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Sunday, December 21, 2008

Leadership at the helm and within

These days I was going through a lot of blogs by high profile professionals from various business segments. I came across this article by Greg Wittstock, in which he describes how a certain place, South Bend in Indiana, US went ahead in restoring its city's overburdened and ailing sewage and storm water system back to full functionality. One has to read the article to appreciate the method embraced by the residents.

An excerpt from the original article

Current estimates for the town of 150,000 to do just that come in at a whopping $200,000,000! Do the math. That’s just over $1,300 for each and every resident currently living there!

The way the residents took to this challenge and made it possible is very reminiscent of how Andhra Pradesh of India followed the same principle to improve living conditions and self sustainment.

That article was written in March 2008 and if I am not wrong, Andhra Pradesh used this method under the stewardship of the then State Chief Minister Mr. Chandra Babu Naidu, some 7 or 8 years ago. If my memory is not wrong the program was called Janmabhoomi program.

We always talk about how far ahead the West think and how we need to imbibe their trends to improve our standard of living and try reach their economic growth rate. But here, we find our Government, though State, beat them (the West) on executing a trend of self development by a margin of at least 7 years.

We had and have leaders who think ahead of times to make our society a better place to live in but we tend not to give a long standing helping hand to those who have long term visions and work towards achieving them. We don’t have that patience to see a slow growth. We want overnight success. We need quick results with least strain on our physical, psychological and financial abilities and look to the Government and Politicians to achieve them. Is it because we don’t have that strong desire and never diminishing focus to excel ignited for longer periods?

Hopefully, we have grown wiser by the year with changes in attitude and political intelligence to choose and elect the right leaders who can take the society in the right direction and develop a robust economy. State and Central elections are just round the corner. What best time would one get to prove their contribution to the country’s cause?

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