It seems that the prime minister continues to suffer from a foreign exchange complex or he would have noticed that ministerial high-flying is the least of our problems. We could afford to send his entire cabinet on holiday if we could cut out more serious wasteful expenditure.

If he wants to see criminal waste let him get his office to calculate how much Indian taxpayers lose because of delayed infrastructure projects. It goes into hundreds of thousands of crore rupees. And, the delays are caused entirely by the convoluted way in which the Indian bureaucracy works. We blame corruption, but the truth is that corruption is sometimes useful because it speeds up a system that moves so slowly that what China builds in twenty months we take twenty years to build. Drastic administrative reforms are the answer, but as we are not going to get them, can we appeal to the prime minister to send for the files on all delayed projects and sack the bureaucrats responsible for wasting our money?

Another thing that he could do is examine why every government department is awash with clerks and peons. With Soniaji as his boss, it would be the politically correct thing to do as well, since recently declassified documents show that Jawaharlal Nehru tried his best to be rid of peons but failed. “I want to abolish the whole institution of peons, and I hope I shall succeed.” He wrote this in a letter to his private secretary M.O. Mathai and in the same letter pointed out that “nowhere in the world do they have such big staffs as we have in India.” If things were bad then they are a thousand times worse today.

... contd.