Citizen Protection Act

It is high time we had a `Citizen Protection Act' along the lines of the existing `Consumer Protection Act'. According to Wikipedia, the latter is an Act of the Parliament of India enacted in 1986 to protect the interests of consumers in India. It makes provision for the establishment of consumer councils and other authorities for the settlement of consumers' disputes and for matters connected therewith also. When you can demand satisfaction for goods you purchase, it stands to reason that you should be able to demand satisfaction for taxes extracted from your hard earned wages.

Quoting such an Act, I would ask our Finance and Prime Ministers to justify why I (and other similarly deprived PWD) should pay taxes for:

• broad four lane highways which are rendered impossible to cross by such devilishly devious hurdles as four foot high road dividers, no pedestrian crossings rendered safe by traffic lights with a green option for pedestrians, and sadistically designed foot-bridges reached after climbing some forty steps?
• buses, trains and metros which are uniformly unusable by a wheelchair user or a visibility impaired person?
• roadway systems where pavements, in the rare instance that they exist, have to be shared by scared pedestrians with two-wheelers tearing down at breakneck speeds.

Armed with such an act, I would also

• ask our MSJE why the entire ministry has not stood as one to protest the obvious and unfair implications of imposing GST according to inscrutable reasoning where agarbattis and sindoor are taxed almost nothing while prosthetic aids, crutches, wheelchairs and braille paper are taxed far far more heavily (rather than spending their energies on `fake news' about Kohli and Kumble throwing the final of the Champions Cup Trophy against `arch enemy Pakistan');
• point out that the implications of GST to PWD are akin to encouraging Jaitley and Modi to pray to the accompaniment of all Hindu rituals while taxing them to walk or write; as Amba Salelkar quite rightly says in an article in Scroll, the state would do well to question its imposing taxes on PWD who are, ever so often, denied facilities that it extends to its `non-special' people (those not gifted with Divine powers and worthy of the title `Divyangjan')!
• ask our `leaders' to own up not taking any action about the sorry state of affairs in our country where you are fair game for a grisly end if you are a Muslim or a Dalit; from carefully expressed sense of horror by respected public figures (see https://sabrangindia.in/article/memories-buried-deep-have-come-back-haunt-me-aruna-roy) to spontaneous outbursts by citizens across the country (with slogans like `not-in-my-name') it is increasingly clear that all but the RSS bhakhts writhe with shame and anger at this state.