“Greatest show on earth begins today” screams the headline in today’s TOI. All of you would agree with the fact that the buzz around the impending elections in our country this time is utterly deafening. As citizens of the largest democracy on earth, we mostly associate election time with something exciting, something to look forward to. A welcome change of guard. A new beginning.

But, alas, under this whole media blitzkrieg, we could have never imagined the fact that the government machinery literally comes to a standstill around the election time.  Let me back my point with a live example from ChangeBhai’s database. Look at this Issue#A0269, “Road dug but not filled properly” uploaded by a Mumbai user and do read the comments uploaded by our back end team to get the context.

Click here to go to Issue#A0269, “Road dug but not filled properly”

It appears that, out of the 5 road engineers handling this area, 4 have been placed on election duty. The ‘helpless’ Head of the road department of this area has been requesting us to understand his situation. He, by the way, is on election duty himself from morning till 3 in the afternoon and they are supposed to keep their mobile phones off during this time.

It is insane how the Municipal Corporation employees could be stalled from discharging their regular functions in the name of elections. They are not in a position to carry out even the most basic function like the emergency maintenance work. We suggest that the over enthusiastic Legal luminaries as well as the Election Commission should find a solution to the problem of our government machinery being rendered almost dysfunctional at this time.

It would not be wrong to conclude that MCGM (Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai) is in an absolute state of limbo at the moment. Sad but true. Having said that, we, at ChangeBhai are not going to get bogged down with this and have doubled our follow up frequency owing to the elections. If there is no struggle, there is no progress.