The Chief Minister announced on Wednesday that the Tourism Departments reply on the amount it spent in the last two years on trips by Ministers, MLAs and officials was erroneous. Since the information has been withdrawn, legislative privileges must be respected and the amount spent on the various trips mentioned in the Herald in its July 23 edition is no longer valid government information and we the media must wait till fresh figures are disclosed in the House.
However with utmost respect to the privileges of our honourable members, there is another privilege that exists outside the House. The privilege of the people of Goa to ask and to know if the state that they help run through their taxes, is delivering them not just services but a universe of comfortable and profitable existence.
Amartya Sen and Jean Dreze argue in their book “An uncertain glory: India and Its contradictions”, that the state fails because of its deeply entrenched inequality and India’s ruling elite have never been properly accountable to its needy majority. The Goa of the last decade, because that is in a time zone of immediate comprehension, has a ruling elite who have privileges that are unequal to those of the majority. Privileges such as country hopping at the tax payers’ expense, not just to visit tourism marts to ostensibly bring more tourists to Goa, but also for other pursuits like watching football matches, motor sport, taking a look at garbage plants and so on. As Sen and Dreze pointed out, this ruling elite has never been accountable to the majority of the people they are supposed to serve.
Since the Chief Minister has an issue with numbers and figures, let us to drive home the essence of this argument, assume that the total cost of all trips made abroad and paid for by the tourism department was Re 1. Now the people of Goa have a right to know, not just on the specific heads on which this one rupee was spent, but also the following a) Could the spend have been less b) Why was there a need to visit that country at that point of time c) What were the tangible benefits of the trip and d) The return on that investment – mainly the number of tourists or long term prospects of tourist footfalls expected from those countries. In another context, if an employee of a company goes on a tour – domestic or foreign, on behalf of the company, doesn’t he have to return and file a tour report and then justify to the management of the company or its share holders, depending on the nature of the trip, how the trip has been beneficial to the company.
Each minister of this government works for this company whose share holders are the people of Goa who make this company run. They will not be satisfied with mere figures if that is what the Chief Minister aims to provide. His umbrage at the publication of the figures of the foreign trips may be justified in the context of Assembly privileges, which are actually undefined and mainly interpretative, but that doesn’t take away his need to be accountable to his shareholders who are looking for more than figures.
Therefore what the Government has promised to reveal on August 5 needs to be more than the “corrected” figures, which is its privilege to place. It needs to place a full tour report of each of the trips in the manner described above. All the four questions for each of those trips need to answered to the satisfaction of the people, and not just the limited satisfaction of the MLA who has asked this question.
India as a democracy will be a better place when elected representatives learn to accept that the biggest privilege they have is the privilege to serve the people, and Parliament and State legislatures are temples or churches or Mosques or Gurudwaras, from which they serve. And the biggest service that they can give us is to work towards protecting our biggest investment in them – our trust.
