The public has time and again learnt this bitter lesson and the officers concerned have seldom given them time to forget it either. There aren’t many departments that have escaped this lethal bite.
How much welfare the Public Welfare Department does for the public is an open secret to the people of Assam. The conditions of the city roads especially the Fancy Bazar jail road stands witness to its claims of welfare. The Municipal corporation is going neck and neck in the race for negligence with ever increasing instances of waterlogging, unkempt drainage and overflowing garbage dumps in public places. The funds may have been extinguished but how much of the amounts sanctioned were actually used for the said projects remains a secret as no real work is done in reality although records exist in ever piling files. While the contractors laugh all the way to he banks.
The APSC scandal has not yet erased from our memories but has the situation improved? Are deserving candidates getting through in the APSC tests or are the ones with high connections and fat bank balances still sneaking past through them?
Even the judicial system has not escaped its spreading tentacles. One only needs to grease a few willing palms and escape penalty in no time. The result of which is the free movement of criminals. The keepers of law too do not hesitate to ask for arrangements for saah paani (a few quick bucks) and act more like the breakers of law.
One needs to have dollops of patience and bundles of money in ones pocket if he wants to have a job done swiftly, be it the making of a passport, a police verification, getting a license for a vehicle or a wine shop and what not.
The craze for making a fast buck has led many a mind astray. Pour-money and-get-your-job-done policy is written over all faces in every office these days and more the money faster is the rate of work done. Above all there is also the gunda power to worry about for if one fills a tender for any purpose one is sure to face competition from one or more of our ex-gun totting friends. But the saddest of all is the part when you have to part from a few notes even to enter the abode of the gods and goddesses. And the special rates in Kamakhya temple is a ready instance of this practice. While in Calcutta’s Kaalighat the paandas have taken upon themselves the right to curse the devotees if they refuse to hand them a couple of hundreds.
Our entire system beginning from democracy to devotion reeks of corruption.
And the day is not far when moksha could be purchased for a pittance.
by Rituparna Goswami Pandey