April 6, 1998

Mr Vajpayee, please reform the bloated and inefficient bureaucracy.

Tavleen Singh

Finally, a prime minister of India who has never been in the Congress. This should mean a new kind of governance, a new political culture, perhaps even a new beginning. Alas, there are few early signs of any of these. In the past week, when Atal Bihari Vajpayee made his first address to the nation as prime minister, he sounded so much like his Congress and once-Congress predecessors that it was hard to believe anything had changed at all.

As if to ensure that this was in fact his objective, Vajpayee stuck a picture of Gandhiji behind him and went out of his way to praise Rajiv Gandhi's efforts in the field of education. The praise must have startled even Education Department officials, since it came for a rather scatter-brained scheme to set up mini-Doon Schools for underprivileged children. Atalji was so impressed with it that he has informed us he wants to multiply it twenty-fold. Could he please at least bother to go on a tour of rural schools and see how desperately they need bare necessities like books, teachers, regular classes and a roof over their head?

A year ago, when Atalji's prospects of becoming prime minister were not yet imminent, I spent a day with him in Lucknow. It was a sleepy, mofussil sort of day and we had a long chat. When we discussed governance being the need of the hour, he said the BJP would start showing that it could do things differently only when there was a change at the Centre.

Well, there is a change now and it would have been wonderful to hear him make the same sort of speech that Zhu Rongji, China's new prime minister, recently made. Zhu clearly enunciated what he thought had gone wrong and what he was going to do about it. For instance, he said he was determined to cut his country's bureaucracy. He also talked of China's vast, money-guzzling, over-manned public sector and his determination to make it more efficient.

Our problems are depressingly similar, without China's advantage of mass literacy. It would have been wonderful to hear Atalji's ideas on these issues. Instead, we got banalities and impossible promises. Sixty per cent of all investment will go to rural India, trebling what it is now. Where is the money going to come from to keep other areas from collapsing totally? Food production is going to double in 10 years. Again, we may well ask: where is the money going to come from?

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, the Government of India continues to function exactly and as wastefully as it has always done. Even the ministries remain the same. We do not need a Ministry for Human Resource Development, we simply need one for education if we are to even begin to dream of a fully literate India. We need an infrastructure ministry, not separate ones dealing with this most vital problem. We need to do away with certain ministries altogether. Why do we need a Ministry for Information and Broadcasting, unless we intend to allow it to continue interfering with our right to information? Why do we need a Press Information Bureau? Its main task is to ply hapless hacks with press releases that have been unusable ever since we stopped imitating Soviet-style propaganda?

Yet, a vast bureaucracy sits in Delhi's Shastri Bhavan churning out stuff like this: "On assuming charge as the Union minister of textiles here today, Shri Kanshiram Rana indicated that the Government would give highest priority to generation of employment ... Giving an indication of the new Government's priorities in the textile sector, Shri Rana emphasised that one of the major objectives should be to ensure clothing for the masses at reasonable price." If the officials in charge of writing this kind of nonsense can't be put to grass, then can't they at least be more usefully employed?

There are other things that need to change -- like the VIP culture that flourished and grew as Congress ministers became fat with pelf and power. VIP housing, VIP healthcare, VIP security: the average Indian has learnt to hate politicians mainly because of these things. But we hear nothing from our new BJP Government on whether it plans to rid itself of these inherited bad habits.

Even if we could begin with VIP security, it would make a difference. The Home Ministry has just announced a list of 120 people whose security has been downgraded. The interesting point is most of the people on the list are so completely unknown and irrelevant that prospective assassins would not even know their names. But armed guards are a Delhi status symbol; so the BJP-led Government's new ministers would be loath to be without them.

If the prime minister is serious about giving us a new kind of governance, then what he needs to do is get someone like Jaswant Singh to make a study of how the Government of India functions and suggest a few radical changes. For instance, is it not about time that it became possible to sack inefficient government servants?

The study could even start with the Planning Commission, in order to find out whether it serves any useful purpose any more -- and if not, what it can be reinvented as. Reinvention of government is what is imperative if we are not to bumble our way through the 21st century as well. Our BJP prime minister has the first real chance to make a difference. Will he grab it?

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