Sabarimala

Recently the Supreme court has accepted a PIL for allowing women in the mensurating age group into the Sabarimala temple. The easiest solution for the government to bypass this conundrum is to declare the sabarimala a club with "rights of admission reserved". With this the matter can be closed. At worst it can be termed as a "private place of public interest" which means that they can't be forced to admit anyone they do not wish to!!

Now coming to the more devious and serious matter at hand - the agenda of the person filing the PIL and the Judge who allowed it.

It is a known fact that for political reasons all hindu temples have been taken under government control leaving aside christian and muslim places of worship outside the control of the government. This was mainly done so that the monies of these places of worship can be used to furthur propagate their religion by conversions etc whereas the hindu temples monies would not be available for their use. The steady chipping away at all the customs and rituals of hindu temples in 70 years of vote bank politics has now reached this level that a judge thinks that he can interfere in the working of rituals and traditions. It was a really sad day when Sardar patel bowed down to Gandhi's choice of Nehru as India's PM when the congress party was overwhelmingly rooting for the Sardar. This is the reason that India needs to get rid of such parties and their politicians.

Politics, education and educated politics!!

Recently the Haryana Govt stirred up a hornets nest by notifying minimum education qualifications for the panchayat elections. This set the alarm bells ringing in the entire political sphere as many present elected politicans are known more for their "rap sheet" rather than their "mark sheet".

Now coming to the said notification, personally I believe that "formal" education should not be a bar for entering politics, as many people (and this will be always in perpetuity in a country the size of India) are educated in the "university of life" and this makes them more in touch with the problems. trials and tribulations of the man on the street which is required when policy is debated and passed in the parliament.

Also the formal education doesnt guarantee knowledge - just look at the number of people who press both "UP" and "DOWN" buttons in elevators !! Also professionally educated engineers, doctors, CA's etc etc were caught napping in the recent Facebook sponsored petition to TRAI where they thought they were protecting net neutrality when actually it was the opposite - all the 150+ people on the authors friend list who signed, when told of the "real" effect of their vote - felt cheated and sent separate emails to TRAI to ignore their vote in favour of freebasics which was obtained by FB in a devious manner!!

Now for some analytical data - Angola talks of "solid education background, Azerbaijan talks of university degree, Turkey talks about higher education. No other country talks about education as a criteria for standing for elections of a public office. (Author note - all 196 countries constitutions have not been read - readers are encouraged to list more countries with minimum education qualifications for entering politics)

List of countries with no reference to minimum education qualification:

1 Afghanistan
2 Albania
3 Algeria
4 Argentina
5 Armenia
6       Australia
7 Austria
8 Bangladesh
9 Belarus
10 Brazil
11 Colombia
12 France
13 Germany
14 India
15 Mexico
16 Philippines
17      Russia
18      Srilanka
19 United Kingdom
20      United States of America

There are many pro's and cons for this subject but the clinching argument is, if education is superior then why should an educated person be scared of the uneducated lot, who would logically have no traction with the voters. Ergo the author feels that the minimum education criteria will restrict the talent pool and should not be imposed in politics. As politics is a popular vote (competition of electorate) unlike a "job" which by its very nature has to be based on the competition of education, knowledge or such other criteria which will allow common marking and hence comparision to get the best of the lot appointed! So the biggest argument for education in politics does not stand as we will end up comparing apples and oranges.

Traffic and water- both need to flow - ask delhi and chennai

The recent odd even formula of the Delhi government to reduce pollution is nothing more than a direct admission that physics trumps human behaviour. As the roads in delhi remain the same there is no way that you can place more and more cars on them. This basic concept of physics that 2 objects cannot occupy the same space is the reason we have traffic jams and the resultant pollution. Now the logical extension of this is to formalise a total limit across the country (at a simplistic level) based on a vehicles per km concept. This way one can auction the rights to car ownership in each area and thus generate more revenues and use that to run buses for free!!

of course the obvious solution will never be followed as that forces accountability on the government to account for the extra revenue from these auctions to provide better public transport, they would rather play with some odd-even rule which within a decade will end up in a congestion tax and other silly things which have huge administration costs attached to it rather than the simple auction method with limited admin costs.

Of course this way only the rich can afford cars BUT aint that the system in singapore where the car registration fees is so prohibitive that only the rich can afford cars? (no point envying such countries when you refuse to follow commonsensical solutions to problems)

Now coming to the odd-even rule. It has reduced pollution from cars more than estimated simply because 1) 50% less cars (taken into account) , 2)lesser jams (taken into account) BUT they didnt take into account NO jams which means if earlier 100 cars spent 40mins on the road - now only 50 cars spend less than 5 mins on the same stretch of the road. this means that car pollution time has been cut from 100*40 = 4000 car minutes to 50*5=250 car minutes ie a 93.75% reduction in car pollution. Now when you input this number into IIT, kanpur report that cars produce less than 3% of the pollution in delhi, we can say that nearly 100% of this 3% has been eliminated by this odd-even rule.

But then i hope the government wakes up to the fact that it is always better to come up with a lasting solution(cars per km )  rather than patch work like odd-even which will require a congestion tax in the near future and better/ cheaper/ safer public transport.

of course nothing would be better than to fast forward the adoption of greener tech in cars - refer earlier blog on this here at http://forsec.blogspot.in/2015/04/ngt-law-and-acche-din-for-conspiracy.html