(Jinka Nagaraju)
Your good intentions sometimes go awry and become the cause of worry. When a change for good is fervently expected, your well-intentioned action gets derailed and flies in the face of your own success.
This paradoxical situation well illustrates some of chief minister YS Jaganmohan Reddy’s programs in Andhra Pradesh, especially the sand policy.
The reason is, you lay too much focus on achieving your political objective rather than the process that paves the path for successful outcomes.
Sand is new gold everywhere. As too much money is involved in the contraband sand, corruption, greed and plunder cannot be abnormal.
The NGT cases have thoroughly exposed the nexus among politicians (of all parties), officials and the mafia.
The experience across India shows that the nexus would only change colour and the system gets a new lease of life every time a new government takes charge.
Chief Minister Jagan has to demonstrate that his government is different.
But unfortunately, his government got caught up in a quite avoidable unpleasant situation, despite having too many advisers. Maybe a case of too many cooks!
Jagan’s enthusiasm to replace awfully corrupt sand mining regime of the previous government with his own in a tearing hurry has led to another disaster.
He scrapped the old policy of the TDP government and could not immediately put in place a substitute.
And he took another three months, to announce his own sand policy.
This rendered lakhs of construction labourers jobless as the non-availability of the sand brought the construction activities in the state to a grinding halt.
When he could replace the old liquor policy with a new one without any transition problems, why did he leave the state without any sand policy for three months, after scrapping the old one?
He may not have expected the unusual floods. But the delay in announcing the new policy and the subsequent flooding of rivers have compounded the woes of daily wage labourers, who are the most vulnerable section of the society.
Sand is not available to the public even in the districts like Anantapur where there were no floods.
There are charges that the online booking system frequently either goes off or says no stalk. Sometimes, it complained, the system says the sand is not available in the district of the consumer and asks him to book from a far off district.
The ruling YSRC’s counter that these charges are politically motivated and the issue is being politicised is a poor justification.
After all, we live in a political society and everything is governed by partisan politics. The opposition parties do try to exploit the follies of the ruling party in order to gain political mileage. This argument cannot be extended to push the plight of the daily wage labourers under the carpet.
Activist Anumolu Gandhi, who was responsible for the NGT slapping Rs 100 crore as interim fine on the previous government, says Jagan’s actions are lacking in any environmental concern, hence the problem.
He says chief minister Jagan is driven more by an urge to immediately scrap the previous chief minister Chandrababu Naidu’s policies rather than putting in place a sustainable sand mining policy.
Stating that Jagan is not ready to initiate criminal actions against the persons responsible for illegal sand mining and those officials, who had colluded with them, as per NGT order, Gandhi says this all show how narrower are objectives of the YSRC government.
It is high time Jagan demonstrated his political sagacity through his actions.