Students cling to laptop hopes in UP. Time for SP to deliver pre-poll promises.

It’s been an unprecedented victory for the father-son duo from Uttar Pradesh; Samajwadi Party has rallied from being a hooligan of sorts to be the chief administrative whip. The buffer state of Indian Politics has witnessed all the action, all the mud-slinging and all the talk of about enshrined ideals in the party manifestos.

Lets rather come to the point that may have set tongues wagging all around the political circles. Development think-tanks would have questioned the authenticity of this pre-poll promise. All eyes were glued to the outcome of the Assembly election results, but some of them were more passionately gazing, with a gleam in their eyes.

              Samajwadi Party promised all students graduating from intermediate a free laptop and all students graduating from high school, a tablet PC. Now, political extremists might question SP’s claim with an air of vehemence and the general public would associate it with the party’s new punch line, “Ummeed ki Cycle”. However might the case be, it’s the student who’ll have the last laugh and indeed that is what the 38 year old, youngest Chief Minster to be of Uttar Pradesh, Akhilesh Yadav might have on his mind.

              An educationist himself, Akhilesh Yadav, son of SP baron Mulayam Singh Yadav, is a qualified environmental engineer from the Sydney University, Australia.  He would be technologically more competent than any of his predecessors at the helm of affairs in Uttar Pradesh.

Brandishing his BlackBerry Smartphone, an iPAD , stereophonic ear plugs, Akhilesh Yadav is not the quintessential UP politician that you would associate with and a promise of technological assistance from the SP scion should rather be taken seriously.

              Having promised the state a development and growth pattern somewhat similar to that of Gujarat and strengthening UP’s position from being excess baggage over the centre, Akhilesh Yadav’s vision is to transform his mother state as India’s leading face for the world.

              How realistic this claim is, only time would tell but one thing is for certain that no student from a Government run college/school would help being joyous at the prospect of receiving a techo-gadget.

However, with all good things said, it’s evident that the opposition would try and pull the smooth carpet under the Samajwadi Party’s chair. They were the same father-son duo who had sought in their previous election manifesto’s a complete flipside to what is being said about technological advancements and the need for Information Technology now in the state.

               In fact, Mulayam Singh Yadav at the time of the unveiling of the SP’s manifesto for the 2012 UP assembly elections, had to re-assert Samajwadi Party’s stand that it was never against English as a language and use of computers, more so because of the political leeches waiting to overturn tables and bring SP’s noose under the saw.

               Implementation of this pre-poll promise is what would be the next big task for Samajwadi Party in Uttar Pradesh. With an estimated 1, 37,993 students set to appear for the UP Board Examinations in 2012; Samajwadi Party has indeed set itself a daunting task. It would have to be prepared to dole out a whopping 65,314 laptops for students graduating from standard XII and 72,679 tablets for students graduating from standard X.

               Perhaps the most critical of all concerns are the usage of the free laptops and the tablets being given to the students. One absolutely cannot guarantee that how efficiently and for what purpose they might be used.

              Since UP is a volatile state and tensions brew faster here than most other states and majority of UP Board students come from impoverished backgrounds with a dream to make quick money, god forbidding if these tech gadgets are used for ulterior motives, the results could be disastrous. Thus proper screening of the laptops and the tablets are required to be done either by hiring a private agency or UPDESCO
(Uttar Pradesh Development Softwares Corporation) prior to handing them out. A routine check of the devices is also recommended to filter out what are they being used for.

             The opposition should get a trail here by conducting a survey in some time from now and assessing the success of the much dramatized poll sop of Samajwadi Party. Who knows what might be the intended result?

             The Samajwadi Party or any political party in UP has banked immensely on wooing caste based politics. In fact all of them have struck the sentimental chord which is the closest to the human heart. SP is no exception. This pre-poll promise too is based largely on that, as for an impoverished student, it just remains a dream to have a laptop or a tablet in his/her hands.

             The unparalleled joy that would come out on the facial expressions of the students would be heart rendering but this is what would prove to be unflinching evidence for the ruling party, that they took care of their masses, that they hung on to the promises even if the ordinary taxpayer is left reeling under the huge economic burden that the state exchequer might accrue due to the poll sop.

It is good to technologically advantage your state in one place but it is equally heart wrenching to see the public exchequer going bankrupt in another.