Government Hospitals are awful in India. They commit all kinds of crimes ranging from bribery to using same syringes multiple times to denying treatment to the most needy.
It's funny that each and every body associated with the Government in India is so inefficient, corrupt and uncivilized that you'd be a fool if you trust any of them with anything. Any democratic system is bound to become like that, if it is of a size bigger than a certain maximum, because it is hard to establish accountability and control in huge democracies. Hence, I believe that democracy is really not an appropriate system to run a Country or a Province. Democracy is good for a smaller group of people - I guess a few hundreds in number, at the maximum.
I think the reason Democracy has become so popular is that it provides a wonderful and perfect playground for people who are cunning and adept at playing politics to satiate their political appetites at someone else's expense, by sitting in safe positions of power, and since such people have great convincing abilities and remarkable assertiveness, they are able to persuade people to accepting Democracy and also propagate it all over so that they expand their grounds to play on. They tag the enemies of Democracy as evil and get united to crush them. And the masses stay in an illusion that they are in control of the systems of governance which are held by their own representatives elected by vote and nurtured by the money they pay as taxes. But we all know how fake it is. It's strange nobody says it very often in public.
For example, India is the world's largest democracy - 1.2 bn people. Are our governments really of the people, for the people, by the people? They are none of them, as we all know. Even if we go by sheer numbers, the fact is, only a small percentage of us vote, and most of those who do are the least aware of what's going on in the country. And to make matters worse, the winner in any election is the guy who gets a simple majority, which is just a small percentage of the votes cast, coz there are so many parties contesting for a seat that each party gets just a handful of votes. So the guy who finally gets elected has the support only from a minority in his constituency. But in the end we fix the number of seats a party has to have in the houses of parliament to stake its claim to form the government - to give ourselves an illusion again that our governments indeed are run by those who have support from more than 50% (or whatever it is) of the country. And to top it all, parties with a few seats join together and form coalitions. What about the citizens who voted for one of those parties to keep the other out? What about parties' ideologies and stuff like that?
And obviously it is all not so clean either. The voters are lured, bought and made happy (as the girl says in the movie Bombay to Bangkok... did ya see it?) in many ways. Then there are booth-captures and fake votes. And even if the voting had been clean, the question as to whether the common man is shrewd enough to decide who's the best to rule him cannot be answered on the affirmative with utmost confidence. And with the way things are done in India, it is not even the government of those chosen by the majority of the adult citizens. It is simply one randomly elected government that forms as a result of manipulating, voting, manipulating again, lots of crap and lots of things too complicated to comprehend or talk about.
One may argue that India is still just a Third World and an Underdeveloped country. (Think why it is so. I suspect democracy might be one of the crippling factors). But even the democracies which are rich and developed are not so because they are democratic. Most of the time, democracy drags back what is running smoothly. Such democracies also have sound economic models and intelligentsia at the right places which allow them to efficiently cover up the inefficiencies that democracy brings with it. If democracy had been a sufficient condition for prosperity, then all democratic nations would have been rich and prosperous, but that is hardly the reality. I feel that democracy is not even a condition, let alone a sufficient one.
So, if not Democracy, what is the best from of government? (Check out this link - Forms of Government - and try to figure out.) Is it the rule by philosophers and intellectuals as Plato suggested in his famous book The Republic? If it really is, then it can certainly be implemented after 2012, when the current world order will come to an end, and all evil people will die and only the intellectuals and the spiritually inclined will survive. I'll be one of the survivors. Wish you all the best!
