The media fudges data and completeness of information to spread propaganda which benefits the sources in power. And who are these sources; sources with money or political power. When politicians could be bought and driven through money, the obvious driver here is money. Having listened to and read P. Sainath’s article and interviews I realized the truth about the corporations and the power wielded by them on the fate of the masses. Although a close to ideal democratic system would not have highly variant power distribution over masses, i.e. power to determine the functioning of the nation. But such a system is nowhere to be seen, not at least amongst the most prominent flavors of democracy.
A measure of comparison on how well India is doing is reflected by the fact that India’s GDP is equivalent to the sum total of the wealth of few rich industrialists. Now if the produce of billion plus individuals equal that of less than 100 people, what does our standard deviation curve look like. I think to really determine the efficiency of a democratic system, we can come up with a technique based on statistics. There are some select metrics which define, how well the nation is doing as a democracy and GDP is not such a metric. Some metrics that should be used to determine the Democratic Efficiency would be Average-Life-Expectancy, Standard Deviation in Per Capita Income, Ratio of voting right exercised, Literacy rate where minimum qualification should be to have at least intermediate education etc. There are many more rational metrics which could determine the success of a democratic system. It’s high time that the media project and analyze the performance of governments on these rational scale rather then playing on the hype fueled by corporations. Why doesn’t the media talk about various UN reports which factually reflects the “India Sliding” reality of the nation. I am not a political scientist but as a rational being could think that democratic values could only be emboldened through continuous analysis of the political system, rational performance determination, and communication of such real facts by the media to the public. Much of public apathy is driven by media. If it plays a sincere role and reports news objectively, the citizens won’t be mired by false propaganda and would be better informed to make decisions.
It’s election time and although I can’t exercise my right to vote, it’s time you think about where the nation is going and how to measure it before making your decision.
Here are some of the Links to P. Sainath’s Lectures:
i) Washington State University, Feb 2005.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1560557294503313321
ii) Interview on Indian Media:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QewCqpgBiuw&feature=related
iii) Globalizations and its remnants
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sVWdIjfRpy0&feature=related
1 Comment
April 26, 2009 at 3:10 am
I think we need to do beyond finding the ways of calculating. From listening to all this, i have understood anything than it’s we need to bring consumer closer to producer. http://www.echoupal.com/ was started with the some similar intention if i am not wrong but i could not follow how successful it was. We need more generous entrepreneurs in this area.
One initiative can be a website/system which takes the order from the consumers and directly provide the order to the nearest producers and just get the logistic fee and some marginal benefits. This will remove multiple layers of intermediaries involved and will help both the producers & consumer. Just a dream of mine, don’t know how successful this model can become.
Anyways great thinking, both u and p sainath.
One of the metrices can be gross happiness index and it is being used in myenmar or some other neighboring nation.
Vijay