T N Ninan: Draft the CMs

Ten days after the Narendra Modi government was sworn in, it has become clear that this is indeed going to be a "Modi sarkar"; very much so. The early pointers to this include the new stipulation that all major policy decisions will be taken by the prime minister, and the move to establish a direct line of communication with all secretaries to government departments - whom Mr Modi met for three hours or more, with no ministers present. The encouragement to officials to go ahead and take decisions, with the promise that the prime minister would protect them, and the instruction that they should get in touch with him directly in the event of any difficulty, makes the message clear: no minister is going to stand between senior officials and the prime minister. Indeed, ministers are being asked to be on their best behaviour - don't hire relatives as your personal staff, and ensure that ministers of state are properly occupied.

Further signals will come when key appointments are made, including the reported move to have a foreign policy advisor in the prime minister's office - a step which must take away from the foreign secretary and to some extent even the foreign minister. While it is of course true that most heads of government are now, de facto, their own foreign ministers, and that India's prime ministers have always been directly and actively engaged when it comes to the superpowers as well as the key neighbours, the extent of overall responsibility that is devolving on a new prime minister is unusual - and must be assumed to be intentional. This is not a case of the prime minister settling for being primus inter pares, or the first among equals. Mr Modi is, and intends to act as if he is, the boss.

This is not necessarily a bad thing when you consider the quality of the council of ministers, which in general terms is underwhelming. The standout man with ability is the finance minister, while Sushma Swaraj is known to work hard at her brief and Nitin Gadkari has a record of delivering on road projects of various kinds (he built the Mumbai-Pune Expressway at about 40 per cent of the cost of the only private sector bid that was received, from the Ambanis). The rest of the ministerial bunch is untested or unimpressive - it is hard to see Uma Bharati actually managing to clean the Ganga, while little is known about the gent in charge of agriculture. For all her articulate TV persona, Nirmala Sitharaman is an unknown commodity as minister, at a time when the country needs a manufacturing revolution. Ditto with Smriti Irani at human resource development, though her better-educated predecessor probably did more harm than good. In an already sparse field, the cutting down of a political heavyweight like Gopinath Munde has not improved matters. The mystery of the missing defence minister makes the whole point obvious: Mr Modi is short of good ministerial lieutenants.

Fortunately, this has not come in the way of Mr Modi getting going. If news reports are correct, he has asked for lists of projects that are held up, and of outdated laws. He has asked for PowerPoint presentations, and underlined the importance of using digital technology to improve government functioning. Many other initiatives must be under way which have not been reported. But sooner or later, Mr Modi will have to delegate. The question is, to whom? If the Bharatiya Janata Party's talent cupboard looks pretty bare, one option is to turn to technocrats. But the step that will really make a difference is to get the chief ministers of Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh to come to the Centre and take charge of key economic portfolios.