Every day I often saw people complaining about government policies, corruption, unemployment, the breaking of laws, traffic jams, under development and everything like that. No one even talks about accountability at all. We are becoming passive day by day which has a devastating effect on our lives. Well! We see people smoking in public places, our internal self-becomes angry about their offensive habit, but we didn’t bother about having a word with the smoker and asking him politely about his offense and its effects on passive smokers.

No, we remain dumb and by nature of being as passive smoker add more to our quality of being passive. Yet then we further start gossiping about the bad habit of that very guy smoking in the public place adds more pain to the problem. We see the people throwing yellow skin of banana on the roads; we remain silent which depicts our nature of being passive. We feel proud of ourselves of not having these bad offensive habits, yet we ignore our colleagues by not having a word with them about their doings making us prideful passive people.

The story does not end here we often complain of corruption in government offices. But do we think or even know the tools in our hands which can help to rub the corruption at all. No! In fact what I believe is that we are the cause of corruption directly or indirectly. We are responsible for the underdevelopment of our town, village or city directly or indirectly.

Do we even know about the right to information act (RTI), right to services guarantee act, right to education, CM’s grievance cell, chief information commission and all the necessary tools for making everything as accountable? Let me tell all the readers that, “ignorance of the law is no excuse”. Further, some people may argue as these are ineffective, will they tell me whether they have tried these or not. If followed, have they been consistent in their struggle.

Further, we make representatives for the legislative assembly of our constituency, we only complain about him as not looking after the constituency very well. We complain that he is not giving a share of constituency development fund (CDF) or even spending that in our constituency. But day by day our MLA becomes spendthrift. Have we ever thought we can get answers to our questions like; how much constituency development has been received by our MLA from a number of years?

How much has been spent in our constituency from CDF? Names of the various works on which these funds were used with the amount spent on each of the work? And also the amount of money which is left in his account? Yes! We can get answers to these questions by a simple application under RTI and a fee of Rs. 10, and forwarding the application to the concerned deputy developmental commissioner (DDC) of our district.

The above example is just a demo and can be applied to every department by following the same procedure. If we think rural development department is not adding to the development of our village we can question in the same way by forwarding the application to the public information officer of the concerned department. The procedures are so simple, but ultimately needs our dedication and interest in making our government accountable. This accountability can lay the firm base for eradicating the menace of corruption, which is becoming a head pain for every people and especially youth.

But for this, we need to get out of this disease of being passive by taking the pills of ‘active’. The need of the hour is a group of well-educated and dedicated youths from every corner of the state of J&K and particularly from every district coming forward as an NGO and contributing for this noble cause, by making people well aware about the laws and the procedures for making the government accountable.

The first step towards brighter Kashmir

Say no to militancy

Say no to shutdowns

Say no to stone pelting

Say yes to good health & happiness

Source : http://www.risingkashmir.com/active-youths-the-solution-for-all-diseases-in-our-society/

02 Jul 2018/Monday.