Public perceptions matter; need more sensitivity
The Supreme Court's intervention over the years in issues that ought to have been tackled by Governments without any external prompting points to either a lack of understanding among authorities of the urgency of the situation or sheer callousness. The apex court had to step in when the Congress-led UPA Government, despite knowing what it was getting into, messed up the allocations of coal blocks and 2G Spectrum. In the present time, the court has had to intervene in the water crisis that has hit many parts of Maharashtra, in the process dragging in the Indian Premier league cricket tournament into the issue. To objective observers, the water scarcity matter ought to have been handled much earlier by Government authorities through a series of measures they deemed essential. Instead, certain steps are being taken only after the matter reached the Supreme Court. The IPl organisers, for their part, could have announced steps to demonstrate their sensitivity to the millions of people who have been hit by the water shortage in the State, by unilaterally announcing that part of the proceeds from the matches, at least those that were to be played in Maharashtra, would go towards a Government fund to help the crisis-ridden. On their part, even IPl players could have shown concern by deciding to donate part of their earnings to help the needy. Yet, none of this happened, leading public opinion to believe that the IPl stakeholders are insensitive to the cause. Nobody is suggesting that either the IPl or the Board of Control for Cricket in India is responsible for the water scarcity and that both need to be punished for something they did not create. It is also not the case that the water to be used for the matches would have been diverted from the population or that its quantity would have been close to what is needed to tackle the scarcity. Moreover, IPl mandarins had said that treated sewage water was to be utilised for the matches in drought-hit States. But public perception matters and the organisers should have shown magnanimity.
Yet another instance where the apex court has had to step in recently is in the case of big loan defaulters. Juxtaposed with the harassment that smaller loanees suffer when they are unable to meet their obligations and the farmers who commit suicide when they are faced with back-breaking debts, the issue of keeping the identity of defaulters who have failed to pay their dues running into hundreds of crores, secret, seems unfair. The public has the right to know why a confidentiality clause in the loan documents should help the rich and the powerful remain incognito while the small loanees are named, shamed and terrorised to such an extent that some of them take the extreme step of ending their lives. The water crisis-IPl row will blow over with time and be replaced with other pressing issues, but the core of the matter will continue to haunt us in other incarnations if we don’t change our mindset.