A Half-Turn

The bureaucrats in Orissa are among the best I have encountered anywhere in the country. This accolade would have sounded truly flattering if it hadnt come from a senior Tisco executive.

The Tata steel major is one of the mega investors in the state with its 10 million tonne steel project, and therefore an official favourite.

Compare this with the Oswal groups experience. The group had planned a Rs 3,000-crore fertiliser complex and was almost on the point of shifting its project elsewhere because of bureaucratic harassment.

The problem was this. The states new industrial policy resolution assured industrialists land at Rs 50,000 an acre outside municipal limits. But state officials charged the company Rs 3.5 lakh per acre and refused to budge when the anomaly was pointed out.

It took the chief ministers intervention to sort out the problem and keep the project alive.

As with bureaucracies anywhere in India, the selective efficiency of Orissas administrative cadres is not unexpected. But Patnaik recognised the problems and instituted an administrative reforms committee late last year to improve transparency and accountability in decision-making.

Ahead of the committees recommendations, there has been some change of heart. Yes, bureaucrats should cooperate with industry to put the state on the path of growth, says S B Mishra, additional chief secretary and an architect of the present regimes industrial policy.

Taking cues from their counterparts in more developed states, many of them are actually leaving the comfort of their air-conditioned chambers and turning facilitators.

This is mostly because bureaucrats find it more prudent to be pro- rather than anti-investment in the current political environment.

The problem in Orissa, however, is that this attitude is restricted to the top ranks of the state bureaucracy.

Complains J B Panda of the Imfa group of industries, While the senior bureaucrats have become attuned to the post-liberalisation scenario and are more responsive to the present needs, the middle level is yet to make the same attitudinal change.

Other investors agree. Another chief executive of an industrial house points out that a high-level nodal committee headed by the chief secretary regularly meets to review the progress on various projects.

But the problem with it is that important decisions by the committee often take more than a month to be notified to the people concerned.

Though the states industrial policy allows entrepreneurs the freedom to the industry to choose their project and the site, it does not remove any of the discouraging ground-level red-tapism.

Investors still have to run to petty officials to get clearances for land acquisition and water and electricity connections. Even a small officials like a sales tax inspector can shut down your factory if he wants to, rues Amarendra Dash, president of the Orissa branch of the Confederation of Indian Industry.

And depending on the level of political influence and the inducements, some entrepreneurs tend to be treated more equal than others. Local industrial houses and little-known domestic entrepreneurs, for instance, say they tend to get more short shrift from officialdom.