Anjuli Bhargava: Why Fadnavis' war room may actually deliver

There are no files, there is little bureaucracy. The Maharashtra chief minister's war room is singularly devoid of the trappings of government offices

Mumbai is facing an infrastructure crisis and it requires nothing less than a full-blown battle to get various agencies in the state working to grapple with its magnitude. It is with this realisation that Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis has set up the war room in Mumbai's Mantralaya. Twenty-seven infrastructure projects are being monitored on a war footing by a team of around 10 people, some of them critical for the city of Mumbai.

Last month I happened to spend half a day at the ministry, meeting some officials, including the war room team, and I have a feeling that this time we may just see some results.

Why do I think so? One, there is nothing government-like about the way things are being approached. To get the war room functioning, the CM and his principal secretary have brought in a bunch of youngsters from diverse fields and ethnicities from outside the system. Kaustubh Dhavse, the officer on special duty to the CM and all of 37 years, has never worked in government before. His team of interns are all in their early 20s, eager and hard-working. The tired feel and often patronising air I associate with Delhi bureaucrats is missing. There is an openness usually absent in government. Also missing are the ubiquitous government files - the hallmark of busy and important bureaucrats' offices.

The approach is just one aspect of it. There seems to be a hawk-like urgency with which things are being tackled. The war room team has been functioning since mid-April but it has, as I understood it, made a few breakthroughs already.

One of the biggest hurdles that infrastructure projects in the city - and in India - face is acquiring land for them. Project after project are held up because the land needed is owned by a host of agencies - usually the government -and getting each one to give it up is a Herculean task. To cite just one example, the Santa Cruz-Chembur link road announced in 2004 was ready only in 2014, primarily because the land transfer took ages.

This has been tackled by passing a government order - during a war room review - that vests the responsibility of all land transfer for government infrastructure projects with a single authority, in this case, the district magistrate. No matter which agency the land belongs to - the Mumbai Metropolitan Region Development Authority, the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation or the revenue department - the competent authority to take all decisions relating to land needed to be acquired has been given to the collector. For Metro 3 (one of the city's new metro projects), close to 75 parcels of land were needed and most of these have been transferred as a result of this centralisation of responsibility. One, or to be precise, everyone, knows where the buck stops.

Getting everyone, who has a say, together at the same place and at the same time helps. To cite one example, the garlanding of the metro service was proving to be a problem as it lacks the circularity Delhi enjoys as a natural advantage. War room intervention and discussion helped work around this by connecting certain critical points to provide seamless connectivity. The plans are, of course, currently on paper but the circularity issue has, for the time being, been circumvented.

A third issue where the war room has managed to step in is the resettlement of people affected when land gets acquired for projects. Typically, in many infrastructure projects, this alone can take several years. A prime example of this affliction has been the Navi Mumbai International Airport project.

But with the 27 war room projects, the CM has asked the housing corporation and authorities involved to present a plan of action for resettlement within 21 days for any government-related infrastructure project. Of course, the actual resettlement could take up to a year - which sounds ridiculously ambitious to anyone who has followed the Navi Mumbai airport saga closely - but he has stipulated that within 21 days there must be clarity on how this would be done.

Last, a critical matter when working in teams: there seems to be no tension between the bureaucracy and the young brat pack brought in by the chief minister. The two appear to be working well together and the usual tendency to grab credit for action was conspicuous by its absence.

Since nothing is happening in typical government fashion, I can't help but feel a tinge of hope. It's not business as usual and so we may just see this government actually deliver.