White Elephants ; Using Coalition Compulsions As a Fig Leaf, Parties Have Kept Alive 20 Dead and Useless Ministries at a Cost of Over Rs 74,000 Crore Only to Expand Their Umbrella of Patronage and Pelf
Summary
October 1985. Venue: Cabinet Secretariat. In the chair: Cabinet Secretary P.K. Kaul. You could call it a meeting on downsizing government. You could even dub it one more attempt at introspection as 55 secretaries of the Government of India presented their ideas on what the Government should do or not do. Amidst the gab fest, one thought received a lot of attention. Since most of the controls on steel and coal had been withdrawn, should these ministries exist? The question was debated, but never really answered. Since the exercise 22 years ago, inspired by Rajiv Gandhi's legendary impatience with sloth, the number of secretaries to the Government of India has ballooned to 84, the size of the Union Council of Ministers has nearly doubled from 42 to 79, including 35 Cabinet ministers and seven ministers of state with independent charge. Add 40 ministers of state, who, by their own admission, have little or no work and you get a perspective of the umbrella of patronage. And yes, the Ministry of Steel continues to exist with a staff of 402 despite the fact that steel was fully decontrolled in January 1992.
Steel, though, is not the only ministry that defies logic or rationale for existence. At least 20 ministries in the Government of India have no business to exist but have been kept alive by successive regimes to park sections of the vote bank that enable them to stay in power. As alliances are formed, vote banks are exchanged--some would say auctioned--for portfolios. The team is on auto-select depending on the exigencies of alliance politics. Take the formation and the shuffles of the UPA for instance. It isn't the UPA chairperson or the prime minister but the DMK chief who decides who will drive the critical programme of the highways project or who will replace Dayanidhi Maran as it and telecom minister. So was the case with the NDA. Shiv Sena chief Bal Thackeray recalled Suresh Prabhu as minister for power and replaced him with Anant Gite, who was his choice and not that of the then prime minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee.See the full content of this document
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White Elephants ; Using Coalition Compulsions As a Fig Leaf, Parties Have Kept Alive 20 Dead and Useless Ministries at a Cost of Over Rs 74,000 Crore Only to Expand Their Umbrella of Patronage and Pelf
Indeed, the UPA takes the cake. It has created new ministries not just to accommodate the allies but also people who it believes would enhance its relevance. So it split the Ministry of HRD and created ministries like Minority Affairs and Women and Child Development; separated mines from coal; and made a distinction between power and non-conventional energy.
The irony is that while creating more parking slots may have helped the parties come to power, the lack of delivery fuels the multiplier effect of incumbency. Every general election sees roughly half the sitting MPs trounced. The trend is worsening if the elections in Punjab and Uttar Pradesh are any indication. Sure the regional parties have reason to rejoice as they carve a niche for themselves in the cake of power. The tragedy is that both the Congress and the BJP--electorally irrelevant in over 200 Lok Sabha seats--seem to be seized of neither the ferment nor the reason for the rising anti-incumbency.This, when the reason is staring at them. Multi-layering and the creation of a plethora of departments have killed accountability and thus delivery. In January 2007, the Finance Ministry, in a confidential note to other ministries, observed that 13 critical ministries had spent less than a third of the budget allocation or just Rs 16,237 crore of an outlay of Rs 59,743 crore. While 40 departments managed to spend only half the allocation of Rs 2,52,594 crore. Year after year, almost all ministries fail to spend a major chunk of their allocation. Yet budget allocations are rising in almost all departments. Plan and non-plan expenditure has trebled between 1997 and 2007-08, from Rs 2,35,245 crore to Rs 6,80,520 crore, which is nearly a sixth of the GDP. This is done by creating new schemes at the Centre in areas that are primarily the concern of the states. The National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme, the backward areas development fund and the proposed dole to workers in the unorganised sector are all cut from the same fabric of political expediency. Thanks to this, a new situation has emerged. The district collector now receives funds directly from the Centre even as he reports to the state government. Ergo there is neither delivery nor accountability. Consider this--the Centre spends Rs 3.65 to provide subsidised food grain worth Re 1 to a person living below poverty line.The crux of the matter is that departments and ministries are created not on economic or administrative logic but political arithmetic. "The multiplicity of ministries creates layers and nothing is quite delivered," says Bimal Jalan, MP and former governor of the Reserve Bank of India. As Jalan points out, such is the multi-layering that if one wants to improve sports facilities for women in rural areas it is not one but seven ministries (Rural Development, Social Justice, Sports, Youth Affairs, Finance, Women and Child Welfare and Panchayati Raj besides the Planning Commission) who will be involved. In a seminal paper on administrative reforms, S.R. Maheshwari says, "The number of dep...See the full content of this document