If I have learned one thing from long years of covering politics and government in India it is that one reason why we are among the world’s poorest, most backward countries is because we usually chase the wrong dreams. We expend huge resources of time and money on things that do not matter and in the process lose the thread of what does matter. We lose sight of what it is that we are trying to achieve.

So we spend vast resources on building rural hospitals and health centres and ignore the fact that they are useless without doctors and medicines. We scatter schools across the countryside, under trees, thatched roofs and tin sheds without noticing that the children who go to these ‘schools’ rarely learn to read, write or count. We build the same roads every year without trying to understand why they never survive a single season of rain. They do in countries in which it rains every day. I could go on and on but I have less than 800 words to make my point and must do so now without further ado.

The national identity card scheme worries me. I see it as the latest item on our list of wrong dreams. I know Nandan Nilekani to be a fine, intelligent, honourable man with a highly developed social conscience. It is excellent that he should be chosen by the Prime Minister as the newest member of his government but it seems sad that his considerable intelligence (and huge sums of taxpayers money) should be wasted on a project that will do little more than add to the massive infrastructure of our bureaucracy. It needs demolition, not more pillars.

... contd.