Distortion of means & ends
- Hueiyen Lanpao Editorial :: June 26 2015 -
The idea and practice of governance is as old as the dawn of human civilization, Governance since then and as understood now pertains to the process of decision-making.
With the advent of modern nation states, the process of governance has been hinged to the effective implementation of policies with certain wisdom that guides the foundation of a country.
In contemporary times, governance is used in numerous contexts with reference to corporate, international, national and local governance. The execution of governance needs formal and informal actors.
However, it should be reminded that it is the primary task of the ruling dispensation to bring about perceptible difference between the initiations of the other actors and the role of the state actors.
In a key paper published in 2013, political scientist Francis Fukuyama opined that governance pertains to the “government's ability to make and enforce rules and to deliver services, regardless of whether that government is democratic or not.”
Therefore, governance has been more or less linked to the performance of agents in achieving stated goals.
If one has to judge governance from this perspective, the malaise of underdevelopment that we have not only known but also experienced in States of Northeast India has been primarily set into motion by the failure of the State actors in executing assigned roles.
In a State like Manipur, the palpable mal-administration that one sees has also been due to the successive governments’ failure to “enforce” and deliver services.
This fact has been affirmed by Chief Minister O Ibobi Singh on Wednesday when he expressed dismay over medical specialists’ refusal to opt for postings in remote mountainous regions of the State.
Similar is the situation of teachers who had been selected by the government to impart education to students irrespective of spatial postings.
Here, one should also note that the trend of not opting for any government posts in the remote areas is first a personal choice that subverts the rational intention of the government’s assumed role for governance.
The trend is not new in Manipur and such subversion of the assigned roles has had tremendous impact on the society puncturing the very rationale for governance.
And in the failure of the government to curb and control the trend, it has now become a sort of tradition which runs contrary to the set objectives of the State.
This is also one way of exhibiting how the process of distorting the means to achieve set objectives of a welfare state.
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