With the proposed division of Ulta Pradesh, four new states are in the offing in the country. One state divided into four apparently to facilitate growth, but actually for political gains. Whether such divisions help the economy or not is debatable but one thing is certain that they help the politicians and bureaucrats alike by giving them new opportunities to loot the nation. More Chief Ministers and Ministers, Chief Secretaries and Secretaries and a full complement of hangers on is definitely what this division shall result in.
Sometime back the (not so)great Indian Railways also went through a similar exercise thereby increasing the number of zonal railways from 9 to 16. The gains or the losses are there for everyone to see. While the railway bureaucracy has definitely gained by virtue of more posts resulting in improved promotional avenues, the railways as a whole have lost out terribly. As it is, the headquarters offices handling only negative functions were always redundant bodies, the need to further proliferate them had absolutely no rationale whatsoever. So now we have a number of zonal railways that have only three divisions to supervise, one general manager in the rank of a special secretary and a fleet of additional and joint secretary level officers, to supervise three functionaries. How superfluous and how ridiculous.
The irony of the situation is that the public, the naive public generally fails to see through such games of the politicians and initially regards such measures as being beneficial for the masses. It is only with the passage of time that the damage caused by such exercises is experienced and by then it is always too late to redeem the situation.
Anyway what can a common man do against the machinations of powerful politicians and a faceless bureaucracy?
It is a hopeless scenario of the fence eating the crop!
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