Two steps forward, one sideways and one-and-a-half step backwards...

... Well that's how I can describe India's progress. It is partly because Indians never held politicians accountable and punish them. Every year Ministers would announce launching of new schemes to make them popular to the masses and then just forget about them. A classic case is Railway Budgets, where every Railways Minister would announce new schemes in the area they represent without any regards to the available funds and unfinished projects. (You will ask me then why is it that we are not in a living hell already. Well India's bureaucracy in spite of itself delivered, and so did some visionary political bosses, but they delivered a little though they delivered it late.)

Anyways coming back to the issue of Indians not holding the executive responsible. Some hope was restored when the Central and the States Governments passed legislation to give the right to Information to the citizens. Its a touchy issue. Why would a devil give you information when you could hold him responsible with the same information. So it was not really effective.
Kudos to the Manmohan Singh government who has shown some vision by publishing the Outcome Budget. The Indian Government will now annually publish an Outcome Budget to tell the citizens as to what it intends to do with the money allocated to various ministries and also tell you how effectively they spent the money allotted to them in the last budget.
Although Mr P Chidambaram, India's finance minister has given the disclaimer that the Outcome Budget is not as polished as it should be, and things would get better, I thought I would probably just for the recordings sake record the shortcomings of this years Outcome Budget:

Outcome Budget of alomost all the Ministries, (I would like to specifically point out Ministry of Steel) read as the plan for various state controlled Steel companies. India's steel sector is much much more than what just the state sector. Does the honorablester wants to say that the ministry exists only to serve the state sector?

I dont understand what purpose some Ministries like the Ministry of Youth Affairs & Sports serve? This one had been conceptualised with the noble objective of utilising the energy of India's Youth in Nation Building. but going by its Outcome Budget, it looks like that it just runs a few Institutes, some schemes. It would have been great if instead of saying that they will organise 10500 NSS camps, they would have said that x% of India's College going students will attend one or other NSS camp.

The NIC, which designs & hosts Governements websites should also include a form where people can come and discuss the issues. Why would I blog it here, without any chance of anyone else seeing it than posting it on the FinMin's website where they could have seen it and taken some action....