Shuffling Across

Still, to show that Mr Ibrahim is no longer the undisputed boss of his civil aviation show, he has appointed Ms Jayanti Natarajan as the minister of state. It will be interesting now to see how things pan out there, and whether the Tata-SIA deal and the Bangalore airport project will be revived. If they are not, that too in quick time, the game would have been won by Mr Ibrahim, if only on points.

Mr Gujral has also appointed two ministers of state in the ministry of external affairs while keeping the portfolio for himself. This means that he will continue to look after policy while the two new ministers take care of the routine administrative work that eddies through the ministry. Meanwhile, as always happens in any Janata Dal reshuffle, the event has been trivialised by the antics of Ms Renuka Chaudhury who has been given health and family welfare. Regarding this as a no-count portfolio (the attitude tells us something about her) she has suggested that this is a slight on her party, which is complete nonsense.

 

The move to clip the wings of minister of state Mr R Baalu by installing Mr Janeshwar Mishra as the cabinet minister in the petroleum ministry is intriguing and no clear explanation is as yet available.

By far the most important signal is the appointment of Mr Yogendra Alagh as minister for power with independent charge (he was minister for planning earlier). This could be interpreted as a clear signal that Mr Gujral wants to revive public investment in the power sector. From 1991 onwards, the Rao government had decided to rely on private investment to make up the gap left by the reduction in public investment in power. But because the operating rules were not clearly determined and because the issue got politicised, sufficient foreign private investment has not materialised. This has resulted in the current power crisis and the simultaneous realisation that public investment in power would have to be revived. It must be hoped that Mr Alagh will take enough non-reversible initiatives in this regard. However, he should bear in mind that, if private investment did not materialise in the quantum necessary, it was mainly his current ministrys fault. It failed compeletely to devise unambiguous and transparent rules for private, especially foreign, investment in power. He needs to rectify this speedily because the public sector alone cannot generate the resources required to meet Indias power needs.