Cooptation in the political parties

We often see political power games happening in the formation of a government. Now a days what happens is that when the political party in the power tries to do something positive, the opposition party is bound to come up with a negative aspect of the initiative and then protests happens, the whole project is jeopardised and finally shelved. That is what happened in West Bengal, where the Buddhadev’s Nano project was shelved because of opposition from rival party chief Mamta Banerjee. Any state can grow only when all the stakeholders forget all the opposition and work constructively towards the development of the state. As of now the political parties perceive themselves as competitors of each other which is actually good because that brings out the best of the system through POSITIVE criticism. Mind the bold positive which is not happening in today’s scenario.

If we compare a state with a company then the Chief Minister is the CEO of the state who comes out of one of the various political parties which are in turn can be compared with various functions like Marketing, Finance, HR, Production etc. Even these functions also compete on budget allocations. But even if the CEO is chosen from one function, the other functions do not start working out of sync. The company becomes a successful company when all the functions work completely in sync which results in an increase in the value of shareholders of the company. Similarly the political parties need to work in sync to boost the growth of the state and increase the value of its shareholders i.e. the residents of the state. So the first thing to do is to eliminate the perception of a perfect competition among the parties in their minds and promote cooptation which is combination of cooperation and competition.

Who is a thief ?

Who is a thief actually? Is it the one who steals something? No, it is actually the one who gets caught while stealing something. See the example of Raju of Satyam, he was a great business leader till the scam came into the public and now everybody criticizes him like anything. But if the real esate bubble would not have happened and Maytas assets were not devalued significantly then he would have been successful and he would be a great business leader now. But then also the fact cannot be ignored that he did forge the books of Satyam. So what is the catch? Getting caught. Our system always follows the practice of “Cure is better than prevention”. So when this kind of issue comes up, the convict gets some punishment and whole episode is forgotten. I am sure there are many corrupt practices even worse than Satyam going on in the corporate world but these will not be prevented because they are not caught yet which goes back to where I started from i.e. “Who is a thief?”

Consumer first

The sale of SUVs in US has gone down like anything. Do US citizens suddenly become conscious of emissions, green and clean technology, carbon footprints? No, what happened is, the rise of petrol prices coupled with economic downturn and partial consciousness of the citizens significantly affected the sale of SUVs. So what was the result? A greener world? No again. The auto companies started to exploit their SUVs products in the developing markets which were not as much hit by economy as US and the green consciousness is practically nil. So what happened is the transfer of the emitting sources from one location to other.

Many researchers are suggesting companies to make products which will be clean and green. I do not agree with that. As long as there is a market for a product, the product will be manufactured. Reva, the electric car is not much popular even if it solves the problem of emissions. It does not have the market yet. So what can be done? First, if the auto companies are seriously thinking about the environment then before spending millions and billions of dollars on the technological aspect of the products they should focus on the conscience of the consumers. They have to make their buyers realize what can be the negatives of these heavy smoke emitters and then consumers will automatically buy the clean-green products, if possible in premium also.