Trust our GoI to come out with the hare-brainest of schemes...the latest in the series was charging a license fee from people for owning TV sets! The proposal was to charge Rs. 500 per year for a color tv and Rs 200 for B&W! The reason for this fee? Apparently the govt owned Prasar Bharati is not doing too well and they can't afford to pay the salaries!! Hello?? If it is a sick unit which is not making money, does it mean you are going to charge money from the people of the country? And that too for a unit which dishes out programs which no one watches? And the news it gives is controlled by the govt! If the people were really good and performing their jobs, it would have been one of the richest PSUs in the country considering the vast reach it has. But they don't want to do their job and instead make the poor citizens pay for their incompetence! Of course, there is also the practical difficulty in implementing this idea which I am not going to go into.
Then there was another of those ideas..this time from some minister in the Silicon valley of India who wants to ban horse racing in Karnataka! What good is it going to serve? How is this measure going to help the common man? The avid race goers, if such a ban came, will find a way around it and still go and bet! In fact it will end up giving rise to illegal betting syndicates! And again am not delving too much into the fact that the minister would be taking on the might of a certain Mr. Mallya, who owns race horses, is building apt towers where a flat can set you back by as much as a crore and is also a sitting Rajya Sabha MP! :-D
There are many more ideas like the ones above which I just pray never see the light of the day for the benefit of this country! The way things are going, the day may not be too far when they decide to tax the air we breathe!
-UV.
