Liberalisation pays off...

The abrupt shoot-out at Virginia Technology University has been a painful piece of news to swallow. Innocent aspiring lives were made to meet their ends in the worst way possible. The suspect a gutsy 23 year old armed with two powerful guns shooting at sight. What prompted him to behave in this way? Perhaps an uncontrollable outburst of emotions which was channeled out the wrong way. Emotions which induced in him hatred against his own clan and forced him to pick up arms which is so freely available in the United States - a liberal show-off they practise. My rage is directed towards this open sale of arms. Is it necessary? Ask them and they will reply, "See, ours is a mature and open market, not like yours. We trust our people. We are and always will be liberals." Quite a bold answer but I guess they refuse to go by the demographics of criminal offences and the sales figures of arms. On top of that they make no effort to find a link between these two. As consequence, we get to see such a horrific history of university and school shoot-outs. Will and should the U.S. Administration still pride themselves on their extravagant liberal decisions?

What lessons do we learn from Nandigram?

The Nandigram incident was indeed a spilled bottle of blood on the ambitious plans to transform West Bengal into a major commercial hub. It’s always painful to see unreasonable loss of human capital, but the more horrific face of it is the game of raising fingers at each other, the political masterminds have started, to gain political mileage. The solution is no where to be seen, just a clog of charges and counter charges. The operations of the media being stifled, exact details of what happened are hard to find. With the emergence of the concept of SEZs, the issue of land acquisition was sure to create hitches in its implementation. So what have the administrators learned from this unexpected incident? I feel the primary lesson they should learn is to allow time to help mature the minds of the people so that they can understand the importance of such projects. India is an agrarian country. Agriculture is still the main profession of millions and as consequence land is worth their lives. Seizing land from them for the purpose of implementing SEZs and other commercialization instruments was bound to be difficult. How much you compensate them, loss of land to them is still like the separation of soul from the body. A lot of brain racking is being done at the Union level regarding the SEZ policy but no satisfactory solution has been reached yet.

While acquiring land for industrial development one should take care of the fact that fertile land is not sacrificed. But from the point of view of the SEZs, the area should be easily accessible and satisfy other industrial requirements. Such perfectly positioned fallow lands are not an easy find. As a result a compromise has to be reached where the interests of one camp or the other is sacrificed. And in most cases it’s the camp of the less resourceful that suffers.

I feel the defect is in the grass root. How many policies you frame, if the nitty-gritty’s of it do not reach the ones to be most affected by it, you cannot expect a sustainable solution. When acquiring land, the views of the ones whose land is to be acquired need to be taken into account. It’s just not taking them into confidence by presenting them with a rosy picture, but making them aware of each and every implication of it. Then comes the compensation package which should be sufficient enough to secure their lives.

But with the poisoned politics around a peaceful consensus can never be reached. To gain political mileage and secure their position each and every party is taking advantage of their illiteracy and presenting them with distorted pictures.
But the bottom line is that this bloodbath should not have happened. It was too gory to be tolerated. This incident should be totally condemned and the administration should ensure that such inhuman clashes do not reoccur.