Learn from the future.

If we want to know the dangers facing India, as the government keeps on pouring money into social schemes without any thought about consequences, we should look at Punjab. At independence Punjabi refugees from Pakistan were given land by the Nehru government. Dams were built at Bhakra and Nangal resulting in a boom in agriculture making Punjab the bread basket of India. The Punjabi " munda " was held up as an example to others - brash, well built, hard working, wearing a thick gold chain and a kara and with money to spend. No longer. Successive governments have destroyed the economy by giving away freebies to win elections. In an article on April 22, 2011, former Chief Minister of Punjab belonging to the Congress, Capt Amarinder Singh wrote that the state had a debt of Rs 1.6 trillion and a public debt of Rs 800 billion. State guaranteed debt was Rs 670 billion while power sector debt was Rs 200 billion. Power deficit in the state was 25% and 4.5 million out of a population of 27.2 million had no jobs. Out of a total of 4.7 million families 1.3 million were below poverty line and 0.8 million families could not afford even one meal a day. Desperate young people, mostly men, are paying vast sums, often by selling assets like farmland, to people smugglers to immigrate illegally to western countries. Sadly, unemployment is also high in the west and jobs are hard to come by. An investigation by the BBC revealed that at least 200 men are sleeping rough under bridges in Ealing in London. They spend their days looking for work but usually without luck. Free meals may be had in Gurdwaras in nearby Southall but they can find no place to stay. Local homeowners are ripping off these helpless people. Most have converted garages and garden sheds into makeshift flats and are charging exorbitant rents safe in the knowledge that these men cannot approach the police because they are illegal. The rent for a shared room with ill fitting windows, mattresses for beds, with exposed electric wires and a camp stove for cooking is 400 pounds or Rs 31000/person/month. Most men are fed up but are ashamed to come back to India because their families had borrowed large sums of money in the hope of a steady supply of remittance from them. A lot have thrown away their passports and identity documents to prevent deportation and are now trapped as British authorities try to find a way with Indian consular services to procure them new passports. The union government should learn a lesson from Punjab that wasting taxpayer revenue on freebies to win elections results in a broken economy. It should be made a crime. When politicians are already criminals they are hardly likely to be bothered by another crime.