|
|
| March 20, 2000 | ||
METRO TODAY | DAILY NEWS | ASTROLOGY | ARCHIVES | INDIA TODAY | HOME |
|
Cover Story
| Nation | Columns | Newsnotes |
From the Editor in Chief | Editorials |
Eyecatchers |
| FIFTH COLUMN Transparency at Work Major ministries must be made to account for their activities once a year By Tavleen Singh
It is healthy for governments to admit to their failings and one of the reasons why the Finance Ministry is forced to do this, once a year, is that it has to produce a budget and by doing so admit, more often than not, to some really bad housekeeping. This year the finance minister's pretty Urdu poetry could not hide the fact that he has failed to control government spending. The result is, by the time we finish spending Rs 1,00,000 crore on interest payment and another Rs 58,000 crore on defence we have a pittance left for development. So, the education budget goes up by a mere Rs 1,000 crore. The Railway Ministry too has to open itself to public scrutiny once a year because it has to produce a budget. Mamata Banerjee may be a hero in West Bengal due to the number of new trains she has gifted that state but to the rest of us she is yet another railway minister bent on wasting taxpayers' money on madcap populist schemes, not someone trying to improve the railways and run them at a profit. It is a good thing, though, that at least two ministries in the government of India have to give a public account of themselves. But what we need is for every major ministry to give an account of its activities once a year. Think of it. Just as we have a budget session of Parliament we could have a social-sector session in which ministers dealing with healthcare, eduction, housing and drinking water would be forced to account for their doings. They would have to provide details of where money was being spent and, in doing so, would undoubtedly reveal that instead of building schools and hospitals they were, in fact, paying salaries to armies of redundant officials. We could then have an infrastructure session to deal with roads, power, railways, airlines and ports and, again we might discover exactly why it takes years for a project to get off the ground. Our ministers would have to give details of how many kilometres of road they had built and why our ports are so hopelessly outdated as to be almost ineffective. There could be similar sessions of Parliament dealing with other vital subjects. This could be one way of getting our honourable members of Parliament to spend more time on real work than on hullagulla. One of the current buzzwords in government circles is "transparency". Even politicians who have no comprehension of what the word really means talk about the need for transparency in government functioning. The idea they have come up with is a Freedom of Information Act. Fine. But anyone who has tried getting information out of a government department knows that 50 years of experience has taught our officials a million ways of not giving any information at all, law or no law. We need a systemic change that would make it compulsory for ministers to provide information to the public at least once a year. It may sound like a radical change but without such steps there is absolutely no likelihood that the wrongs of 50 years of misgovernance will be corrected. When it comes to things like infrastructure, healthcare and education the problems are simply too large to be dealt with by gradual increases in the budget. We need to remember that we have almost no modern infrastructure at all and that our education system is so primitive as to have no emphasis at all on quality. In an age of computer literacy we continue to measure literacy by whether or not someone can sign his name. So, if we are to begin to deal with the problem we need to make major ministries accountable -- like the Finance Ministry is once a year. It would be a dramatic departure from the way government has functioned, but then, to quote the finance minister, "Takaza hai vaqt ka key toofan sey joojho, kahan tak chalogey kinarey, kinarey (when it is time to battle the storm, how long will you take refuge on the shore?)" |
|
||||||
| Top |
 BUSINESS TODAY | INDIA TODAY PLUS | COMPUTERS TODAY Write to us | Subscriptions | Advertise with
us |
If
you have the courage and indifference to bad prose to wade through the reams
of verbiage that make up the Economic Survey you could discover that it
amounts to a funny kind of mea culpa. An admission by the government that it
is guilty of mistakes. Listen to this: "More effective management of
public finances continues to be the central challenge facing all levels of
government in India. In some ways the challenge has become more daunting in
recent years pursuant to the sharp increase in government wage bills
resulting from the Fifth Pay Commission." And listen to this: "The
delays in our legal system are also legendary. In many economic cases
decades pass before final resolutions, with enormous loss of time, effort
and resources. Observers have noted that government or government agencies
are often part of the problem of delays in our legal system. A National Law
School study estimated that government was plaintiff, defendant, appellant
or respondent to appeals in 60 per cent of all the suits filed."