* Any views expressed in this opinion piece are those of the author and not of Thomson Reuters Foundation.
One of the poorest states in India regularly spends hundreds of millions of dollars on vanity projects and ill-thought out infrastructure schemes
By Roli Mahajan
How much longer will taxpayers remain immune to the sight of their money being brazenly wasted by their politicians?
For residents of the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, this month’s legislative election provides an opportunity for change.
Uttar Pradesh is the most populous state in India, accounting for 16.4 percent of the country’s population but it is also one of the country’s poorest states when measured on a per capita income basis. Almost all the social indicators of the state show that it stands at or near the lowest position among the sixteen major Indian states in terms of social development indicators such as medical facilities, birth rate, death rate, infant mortality rate, literacy, per capita income etc.
Yet chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, Mayawati seems to ignore these. This is a chief minister who, according to leaked U.S. diplomatic cables published on Wikileaks, got her slippers flown over from Mumbai on an empty jet and who famously installs statues of herself in the concrete jungles that she created in Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh’s capital city.
River Gomti, a tributary of the Ganges, is so overwhelmed by the concrete activity carried out by humans on its banks that in Lucknow it has shrunk to the size of a stream. In 2010, the Allahbad High Court stopped construction near the river and asked the government to send experts to inspect the river bank. The state government insisted that it hadn’t violated any laws and although parts of the project have been suspended, to date 3 billion rupees ($58 million) of taxpayers’ money has been spent in the construction of a massive park, an open air theatre and an auditorium.
A state which should be addressing worrisome factors like intra-state disparity, with conditions in some regions as bad as sub-Saharan African countries, is “utilising” its resources on frivolities.
It seems to me that more taxpayers’ money will be spent, more trees will be cut down and more enormous structures erected until a new leader is elected who will then spend equally large amounts (if not more) to have the statues and parks (that currently contain more lights and cement than trees) demolished. No doubt, they’ll then be replaced with his or her whims and fancies, eating up more public money in the process. After all, this is the pattern that the state has been following since the early 1990s.
If that wasn’t bad enough, in another part of the state, construction companies, targeting those who work in the Metropolitan city of New Delhi but can’t afford to live there, were given the right to build houses on good cultivable farmland. Somehow, farmers united in their protest. The ensuing court case went all the way to the Supreme Court. The court slammed the authorities for taking advantage of the "colonial law" on land acquisition which was used to divest farmers of their prime agricultural land, benefitting the rich and paying "pittance" to the common men. To date, those people who paid for flats on the land have not had their money returned, while the farmers are still waiting for the bureaucratic wheels to turn to get their land back.
This issue, along with many others like it, was collecting up on the doorstep of the Uttar Pradesh state government when Mayawati came up with her master plan - she proposed to divide the state into sub-parts in order to facilitate what she termed “better and integrated development.”
Though smaller states might mean better administration, the timing of this yet to be ratified decision, coming as it does just before the state elections, is a terrible one. If the state is divided without some improvement in the state’s development status, Uttar Pradesh (which literally means better state) will be doomed.
Roli Mahajan is an International Year of Youth Journalist for Advocates for Youth, a nonprofit organization based in Washington, DC. Mahajan has worked to feature inspiring stories from her state, Uttar Pradesh. In March 2011, her film Rowing Her Way Through the River of Life was selected for screening in the 4th Samsung Women's international Film Festival in Chennai, India. Mahajan holds a master's in mass communication and journalism from the University of Lucknow, India.
