Appraising the Politicians

Most of us who are part of corporate world have to go through the grind of annual (and in my company's case - semi annual) appraisal cycle. This was very astutely called Character Record (or CR for short) in my dad's organization (any guesses why? :) ). Whatever we call it appraisal is a process where an appraiser (employer/manager) gives us feedback about the performance of the appraisee during the appraisal period, identifies his strengths and areas of improvement (a euphemy for weakness), measures performance against set targets and set targets for the next cycle. It is a fairly standard process with slight variation across all kinds of job.

Interestingly, I have never heard that such a thing exists for the most important job in the country. That of the elected political leaders. Shouldn't we, as the people who elected them to their offices, at least have the right to ask them what exactly they have done for the people of this nation? Shouldn't we, as tax payers who part with over a third of their hard-earned money to pay for these politicians' Z-grade security, escort of dozens of cars, palatial living quarters, numerous foreign trips, deserve to know where all this money is going apart from providing comfort and luxury for them?

In a perfect world, as a citizen appraiser I would love to set real targets for the politicians. Targets that can be quantified and compared - like what percentage of people were brought above poverty line, improvement in literacy rate, increase in per capita income, fall in crime rate, availability of basic amenities for common man, generation of employment .... so on and so forth. But this is definitely not a perfect world, so in reality our politicians have agenda like drive away non-Maharashtrians from Bombay, demolish Babri Masjid, make a new state, change name of a city/street/square/airport/museum, annihilate people of a religion/community/caste/tribe, ban dancing/smoking/drinking and so on. My memory fails me when I try to think when was the last time a politician took up a real issue and did something for it.

We pride ourselves in being the world's biggest democracy, but I see more reason of being ashamed of this farce we call democracy. Does being big only mean having a higher number?

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