States: Andhra Pradesh; E-mail to the voter

India Today
October 5,1998

ANDHRA PRADESH
E-mail to the Voter

To boost his image at home, Naidu tries electronic governance from the US. But the signals are not convincing enough.

By Amarnath K Menon

Naidu with Bill Gates To say that N. Chandrababu Naidu is a young man in a hurry is to repeat a cliche. Yet that's exactly what he seemed on his whistle-stop tour of half a dozen cities in the United States last fortnight, rubbing shoulders with the cream of the American corporate world, making slick presentations to promote Andhra Pradesh as the most hospitable investment destination in India. The flood of pictures beamed back home -- both for Telugu television channels and for distribution to local dailies -- ensured that more than 8,000 km away, Naidu continued to be the techno-savvy CEO of Andhra Pradesh Inc.

For almost two years now, the chief minister has been talking about electronic governance. For two weeks starting September 11, it was truly put to test. Telephones, fax, e-mail, video conferencing and a variety of gizmos were generously used by him, not just to keep in touch with what was happening back home but also to issue diktats to ministers and mandarins in Hyderabad. The message thus was clear: wherever he may be, the interests of the state were on top of his mind.

While the objectives seem laudable, there is no dearth of carping critics. No sooner than he landed back in the state late last week than the chief minister was accused of trying to centralise authority by developing a sophisticated information gathering system and keeping everyone -- cabinet colleagues, MLAs and officials -- on a tight leash. Worse, questions are being raised about the success of the US trip itself. "After all that hype, one wonders whether the roadshow was just that," says a senior government official. Similar efforts by chief ministers in the past have failed to bring in any major investments. And Naidu's own week-long trip to Malaysia and Singapore in May last year did not yield any significant results. All that he managed was a collaborator for a Hyderabad company for providing expertise in building flyovers.

When Naidu set out this time, he intended to make the trip more fruitful. In the end, it has turned out to be no different. The only cause for cheer has been the offer from IBM to collaborate in one of his pet projects -- "electronic government". Despite the much-publicised meeting with Bill Gates, the Microsoft chief declined to visit Hyderabad later this year to inaugurate Hi-Tech City, a software development complex promoted by the Naidu Government. That Gates keeps himself abreast of events here was evident when he assured Naidu -- while presenting him a copy of his book The Road Ahead -- that he would visit the state in the year 2000 after the assembly elections were over. There is no official word on Naidu's response to that, but it is believed that he told Gates, "I'll still be there."

With the Americans, on whom he banked so much, not quite going the whole hog, the chief minister was forced to turn to the huge number of Telugus there to help raise funds for development programmes in the state. With 69 per cent of the Indian software professionals hailing from Andhra Pradesh, Naidu tried hard to woo them into making investments back home. Though the response was far from enthusiastic, it was not exactly cold either. Quite a few seemed willing to invest but, to the chief minister's surprise, many doubted the Government's ability to utilise the funds constructively. "Naidu seems determined to turn Andhra Pradesh into one big hi-tech network," says Dr Dinesh Patel, chief of arthroscopic surgery at the Massachusetts General Hospital, "but many also looked at him as a politician in a hurry."

Some critics even see his "electronic government" project as politically motivated. According to them, the aim of the project was to enable Naidu to centralise his authority. Before leaving for the US, Naidu commissioned the Media Information Monitoring System, which works round the clock, to keep tabs on adverse reports in the media, mark it to the concerned departments for a field check and report back on follow-up measures, with a copy sent to the Chief Minister's Office. He also ordered ministers to make surprise district visits and provide him with updates from time to time.

While in the US, not a day passed without Naidu establishing contacts with the authorities back home. A daily three or four page summary in Telugu of relevant information culled out from the newspapers had to be messaged to him. The chief minister's secretary, S.V. Prasad, and Chief Secretary K. Madhava Rao called him twice a day for an instruction update. Officials in his entourage also put through calls to Hyderabad or made enquiries on the Internet. In spite of the flood of information supplied to him, he would often be seen seeking minute details from sky phones aboard planes.

And this is what is beginning to irk his deputies. "Why should he be so obsessed with issues, minor issues, that his cabinet colleagues and senior civil servants can handle on their own?" asks one of them on condition of anonymity. Is it necessary for a chief minister sitting in Seattle or Boston to issue orders for building 10,000 public toilets in each district? Or analyse the water levels in major reservoirs to order power supply from hydro-electric stations or thermal power plants? Naidu did this and more. One evening Revenue Minister T. Devender Goud and Health Minister N. Janardhan Reddy waited in Naidu's Hyderabad home for him to appear in front of them on the video conferencing facility and clear their visit to the rain-hit areas of Nalgonda district.

Initially, Naidu wanted a panel of three ministers to keep track of the goings-on and take decisions on key issues, after consulting him of course. The practice had worked well when a team of four ministers decided on behalf of former chief minister M. Channa Reddy when he underwent a kidney transplant at a US hospital. In Naidu's case, it soon became apparent that he had floated the idea only as a ruse to keep under wraps his desire for remote rule without delegation any authority to his cabinet colleagues.

His calculations is that by projecting himself as a strong, pro-reforms leader, he will be able to impress upon corporate giants in the US to invest heavily in the state and thereby strengthen the TDP base in the run-u to the assembly elections, due later next year.

Many top American executives saw Naidu as a messenger who will convey to Delhi their displeasure at the slow process of liberalisation. Said David Meachin, chairman of Cross Border, a mutual fund firm: "Things just don't happen in India." While acknowledgeing that Andhra Pradesh was doing wonderfully well, he wondered how India could be made "to move on". Sources close to Naidu said some of the Americans even prodded him to muse over the possibility of playing a larger role at the national level. But at a function organised by several Telugu associations before his departure home, Naidu bluntly assured them that he would concentrate only on Andhra Pradesh. "I want to make the state a role model," he said, "surely then things will happen in the rest of the country." The kingmaker was making it clear that he had no visions of becoming the king-not in the near future at least.

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