Article - 55 Week 12
Progress sans Justice:
Last week I was in Singapore, where I gave a talk to the students of SMU on Government, Business, and Society. Something struck me like a hard-rock when one student asked me if the Government of Singapore was a good one or a bad one. I was not struck by the question, but by the answer that had to be delivered with as much propriety, honesty and candidness in the forum. I told the audience that a good government is not one who is just successful in our eyes, in fact success does come forth from being fair and good to all the citizens and in promoting well directed freer market forces. Freeing up market forces again is an externality of unadulterated fairness and justness on exchanges of excesses. Doling out quick and fair justice is the first step of building a good and durable government. When you read the ancient Indian stories about the Kings and Princes, you realize that for a good and successful King, quick and fair justice preceded military prowess. Even Lord Ram, had to push his own wife into fire and wilderness to make sure that justice had to be quick and fair and made no special relaxation for the privileged that included the First Lady.
The reason we languish in mediocrity in our shipping industry, along with many other fields in India is because, justice is in the slammers. Justice is unarguably delayed beyond tolerance, is mostly unfair, and the worst thing is that it is discriminatory.
When CONCOR makes a mistake in its billing, it refuses to own up and pay back, when the terminal makes a mistake of not handling its duty properly, it slaps a storage cost on the shipping line, when the Port Authority scripts a doubled-edged instrument of BOT contract, when a small & genuine error is detected in data entry the Customs not only slaps a humungous punitive charge on the shipping line but also takes a huge bribe that could wipe a business off, when some company pays its service taxes on time and sincerity its books are ravaged by the department to extort bribes and the list is endless.
And the quality and quantity of justness and fairness injected upon the populace, differentiates a good government from a bad one, without being specific. A democratic form of government can also be bad. The consolation lies in the fact that at least there is a recourse for badness, but there is no guarantee that the replacing government would necessarily be just and fair in its life to death struggle to perpetuate its seat and handle on power.
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