The blog Kaipullai.com has a tribute to a government servant who got around India’s bureaucracy to perform feats of engineering that put to shame all the “free-marketers” ( or, more accurately, corporate and crony capitalists) of the last twenty years of privatization.
The man is Dr. E. Sreedharan, who recently retired from the leadership of the Delhi Metro Corporation.
Dr. Sreedharan’s achievements suggest that sensible libertarians should avoid demonizing everyone who works in the government or attributing all things anti-social to their actions.
Check out this description of one of Dr. Sreedharan’s earliest feats – restoring a bridge destroyed by a cyclone:
“At that time, Dr Sreedharan was a Deputy Engineer in the Southern Railway. And this piece of wreck was in his territory. Indian Railways, gave Dr Sreedharan six months to restore connectivity to Rameshwaram. Which was asking a lot considering
Dr. Sreedharan, had to convert this
To
IN SIX MONTHS
Dr Sreedharan finished the job in ..FORTY SIX DAYS (1964).
He took one month and 15 days to restore, THAT bridge, back to full operation. The bridge which was India’s longest sea bridge for 96 years, till the Bandra Worli Sea Link was inaugurated in the year 2008.
Forty six days to restore this 2.3 Km bridge in a state where
THIS BRIDGE
took six effin months to restore after being washed away by a flash flood, in 2006.
There are some achievements that look cool, but once you get an award, you completely forget about them. And then there are some you won’t forget, even if you suffer a total memory loss.
This was one of those things.
For all this trouble, Dr Sreedharan got a Railway award consisting of Rs 100 and an awful looking plaque.”
The post ends this way:
“So let me just encapsulate, if that can be done, what Dr Sreedharan has done for the country
1. He restored India’s longest sea bridge which was completely destroyed, in 46 days.
2. He designed India’s first Metro.
3. Supervised the building of India’s first indigenous Merchant vessel.
4. Executed India’s most difficult project since Independence.
5. Gave Delhi wallahs, something called the Metro.
6. Predicted India’s biggest corporate fraud, three months before it happened.
I don’t know how the Bharat Ratna [LR: India’s highest civililan award] nomination thing works. But I believe you stand a chance if you have done something good for the country. Now tell me, what has Dr Sreedharan not done for the country?
I mean when you can consider a guy who sells a computer anti-virus on prime-time television for India’s highest civilian award, Why is there not a whisper about a guy who has ensured 400,000 people on the western coast of India saw a train for the first time?
Or, was responsible for a sharp drop in road-rage killings in Delhi?”
Read the whole post at Kaipullai’s Vetti Thoughts.
I dug around a bit after reading the blog, and found that since retiring, Sreedharan has become president of an NGO (non-governmental organization) called Foundation for Restoration of National Values, an outfit to which Ratan Tata, of the famous industrial family, also belongs. In that capacity, he has been campaigning for the introduction of a stringent anti-corruption law and, interestingly, has lent public support to Anna Hazare’s anti-corruption movement.
The Anna Hazare movement, an Indian version of OccupyWallStreet, according to its supporters in India , has been endorsed (and claimed ) by Wikileaks’s Julian Assange.
[Assange has just lost his extradition appeal in UK and will be going back to Sweden to face rape charges that his supporters believe are trumped up.]
Critics of Anna Hazare include those on the anarchist left, like Arundhati Roy, as well many on the anarchist and/or nationalist right.
The former see Hazare’s emphasis on anti-corruption as a kind of moral dilution of their fundamentally anti-state position.
The latter see Hazare as a Trojan horse for corporate and neo-colonial interests intent on breaking down national governments and religious/cultural identities through the mechanism of a transnational anti-corruption regime.
Corporate and NGO interests manipulate naive libertarians with anti-government rhetoric intended to get them on board what’s really a scheme for global management.
The globalists ultimately want to turn nation-states into surveillance units where citizens voluntarily monitor themselves and each other in a world-wide panopticon.
(I’ve blogged about this dozens of times last year).