26 October 2016 12:00 am
The participants were putting their thick heads together to discover new ways and means of increasing the revenue for the public coffers.
Political authorities presiding over public finance and the international trade were among the pundits present at the conference.
At the outset, a participant presented a proposal to fell trees on state-owned lands for timber for sale. He pointed out that that they could raise an income of about Rs. 4 billion from this exercise. This proposal was accepted with none raising any objection to it.
Thereafter, a big-made top team member announced his revenue-generating proposal. “There is another source of income as lucrative as logging. There is a good demand for elephants. Why don’t we capture a good number of wild elephants for sale? While making wild elephants a good source of income for public coffers, we will be able to meet the demand for elephants for peraheras and above everything, we will be able to ease the human -elephant conflict to a great extent. Don’t we hear practically every day a story or two about wild elephants raiding some village or other in the backwoods of the country and destroying the crops of poor peasants and killing people? Once we implement this proposal, there will be no need to spend public funds on erecting electric fences either. So we can kill several birds with one stone…”
All participants greeted this proposal with loud guffaws. The purohita who stared angrily at the visibly amused participants kept quiet making no further effort to justify his proposal.