The recent advised by the union finance ministry to the state government to adopt austerity measure to check the state debt crisis is a welcome and a positive directives. We cannot expect the central government to wipe the man-made state government debt all the time. Its high time that the state government should resort to practical proper budgeting and planning to check unnecessary and extravagant expenditure. State like Nagaland where there is not much source of income for the government and most of the time is dependent on the central government , running such a government without proper planning, budgeting and extravagant expending will always put the government in debt crisis in every budget session. It may be of Congress, NPF or a BJP government, it will always left behind a big debt to clear after 5 years. The reason being our expenditure is always more than our income. It has been highlighted time and again that we have excess government employees as a result of the menace of backdoor appointment. Excess means the government has to spend extra expenditure. Such kind of excess will always put any government in debt in the long run. Nagaland is lucky to be getting funds from the central government since its statehoood. But we do not see much development as we have a big virus called corruption. Drug addict and alcoholic parents will always ruin their family similarly wherever there is rampant corruption like ours we cannot expect much development. This is the situation most of the calamities hit African area are facing today where the western countries and United Nation are providing lots of fund for rebuilding but there is not much visible development because of misuse of funds. Good actors and director's can bring life to an average movie script but bad actors and director will ruin even one of the best movie script in the world. Similarly Nagaland has all the potential to become one of the favourite destination spot in India. We have the raw material of rich history, culture, cuisine, favourable climate, rich soil, beautiful landscape etc. But as long as there are many bad actors and directors we will never realised our potentials. Gandhi has rightly put up that "the world has enough for everyone's needs, but not enough for everyone's greed".
Moameren Pongen Asst Prof Chumukedima
