I ended up laughing because when I saw the smug expression on the Health Minister’s face as he gave interviews about the ban on nationwide television, I realised that he took himself too seriously for anyone else to need to. Anbumani Ramadoss will be remembered in history books in a small footnote as the man who had a chance to really make a difference and blew it. The Prime Minister will be the one blamed for allowing the most important portfolios in his cabinet to remain in the hands of men who never understood their importance. I speak of health, education and national security. Even if we can sympathise with Dr Manmohan Singh’s compulsions in keeping two aged leaders in Education and Home for reasons of peace in his party, it’s hard to understand why he needed to keep Ramadoss as Health Minister. Is the Congress Party so unsure of its future that it needs the support of a nothing party like the PMK?

Do we need to be inflicted with a Health Minister who is ready to waste our hard-earned money on impractical, unenforceable bans when there are so many important things that need to be done? Half of India’s children are malnourished, more than half of Indian women suffer from aneamia, we have one of the highest rates of infant mortality in the world and most deaths of children under the age of five are from preventable diseases. Can we afford to worry about smoking in public places?

Can we afford to burden our law enforcement agencies with this new crime when they are unable to protect us against much more serious problems like bombs in our bazaars and gang rape in our streets? Can we afford to burden the judiciary with punishing smokers when terrorists and other murderers remain untried for years and when the backlog in our courts will take more than 300 years to clear?

It has been said before in this column and needs to be repeated that we have the largest population of young people in the world. Half of all Indians are under the age of 25. The two things they need more than anything else are access to decent pubic healthcare and decent schools. It is scandalous that the Indian state has been unable to provide these two most important tools of empowerment and if you examine why you will discover that it is because we have our policies and priorities all muddled up.

One of the legacies of our dark decades of Nehruvian socialism is our ability to waste taxpayers’ money on make believe public utilities. Travel through India’s villages and you will see endless examples of what this means. Half-built sheds without teachers or books that we call schools. Crumbling, empty buildings that we call hospitals. Poles stuck in fields for electricity and rusty hand pumps that we pass off as water supply. The Health Minister now forces us to spend a few thousand crores more on trying to enforce a ban that may improve the personal health of a few heavy smokers but will do nothing to improve public health.

The air in our cities is so polluted that cigarette smoke will make no difference to it. What would have made a huge difference is if the Health Minister had insisted on reductions in the emissions of motor vehicles and forced polluting factories to clean up their act. What would have made a difference is if he had spent our money on overhauling a public healthcare system that is so bad that more than 80 per cent of our poorest citizens are forced to rely on private healthcare. Sickness is the leading reason for rural indebtedness.

This is not all Ramadoss’ fault. He inherited a public healthcare system that was in terrible shape. What he can be blamed for is doing nothing at all to make things better. What he can be blamed for is concentrating on cosmetic changes when what was needed was a major operation to remove the tumour of decades of neglect. At the end of his tenure if all he has to offer us is this ban on smoking in public places, then it really is time for him to go back to the provinces.