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This is Arun
Shourie calling. I received a call on my cell phone from your number."
The ever-polite minister of disinvestment surprised my colleague Malini
Goyal by returning her call one Saturday morning in July. On his way from
a hospital where his critically ill mother was admitted, Shourie had his
spartan office opened for discussion on the performance of his ministry.
His promptness of response and honesty of replies made me wonder: is he
a villain of the economy? That was the tentative title for the story we
were working on. The idea was to evaluate the performance of key economic
ministers of the NDA Government and rank them.
Shourie wasn't the only "non-villain" minister we met. Power
Minister Suresh Prabhu was the quickest to respond. He asked his secretary
to give us a detailed pre-interview briefing and met us many times to
field some tough questions on the ills of the power sector. Arun Jaitley,
the then minister for law and shipping, was equally forthcoming and thorough.
But the biggest surprise was Minister for Heavy Industries Manohar Joshi.
Contrary to his image of an obstructionist and power-monger, Joshi sounded
quite a reformer. He declared his resolve to make his ministry redundant
in four years. So here was a minister willing to relinquish power.
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| MINISTERS ALL: Villains and heroes of the NDA
Government |
By now I was seriously worried about the form our story would take. We
had set out to nail the villains responsible for holding the economy to
ransom. But some of the ministers we met would rather be called heroes.
The perception of most ministers being inefficient wasn't matching reality.
I toyed with the idea of changing the title of the story from "Villains
of the Economy" to "The Heroes and Zeros of the Economy".
But that, my colleagues felt, would take the punch out of the story.
That's why there was a perverse sense of happiness when we discovered
that not every minister was Jaitley, Shourie or Prabhu. There were ministers
who refused to acknowledge our calls and faxes. In the six weeks that
we worked on the story, I made more than 20 futile calls to Labour Minister
S. Jatiya at his office, Delhi residence and his constituency, Ujjain.
Tourism and Culture Minister Ananth Kumar was to different. Fed up with
making calls, Malini once forced her entry into the office of Kumar's
assistant and requested a meeting with the minister. She returned unsuccessful.
Yet, after the publication of the story, which justifiably wasn't charitable
on him, Kumar complained to my editor that nobody from India Today had
ever called him. Being called a liar is, of course, one of the hazards
of reporting on ministers.
Despite the variations in accessibility and commitment of the 10 ministers
we met, there was one attribute that held them together: the collective
underperformance of the NDA Government. The difference was only in the
degree and cause of underperformance. That's a reason why the story was
eventually titled "The No Ministers". The story evoked much
greater response than I had expected. Not surprisingly, ministers with
poor ranks cried foul. But surprisingly, ministers who were not rated
asked why they were left out. The NDA Government has 45 economic ministers,
but we could rate only 10-even after stretching our deadline. It was heartening
to know that at least some ministers want performance evaluation.
A cabinet reshuffle within a week of the publication of the story seemed
to have taken a clue from our ranking. The three lowest ranked ministers-Jatiya,
the then civil aviation minister Sharad Yadav, Kumar-were shifted from
their ministries, whereas Shourie, ranked third, was elevated. For months
after the story appeared my journalist friends kept asking me if my editors
had influenced the rankings. My denial didn't convince everybody. That's
another kind of perception-reality mismatch the story taught me about.
 
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