Monday, June 28, 2010
Is Our System of Justice Really Just?
The Bhopal Tragedy Makes Us Think and Act on This issue
The way the worst industrial disaster at Bhopal, India created by the irresponsible managers of Union Carbide of the world was handled shows the worst face of all of those who were connected with it inside the company and outside the company.
In a way it amounted to deliberate attempt to kill more than 25000 people and making millions of people disabled in various degrees for generations. It was deliberate because every manager who was responsible for upkeep of the plant knew about the dangerous most outcome in case of an accident in the defective plant. So it was like committing calculated murder of such a huge number of people.
This act cannot be equated to carelessness or a small crime for which the commensurate penalty in justice is pittance, normally.
It's time to revise the concept of what is a big crime and what should be commensurate sentence for committing it. The existing thinking on it is absolutely wrong and obsolete.
The bigness of an act of crime should be decided based on the end results of committing that crime. And the justice will lie in deciding the sentence commensurate with the heinousness or monstrosity of that crime.
It's high time to think and act quickly.
Monday, June 7, 2010
Do We Really Elect the Right People in Democracy?
(Read the inside stories of the corporate sector in the form of short management case studies at: http://shyam.bhatawdekar.com or http://management-anecdotes.blogspot.com/ or http://corporate-case-studies.blogspot.com/)
Money Backed Election Model is the Culprit in Corrupt Democracy
If democracy is the government of people, by people and for people, then I wonder if it is happening in any democracy any where in the world.
Elections are being fought by the political parties and its people on the basis of massive money pools created by the smart alecks- huge sums of the money largely extracted from the obscenely rich corporate bodies and such others. And obviously they throw this money at the prospective politician as their smart investments with the assurance of highest possible returns on these investments.
Then, elections are fought using such unimaginably large sums of money by the people who can afford to do so. What happens to those other more deserving candidates with no money of their own or with no dirty skills of squandering the money of others? The electorate is totally deprived of these better candidates and democracy suffers hugely.
When the contesting candidates get elected by using the money provided by the corporations and other rich bodies, they work only in favor of the corporations and the rich people and totally neglect rest of the people of the country.
Therefore, remove the money from the election scenarios. The elections should be fought without money. I suggest a following model:
- Any citizen of the country should be eligible to contest democratic elections. Some minimum and maximum age and educational qualification should be imposed.
- The candidate offering himself/herself to get elected must not have any criminal record or he/she should not have any criminal proceeding going on against him/her at the time of going through the election process.
- Every candidate will have to submit a detailed bio-data with their photographs to the body that organizes and administers the entire election process.
- This body will publish the bio-data of the candidates at governmental expenditure in the media. This will account for only marginal additional expenditure on government's total election budget.
- The candidates will not canvass the way they do now by spending the enormously huge amounts of dirty money they collected in a dirty manner. Instead, specially created TV channels or even the existing TV channels will provide certain equal time slots to the candidates to make their presentations to the public. The expenditure for this will be borne by the government; after all that is the people's money now being used very decently for a very important cause. Plus the candidates' bio-data are already available with the public now.
- The voters will be able to see and study these presentations and the detailed bio-data of the candidates contesting the election and they will decide whom to vote based on their merits.
- The voters will vote on the appointed day for the candidate they chose.