Sonia Gandhi is right to ask her party legislators to sacrifice a portion of their salaries to drought relief. She is wrong to not ask for much, much more. With 246 of the country’s 646 districts in the grip of severe drought, the least we can expect from our elected representatives is that they stop living off the fat of the land. Their salaries are small. It is their perks and privileges that are scandalous and this drought is a very good time to remind them that in the national interest they must give up some of the luxuries to which they have become accustomed.

A Member of Parliament has a salary that is only slightly more than he would pay his driver or cook. But, add up constituency allowances, free telephone calls, free travel, free electricity and free accommodation in the best part of Delhi and a single honourable MP ends up costing taxpayers more than Rs 32,00,000 a year. With millions of their constituents on the verge of starvation, our MPs must be made to give up their perks. And, if Soniaji can persuade those who live in bungalows in Lutyens’ Delhi, on land that is worth more than Rs 100 crore an acre, to move to lesser dwellings, she would have made a revolutionary change in our ‘socialistic’ political culture. There is not another country in the free world that reserves its most expensive real estate for the exclusive use of its officials.

There is probably no other country either that allows government to make such wasteful use of public land. Think of the absurdity of a government dairy farm sitting on land worth hundreds of crore rupees an acre on Mumbai’s Worli sea face. Think of how much land the railways occupy without making commercial use of it or how much is reserved for the defence services and you begin to get the picture. If all this land was used more sensibly by government, it would release hundreds of thousands of crore rupees that could be invested in irrigation so that we never need to fear another failed monsoon.

... contd.