of S.K. Jain, chairman of the public sector Syndicate Bank on August 2 on charges of sanctioning risky loans for bribes, has aroused worst fears about the country™s 27 public sector banks which were nationalised by prime minister Indira Gandhi way back in 1969. From that time onwards, public sector banks (PSBs) became the private banks of politicians with the phone call from Delhi becoming the most important criterion for sanction and disbursements of large loans. For smaller loans, a 10 percent cut of the sanctioned loan amount to branch managers became the established norm. Four decades later, India is among the most under-banked countries worldwide with less than 40 percent of the population having bank accounts and even a smaller percentage eligible for bank credit. Small credit flows to farmers and small businesses became possible only because of statutory lending mandates to PSBs to allocate up to 40 percent of total loans disbursed to SMSEs (small and medium-scale enterprises). But in such disbursements, willingness to make the 10 percent pay-off to bank officials was ” and remains ” the main eligibility criterion. Consequently, bad loans of the Indian banking system dominated by PSBs have risen to 4.5 percent…