T N Ninan: Five things to do

Narendra Modi takes charge as prime minister on Monday. Expectations are high that he will deliver on many fronts, and there has been no shortage of free advice. Let me add my ha'penny worth.

First, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has a majority in the Lok Sabha, but the country needs to prevent a recurrence of fringe political parties or groups holding coalition governments to ransom. The anti-defection law applies to individual legislators, not to parties that can join and leave coalitions at will. They should be subjected to the same discipline as legislators: if a party leaves a coalition, it must give up its seats in the House and face fresh elections. There will be those who try to circumvent this by offering issue-based support without joining a coalition; this can be countered by the President (or governor) calling the coalition (not the party) that has the largest number of seats in the House. This will rewrite what has euphemistically been called coalition dharma, and reduce the scope for political blackmail by minor parties.

Second, the civil service has to be made independent of ministerial whim. The damage that the last government did, in allowing ministers to choose their departmental secretaries, has to be ended and status quo ante restored. If A Raja had not been allowed to get rid of a non-cooperative secretary for telecom, and to replace him with someone from his previous charge (environment and forests), there would have been no telecom scam. In rare cases, and only with good reason, should a secretary be changed at ministerial request.

Third, all government-owned companies must be put under one ministry, grouped under different departments that are charged with improving their performance, and selling those that are beyond rescue according to an agreed plan. This will remove the scope for individual ministers to use these companies as their personal handmaidens - to extract everything from jobs for the boys to large monthly pay-offs (as detailed in P C Parakh's book), and from cars and air-conditioners to entertainment budgets and guest houses, all for personal enjoyment. Such favours encourage ministers to ignore public sector accountability (why kill the golden goose?). The other advantage is that sector ministries will stop tailoring policy to suit the government-owned companies in their bailiwick.

Fourth, the central subsidy bill (equal to a third of tax revenue) can be trimmed by a third, through three steps: free pricing of diesel, reduced leakages during delivery, and excluding the top 30 per cent income category from all subsidies, including on cooking fuel and foodgrain. This will create the fiscal space for a big step-up of government investment in the infrastructure - to pay for the equivalent of a six-lane highway from Kashmir to Kanyakumari plus one 5,000 MW super-thermal power station, every year. Those to be excluded from subsidy payments can be easily identified - anyone paying income tax, owning assets like two-wheelers (25 per cent of the population) or living in a two-room pucca house with kitchen and bathroom (the Census has already done the enumeration).

Finally (and this will be tricky), Mr Modi could take a leaf out of Margaret Thatcher's book. Agencies in charge of implementing field programmes should be carved out of the government proper and converted into service organisations headed by CEOs. The government then contracts them for specific jobs, with targets - like running schools and achieving a minimum pass percentage, or meeting public health targets. Failure means the CEO gets changed, or the agency loses the contract. If you think this is a "pink paper" kind of idea, think again; it is in one of the reports of the Administrative Reforms Commission headed by Veerappa Moily.

Some of these steps will need fresh legislation, and some need the co-operation of states. But they can transform politics, governance, the public sector, infrastructure investment, and service delivery.