Public money in private entertainment!

IPL(2014)victory celebration Kolkata Knight Rider (KKR) is one of the franchise teams of Indian Premier League (IPL), a T-20 cricket tournament. It’s owned by Bollywood star Shaha Rukh Khan along with Juhi Chawla and her husband Jay Meheta.It’s totally a private tournament and has, in fact, no connection with the state. Association of ‘Kolkata’ with the name of the team is only coincidental and does not mean it’s a Kolkata team either. However, incidentally King Khan is the brand ambassador Bengal.It’s, of course, altogether a different story. Nevertheless the state almost officially bash in the glory of KKR’s wining the IPL trophy. What’s more, the State celebrates the victory at the expense of public exchequer.This year CM will dash to Kolkata from Darjeeling cutting short her normal schedule to participate in the celebration even by a hiring a private plane that costs a few lacs of rupees. On earlier occasion even guv took part in the celebration.

Demonetization!

Though situation has improved post demonetization but perhaps we’ve a long way to go before things become normal. We have to brace for cash crunch for many more days to come as the quantum of money withdrawn for note ban will not be fully replenished to promote digitization So shortage of cash will continue The situation will gradually ease out with the progress of digitization. Admittedly, it’s a Herculean task to make digitization successful in a vast country like ours with many and varied problems but unless it is done whole efforts to minimize financial corruption and accumulation of black money would go to waste.All efforts are being made to encourage people to go in for electronic transactions.Govt has even offered many incentives in this regard and people are also responding favourably. Nevertheless growth of digital economy suffers badly for lack of infrastructure particularly in rural areas In large number of villages there’re are no banks, let alone internet services required for e-business. There villagers have never seen debit or credit cards, swipe machines (POS) and heard  of e-wallet either. So now Govt has the massive task of extending banking and internet services to them and train them how to carry out e-transaction.It will take a long time to perform this mammoth task. Internet services should have been made available in villages before demonetization, which Govt is now trying to  do on war footing. This lack of foresightedness adds to people’s hardships. But what’s very interesting is while most of the opposition parties are up in arms against PM for demonetization the common people stand by this stance though they miserably suffer for it. Time will tell how far Modi’s efforts to cleanse the Augean stable would be successful or turn out to be a futile exercise.