If we look around, we find gloomy pictures almost everywhere. Today, there is trouble in our body- politics, economy and society. Need of good governance has been a recurring theme in our society today. Each of us is part of governance on different aspects and therefore bearing mindset of responsiveness, participation and transparency and accountability ensures reforms of good governance to be undertaken. Mahatma Gandhi rightly said that there is enough to meet out the needs of the people, but not to meet out their greed. Every state in the world initiates series of development activities in order to bring about positive changes in the economy,society and lives of the citizens. However, it has been observed that development initiatives so far had no desired effects. Widespread corruption, inefficiency, lack of responsiveness, accountability, social prejudices and ineffective administration become a source of rising discontentment with the administration among general public. Corruption is so deeply entrenched in the system that most people regard corruption as inevitable and any effort to fight it as futile. This cynicism is spreading so fast it bodes ill for our democracy itself. India is witnessing rapid modernization and robust economic performance, but it is shame that a country has a large majority of the population living without sanitation amenities. It has been more of cliché that in India access to mobile is easier than to toilet. It assures that corruption is minimized but everyday it is published and shown by the media about various scams, delay in legal proceedings(e.g., state municipalities election under reservation scanner in high courts), wasteful expenditure of government funds by elite politicians (chief guest), monopoly of ruling government as service-provider (backdoor) and failure to pay salary to our teachers ( SSA)- maker of our children’s future, non-transparent system of command and control, increasing graph of complexities in distribution of various funds and schemes to their political supporters neglecting the opposition, unbiased tax evasions by our visionary groups and the gulf of per capita availability of resources between the responsible elite representatives of the people.Lack of effective and stringentpolicies and laws to curd the growing influx of immigrants in our economy and no strict law for the defaulters of law- crimes, bribes etc…Witness so much instance where large sums of money have been spent on needed development ventures but their costs are much higher owing to contracts which is redirected to those paid bribes. In this connection, it may be mentioned that the much publicized NREGA (renamed into MGNREGA) reflects the disbursement among citizens and households randomly rather than bringing rural development is an excellent example of the importance of critical linkage between government and development. More ever, the level of corruption, bribery, malpractices and other evils practices against social and economic development are being increased due to poor governance in our society.
Most of the innovative programs which are seldom replicated across the state remained under the islands of excellence which a common man is not much aware of. Since the innovations were not up sealed therefore their impacts remain limited. In order to assess the effectiveness and impact of administrative reforms finding the right leadership is important but, to the extent one gets internal organization design right and also has clarity on the roles and ensures that the creation of organizations and power of government are well grounded. However, if only we citizen also stop our money-based voting than refined measures can be initiated by our laws. Capturing the incidence in our own capital where our own city buses are being driven by non-locals and also a marginal ratio of non-local earnings in our own unorganized sector. (Source: KCCI – Kohima unorganized sector earns about 238 Crores annually. Out of which 11980 are non-local workers earning about nearly 60% of our annual earning,which is mainly been diverted to other states).
Former UN Secretary General, Kofi Annan once said, “Good governance is perhaps the single most important factor in eradicating poverty and promoting development”. Good governance should be conceptualized as a goal and as a process that accelerates growth, equity and human development potential for the people and society. It further highlights, good governance need to ensure all, including the poor and other disadvantaged groupand should have the means to influence: - to influence the direction of development, to make contributions to development, to share the benefits of development, to initiates a series of development activities in order to bring about a positive change in the economy, society and lives of the citizens.It is important to place various initiatives in a citizen- centric perspective with social audit mechanisms and with proper RTI legislation to ensure good governance for introducing transparency and accountability that parallels the economy and good governance with growth and development.
