Another Bureaucratic Assininism

I did not turn the pages of the dictionary to see if "Assininism" was a real word, but what I mean to imply is the "condition of being assinine in someone's expression of speech". But if there is a word like that, that is what I would use to describe the following incident.

Recently, the Joint Secretary of a ministerial department, visited IIT and asked for help in various areas of research including medicine, energy, IT and so on.

In my opinion, an engineer is not supposed to "create" a problem, he "solves" it. His training is mainly targeted to handle real world situations. In this context, the faculty and the students of IIT asked the Joint Secretary to give out areas, or requirements in the specified areas where IIT people can help in the required manner.

The response from the Joint Secretary "How can I tell you what the problem is and where the problems lie?" Wow! The joint secretary of a ministerial department and the person does not know where the problems are! I started wondering how government appointments are handled!

The faculty and the students took more than 2 hours to explain to the Joint Secretary, that it was the ministry which was supposed to come up with the gap areas and then projects/research work could be taken up in the respective area. It was hard to explain to the person, who holds an IAS, that is impossible for an engineering student to throw stones in the dark.

Chasing Realistic Dreams and Not Utopia

The machinery that we follow in our country is pseudo-democratic. The bureaucracy is full of busybodies with a brimful of ideas and it wants to implement unrealisable dreams.

I am not naming the people involved here, but I am pained to describe before you, the young people of India, a certain initiative that has been taken up by one of the state governments in our country.

The initiative plans to draw from the world bank a sum that runs to a thousand crores and more. It aims to set right a certain set of "traditional" practices in the water distribution, allocation and irrigation sectors, that these people believe have gone "wrong".

I had an opportunity to look at the proposal made by the "chosen" people of the bureaucracy, and believe me, the three documents that I had a look into were akin to the famous bhasmasura. Not only the people had no idea which models were applicable when and where, but also they thought that GIS was only a tool to make maps. They plan to design a system which would design and dictate policies, handle billing and tender, make maps, devise alternate strategies, not be a black box to the user and display the model proposed and the relevant flowchart, become a repository of knowledge etcetera etcetera etcetera all built into one. They probably stopped short of doing the laundry and cleaning the toilets!

I ask you, o common man, would you like to be slaves of such kind of bureaucracy? Would you like to submit before the World Bank, a project that has no clear mission, no clear vision and yet is a khich of big-worded ideas, thus sending our country into debt and in foreign hands.

I would ask the young people to come forward, learn proper methods of writing project proposals and throw them open to the real world. Make your ideas available to the public, tell them that you know what to do and how. Choose small ideas but study the best practices. Let Geoinformatics be a friendly tool for the people and not an enemy of the country. There is a need to educate people on the proper use of Geoinformatics in our country.

I am signing off for the day.