Advice and dissent

UPA has mastered the art of policy by committee

It may well be that more committees, commissions, advisory groups and groups of ministers (GoMs) have been constituted by the government of the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) in the past six years than all previous governments put together. The time has come for a department of committees, commissions and advisory councils to be created to keep track of who is saying what to whom and what is being done about it. At last count, over a hundred GoMs have been estimated to have been created in the past six years. An interesting innovation of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has been to create subject-specific committees comprising ministers, other officials (including Planning Commission members) and non-government experts. Thus, there was the Trade and Economic Relations Committee (TERC), the National Manufacturing Competitiveness Council (NMCC), the agricultural and energy coordination committees (ACC & ECC), the National Council on Climate Change, and such like. Almost every available expert on any given subject has been invited to offer advice to the government as member of one committee or another. No subject expert in India can claim her view has not been sought by the UPA government! The prime minister himself has a Planning Commission and an Economic Advisory Council at his disposal, apart from bodies like the Trade and Industry Council, the Advisory Council on Science and Technology and the National Security Advisory Board. As if this plethora of advice is not enough, the chairperson of the UPA has an advisory council of her own. A safe driver always ensures there’s a good spare tyre in the boot.

In its original avatar, the National Advisory Council (NAC) of UPA-1 had a distinct ideological character — consisting of civil society activists who had a healthy distrust of government — and included some party functionaries who had not found a job in government. This time round, the expanded NAC is a bit more inclusive but, for that reason, its ideological character is not yet clear. Its composition follows the usual Congress party quota-filling formula — a Dalit, a tribal, a Muslim, a woman, a person from the North-East, etc. Then there are some NGO activists, including a couple of dissenters who walked out in protest from NAC-1 and so it is not clear why they have returned to adorn NAC-2. It is also not clear what new thinking the UPA hopes to get out of a grand old man like M S Swaminathan. The group has a nice office in the heart of Lutyens’ Delhi and a dedicated secretariat funded by the taxpayer to oil its wheels. Before anyone complains that none of these advisory groups includes any young person, one should remember that the “young” Rahul Gandhi also has his own set of NextGen advisors. All this wisdom available to government and party should keep editorial writers busy for a long time to come!