Privatization a boon or a bane

Privatization often yields good profitable results when it comes to contracting out the parts of the job that an official representative of the government or a sub-department of the government would normally be responsible for.

While for-profit privatization might yield in short term service quality enhancements and economical options, often times the contracts given are biased, and the companies which are looking to be profitable can't show growth without squeezing the services. It is practically impossible. While privatization is good initially, we ought to learn from other countries who implemented them.

For instance, in the USA many family services and governmental services are dolled out to private players resulting in forced acceptance of crimes by people, or resulting in ineffectual services that put many people's lives at risk. Be it railways, communication, postal services, police services, prosecution. Often times, once the cat is out of the bag, ie. privatization lands on a lap of the services and receives good feedback, it is very difficult to put the cat back in the bag.

The contract winners also seem to be influential people who can silence the democratic rights of people, and make the crime seem like a petty mistake (see YES Bank for example). There is no accountability as the mistake is made by one tiny person who becomes a scapegoat, while the government says they were not a part of this. It will be interesting to see what precedents happen in Railways privatization which will set a tone for future arms of the government that will be privatized. Can they keep up with the refunds? What happens when there is an accident because of their cheapening of resources, lead to an accident? Because they are in the path of IPO, they have to show increased profitability year on year. For-profit often comes with a cost-cutting agenda, and that leads to riskier operations.

What can be a solution for this? Humans seem to be emotionally bad decision-makers. The only right decision is when you decide to review or revoke or reinstate the solution you initially proposed. We are bad at predicting, as long as people don't start finding scapegoats, and actually see what went wrong, and correct it we should be fine. Then again, that can only be coupled with complete transparency and good journalism which will play together nicely in this beautiful planet we stupid humans call home.