Ready, fire, aim, miss

About six months ago, the chief minister announced, amid the usual fanfare and ribbon-cutting, that the city would be garbage-free in six months. Since then, regularly on this wall, I have been counting down the clock to this deadline. Now he's about to give us the Christmas and New Year gift we've all been waiting for - one more promise to do something, probably in six more months.
It was always clear that this wouldn't happen on time. But rather than being a skeptic from the beginning, I decided to wait. I even offered to help some corporators in south Bangalore run the Kasa Muktha programme properly in their wards. Nothing changed. For three reasons.
First, we rush to make announcements without actually having a plan in place. Perhaps beguiled by the media value of making lofty statements, netas are eager to make grand declarations, and they seem to believe that we can then work backwards from that. But this is delusional. Great outcomes are the result of the many small steps that add up to them, not the other way around.
Second is the lazy tendency in politics to equate announcements with outcomes. When India first became free, leaders promised outcomes. A literate population, real scholarship in universities, robust and productive health, motorable roads and so on. Then they decided that is too hard and settled for outputs instead - graduating students, laying tar on roads, etc. Then they found even that is too hard and started settling for inputs - making budget allocations, hiring more staff and so on. Now they've reached stage four - where they settle for announcements.
Third is a bureaucracy that doesn't really guide netas anymore. When some senior politician wakes up (in some cases, literally) and gets all worked up about an issue, he barks out an order, "dishum-dishum-damaal, this better happen by summer or winter". The officials at the receiving end, instead of explaining the complexities and governance issues involved, instead say, "yes, Sir." Partly because they sense that he will not have the patience to hear them out and partly because they believe he will not remember it after the next morning.
What we really need is a solution to the attention-deficit disorder that plagues our government. Kasa Muktha, and a million other promises made to the citizens of Bengaluru will happen quite predictably after that.
(The writer is an urban expert)