2023-08-12

The dark side of election freebies in India

The free medicines scheme of the Tamil Nadu government Makkalai Thedi Maruthuvam (healthcare at people's dorstep) is prone to massive looting by government officials and politicians.

Because Modi is such a Globalist Stooge, the BJP is confident of stealing most elections. This is why they openly admit that their election promises are just jumla. After the elections, they brazenly increase fuel prices and cut off water supply to farmers. Even if they lose election, they launch an Operation Lotus and steal the MLAs.

Regional parties in Tamil Nadu (TN) do not have access to the EVMs. The people of Tamil Nadu have always voted en masse to either the DMK or the AIADMK. There is no room any other party. Only the Congress survives but it does so as a junior partner to either of the two Dravidian parties.

Apart from the mountain of black money that gets spent during elections, all kinds of freebies have been showered on the TN electorate. I think it started with free rice to the poor, free noon meals to students or free power to farmers. Now, we have had free meals, free power, free TV, free fan, free mixer-grinder and free what-not.

My father became a victim to this freebie culture. He became an exceptional miser. Because so many things were free in the state, he refused to leave it. He sought to subsist entirely on freebies and his EPF pension. He even switched off fridge and used low-light LED bulbs so that the electricity bill usage would not rise above the free 100 units! He did not use the motor pump and instead borrowed water from a neighbour's house. He got meals from Amma Unavagam for almost no money. He got more than enough free rations from a PDS shop. Whenever a buyer came to acquire his property, he quoted unrealistically above-market prices.

Age was not on his side so fate intervened. After a near-death experience, when neighbours forced the door open and got him to hospital, he almost realized his folly. (I had to ride nearly 500 kilomters to Chennai on a motorcycle in heavy rain.) I say almost because he still refused to sell the house. Some months after that, he called me and said he had become almost totally blind and wanted me to sell the house and take him to Kerala.

In Kerala, when I took him to a local hospital for a full-body checkup, I discovered that the free eye-drops that he received from the TN govt were not glaucoma medicines. They were cheap antibiotics. Glaucoma is caused by nerve damage. It cannot be cured. Glaucoma eyedrops only prevent further damage. For around a decade, he has been putting gentamicin and ciprofloxacin in his eyes instead of an effective glaucoma medicine.

I checked his prescriptions. He did not have one. Instead, there was an unlabelled pocketbook in which the doctors recorded his visits. For every visit, it prescribed eye drops. That is, no names — just ‘eye drops’. In the records provided by Shankaranetralaya (where he went initially) and a local charity hospital (where he went subsequently), the consulting doctor had clearly mentioned the name of the medicine. The government doctor did not. The ‘eye drops’ that the government provided were indeed eye drops but not the ones needed for my father's eye ailment. The doctor apparently thought he was in the clear if he did not write the name of the medicine. The person who dropped the medicine at my father's place without a prescription used a மக்களைத் தேடி மருத்துவம் (Makkalai Thedi Maruthuvam) envelope that also did not mention the name of the medicine. What this means is that the operators of this free medicine scheme used my father's name to bill the government for expensive glaucoma medicines, provided cheap generic antibiotics to him and pocketed the difference.

My father had several lakhs in his bank account. His children could have paid for the medicine but he chose the freebies provided by the government. The freebies spoiled him. Most people who had grown up in extreme poverty never pass up a freebie. They think they have a right to it as a citizen and it would be extremely foolish to pass it up. Unfortunately, they do not realize that the policians and government officials who run these freebie schemes do not have a conscience.