Futuristic departments
The atmosphere is quite festive in the capital of this State, having a city of the millennium, no less. And why not?
How many governments across the globe can boast of a department dedicated to the future?
There was a consensus among the elite of its officialdom that they were not entering uncharted waters. On the contrary, the state ventured into to future, drawing ample lessons from how to run (or not, depending on whether you belong to the ruler or the ruled community) its showpiece cyber city.
The mega event started off with an impressive multi-media presentation titled 'Future is Past', quoting a Swiss-American psychiatrist and author Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, 'We need to teach the next generation of children from day one that they are responsible for their lives'. Elaborating further with the aid of actual site photographs (as opposed to artistic representations favoured by its famed realty segment) the voiceover intoned that its steadfast focus, right from the beginning, has been on revenue generation, leaving mundane tasks of city management to the residents themselves.
The motto being 'Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime', with a caveat that fish may not be available during certain days of the year. It was emphasised how it has always been a science-backed process of thinking, well before the term `design thinking' got fashionable. The simple but effective, this phased process was summarised in a few steps as 'big ticket announcements – drawing board – DPRs – tendering – re-tendering – rethinking – back to drawing board'.
In a nutshell, present challenges get converted into future ones. After all, wouldn't the future look bleak without challenges of its own? This also helps boost everyone's morale by constantly looking forward to the future. Our age-old philosophy also tells us that while the Present is Transient, the Future holds Potential.
It helps greatly to have multiple agencies working at cross purposes; and of course, that annual ritual of GRAP helping convert better parts of present plans to futuristic ones.
The presentation highlighted another noteworthy enabler that ensured that, instead of the devolution of power envisaged in the 1992 constitutional amendment, the city-centric decisions were centralised.
This singular innovation must have pushed most of the present-day issues to some indeterminate future dates, it was said.
All through this, however, the guiding principle of equity was never forgotten, e.g., mansions worth hundreds of crores faced the same infrastructural eventualities as common homes or for that matter high-level district offices.
The gathering applauded enthusiastically when the presentation ended with reiterating the commitment to growth built on inclusive and equitable promises, all in the future, naturally.
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