The decision of the government to create giant entities to face competition effectively offers superficial substantiation. ONGC is already weak (Editorial – “Bigger, better?” July 21). The move to merge public sector entities to create larger entities is only to ensure that the public sector is wiped out soon. It also supports this government’s election promise of ‘minimum government, maximum governance’. The Nehruvian policy was to create a number of public sector companies to ensure growth in a state of what is called in economics as ‘Perfect Competition’. Now the policy is to merge all such companies and make it easy for a sellout or closure. One sees this in the field of general insurance too. Having opened the floodgates to private operators, there is now a plan to merge the four giant entities “to face competition effectively”.
Winters are extremely hectic for Sushma Patel, a vegetable grower in Uttar Pradesh’s Chunar town. Her farm is in the fertile plains of Ganga where people grow three crops a year. But this is the only season when she can grow vegetables. And before that, she needs to manually dig out shreds of plastic and wrappers from her one-hectare (ha) farm. “This is all because of the nullah,” she says, pointing at an open drain that runs through her field, carrying sewage from the neighbourhood to the Ganga. “Every monsoon, the drain overflows and inundates the field with a thick, black sludge and plastic debris. We cannot even go near the field as the stench of sewage fills the air,” she says. But Patel has no one to complain to as this is the way of life for most people in this ancient town. About 70 per cent of the people in Chunar depend on toilets that have on-site sanitation, such as septic tanks and pits. In the absence of a proper disposal or management system, people simply dump the faec...
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