Truly transforming India

Due diligence in tackling legacy problems is the key

Prime Minister Narendra Modi's speech at the first "Transforming India" lecture organised by the NITI Aayog had rightly pointed out that India cannot march through the 21st century with 19th century administrative systems. His call for new mindsets and ideas to achieve this goal is unexceptionable but perhaps ignores two facts. One, there is no shortage of advice on administrative reforms; two, the urgent need to address the unglamorous nitty-gritty of governance systems that could make a radical difference. The idea of reforming India's vast and unwieldy bureaucracy has been in the public discourse since the sixties. There have been two Administrative Reforms Commissions (ARCs), almost four decades apart, in 1966 and 2005. Both commissions filed voluminous reports with detailed recommendations but without any noticeable impact.

The report by the second ARC, in fact, was followed by a core group headed by the Cabinet secretary during the second tenure of the United Progressive Alliance to distil the recommendations of the ARC's 15 reports, of which 12 have been considered. There is, however, scant evidence of implementation. Ironically, the United Kingdom, from which India inherited its administrative structure, has overhauled its administrative systems so that senior vacancies are open to applications, to attract external sector experts, including foreigners. In India, promotion remains a tenure-driven, rather than a merit-driven, process, with a visceral aversion to lateral entrants. The current relaxation of the age limit and the number of attempts available to administrative services aspirants can hardly be considered conducive to the kind of innovative thinking or greater accountability of which the prime minister has repeatedly spoken. The nurturing of the mediocrities implicit in a generalist bureaucracy has resulted in a palpable shortage of institutional capability to drive critical changes in the political economy. For instance, the inability to create workable public-private partnership contracts has stymied the road-building projects for years.

These inherent deficiencies may have diminished the bureaucracy's ability to be a credible agent of change, but there are scores of small reforms that are no less critical. For instance, Mr Modi referred to Lee Kuan Yew's transformation of Singapore as a model. Tharman Shanmugaratnam, the deputy prime minister of Singapore, who delivered the inaugural lecture, offered one practical urban model that would make the Smart Cities project genuinely workable. Referring to India's "unfulfilled potential", he suggested appointing CEOs for city administrations so that revenues are maximised and invested in infrastructure and services instead of being co-opted into state Budgets. Management of cities in India is further hobbled by multiplicity of organisations that are responsible for different parts and functions of the city. Under the current framework of governance, most cities are run by a municipal corporation or a council. Added to these are several related bodies that do not work under a clear pyramidal structure of accountability. While some Indian cities have a mayor, the role is mostly titular and lacks any authority.

Then again, in India's Dickensian jails, two-thirds of the inmates are undertrials, with all the social hardships this entails for families, especially of the poor. In 2013, the Supreme Court had recommended that under-trials who had served more than half the term for the offence for which they were accused should be released. So far, only Maharashtra has implemented this order. Many similar measures involve mere administrative diligence rather than an aptitude for innovation or blue-skies thinking. Starting with these could well add up to the "Big Bang" transformation of which the prime minister frequently speaks.