Sympathy or Apathy: An unsolved riddle about Kashmir

People in Kashmir are careless about the sickening problems that engulf our society. We are the victims of apathy in our system. The unfortunate part is that we don’t find any fault within our system and thus don’t try to bring change, only because we are used to this system. Apathy has become a ridiculous norm in our valley. Our system looks normal because we haven’t been exposed to the world. Anyone who gets the taste of the outside world never looks back to our Kashmir. This apathy, irresponsibility and unaccountability within our system has taken a toll on our human resource, it is leading to serious Brain Drain. From educational institutions to banks and to recruiting agencies of the government, everything has been adversely affected by the apathy.

 In J&K the two main recruiting agencies of the government are JKSSB and JKPSC. When these two institutions are imperfect, their outcome becomes imperfect and the very imperfect outcome forms our civil administration. This civil administration is tasked with the development of infrastructure, education system, health system, energy sector and all the necessary stuff that concern the common people. When the base, the civil administration is imperfect, the very institutions of the government that are at the service of people don’t do any good to common people. Then people gradually lose interest and faith in these institutions, giving liberty to the concerned officials to misuse their offices and this misuse is corruption, which is an acceptable evil in our society. We all whole heartedly take part in corruption, either by paying bribe or by remaining mute spectators wherever government machinery is misused. By not raising our voice against this evil, we are axing our own feet. We allow the principles of our society to degrade as such.

In J&K the two main recruiting agencies of the government are JKSSB and JKPSC. When these two institutions are imperfect, their outcome becomes imperfect and the very imperfect outcome forms our civil administration. This civil administration is tasked with the development of infrastructure, education system, health system, energy sector and all the necessary stuff that concern the common people.

One of the hilarious things that I as a student have seen is that students come to know about the change of syllabus in English subject of class XII CBSE in their examinational hall, when they begin to write their exams. Not only this, the very teacher of English was once given the responsibility of CBSE Cryptic Crossword Contest (CCCC). He got students registered for the same but forgot the date on which the competition was to be held. The contest was held throughout India and his students came to know that the contest was held through a local daily. This is height of irresponsibility among our people. In 2015, J and K Board of School Education (JKBOSE) which conducts stage-I of National Talent Search Examination in Jammu and Kashmir, had given a notification in a local daily for the same. A few years ago, National Council for Education, Research and Training (NCERT) had revised the syllabus for the same and the language portion was only for qualifying purpose and the same was not to be included while calculating the total score. Every state had clearly notified in bold letters in their advertisements that language portion is only for qualifying purpose. Our people being informed but lazy had been copy pasting the advertisement from last several years without adding the line. It was only after when some students took them to task that they accepted their mistake.

Kashmir seems to be the only region where authorities do not pay heed to anything accept what they get on their tables. This is the 21^st century and the mode of information is fastly changing. Awareness has reached its peak but we are still lagging behind. If you instead of encouraging students discourage them only because you will have to devote some time to them then you don’t have the right to get the salary. A public servant is paid with the tax of common people and if he fails to deliver his task, then he has no right to continue his service. He has to surrender himself to the people of nation. He can’t evade his responsibilities. He has to be accountable for each and everything that he has been entrusted with.  An SBI employee is reminded of his position hundred times a day with a famous quote of Gandhi ji on the screen of his computer that reads “A customer is the most important visitor on our premises. He is not dependent on us. We are dependent on him. He is not an interruption of our work. He is the purpose of it. He is not an outsider of our business. He is part of it. We are not doing him a favour by serving him. He is doing us a favour by giving us the opportunity to do so”. Let me elaborate it a bit by giving an example of my own district. Last year, DC of our district had ordered the Tehsildar of our town to identify some land for construction of a public park. Tehsildar passed on the order to Patwari and the Patwari without any application of mind took some pictures of a stadium of our town and forwarded the same to the DC and told her that it was the only land where a public park could be constructed. He knew that the DC will not convert a stadium into a park. We had huge government land available in our town but the Patwari in order to save himself from the eventuality of transferring land to other department made our DC put a full stop over the plan. There are people who work with a missionary zeal, who want themselves to be wrapped in national flag at the time of death. People like Late APJ Abdul Kalam revolutionize a nation. We all have the ability to become APJ but we need to awaken our conscience. People get satisfaction from the selfless public service. They attach their emotions to the work. They fully commit themselves and transform their society but we are hell bent on degrading our society.

We were recently flooded with the news of two children from the valley making it to international level in their respective games. Other states too have numerous people representing India at international level but they don’t make it to news because it is a norm there. Punjab has its sons playing in National Basketball Association; even they don’t make it to the news. It is common in all other states that they actively participate in such programs but due to official apathy and lack of information here, it becomes something special, something extraordinary. The pathetic thing is that we never blame ourselves or the authorities at the helm of affairs for such things but we digest that we are discriminated. It has happened several times that funds were provided to our state for a particular scheme and not a penny was spent. It is no discrimination but it is lack of proper machinery in our state. People need to remain conscious and higly informed. This is the time to say good bye to the mentality that entrusts everything to the government. Governments don’t perform unless and until people participate. The development, the schemes are for we people and the money used in these is ours only ours. We pay taxes to the government. We must fix the responsibility and hold government accountable. It is the conscious citizens that make a great nation.

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