Ensuring Efficient Governance Key For People’S Support

Three things have to happen in India for the governance to get an upgrade in terms of the service it provides to the people -- ensuring quick implementation of decisions made, putting in place built-in systemic checks against delays in ‘delivery’ caused by inefficiency or neglect and taking effective measures to eradicate corruption

It is heartening to note that the Centre is actively engaged -- primarily through the Economic Ad-visory Council of the Prime Minister -- in examining the matters that came in the way of an effi-cient public-oriented ‘delivery’ by the government machinery.

A general definition of ‘efficiency’ applicable to all situations is that it is ‘a measure of productivity per unit of resource -- money, manpower or time’. Consequently, any step that makes a process cost-effective without adversely impacting the output, will also add to its efficiency. ‘Ease of do-ing business’ has rightly been made a testing ground for scrutinising the performance of those who manned the Ministries at decision-making levels. Bureaucratisation is being addressed by eliminating obscure and obsolete laws and rules, revising timelines for implementation and rede-fining accountability at different steps of the hierarchy.

There is so much to do in this regard and the government has to be complimented for launching the move. Finding ways and means of reforming governance is a ‘task’ that had to be assigned to competent people with the needed experience and interest -- like those who hold responsible positions in highly empowered bodies like Niti Ayog and Economic Advisory Council and had an inside view of the governance. The traditional practice was to constitute an Administrative Re-forms Commission which -- judging from the past -- used its autonomy only to take its own time in producing volumes of reports that were full of generalities. ARCs made few points of identified deficiencies and seldom spelt out practical ways of resolving them. The importance of both ‘structure’ and ‘process’ reforms has attracted greater notice ever since Donald Trump, Presi-dent-elect in the US, announced that Elon Musk would oversee a Government Efficiency Com-mission to bring about improvement in the governance of the democratic State.

Three things have to happen in India for the governance to get an upgrade in terms of the ser-vice it provides to the people -- ensuring quick implementation of decisions made, putting in place built-in systemic checks against delays in ‘delivery’ caused by inefficiency or neglect and taking effective measures to eradicate corruption. To set the right environ, it was necessary to discard laws and rules that had lost their relevance because they essentially catered to the colo-nial set-up or became totally redundant on account of the world shifting to a new age of commu-nications and refinement of legal obligations. There was a need for a thorough review of the insti-tutional entities within the government and ‘autonomous’ bodies existing under the umbrella of the Centre, to judge their contemporary utility and purpose and make the required changes by way of closure, organisational restructuring and merger. Also, it is the acceleration of ‘digitisation’ that has become the universal call for reform in governance -- especially needed by an advancing economic power like India. Fortunately, the present regime is making brisk progress in this direc-tion. Online work -- with due regard to security -- has proved to be a great instrument of efficien-cy, cost-effectiveness brought about through saving time and manpower as a ‘resource’ and op-erational learning for knowledge enhancement.

Participating in a media event recently, Sanjeev Sanyal member of the Economic Advisory Council of the Prime Minister, highlighted the ‘nuts & bolts’ reforms being carried out to make for efficient governance. He drew a line between ‘structural’ and ‘process’ reforms and explained how the latter were being prioritised -- ranging from discarding of many colonial-era laws like La-belling laws and the Weights and Measures Act to the winding up of defunct organisations that were allowed to keep going as ‘autonomous’ bodies even when they served no purpose in partic-ular. He stated that online processing of matters requiring clearance from multiple Ministries in a time-bound fashion was already adding to the ease of doing business.

The massive bureaucratisation in India has always been a challenge to the speedy delivery of project work and the attention being given by the Modi government to the much-needed reforms in governance would be deeply appreciated by informed citizens. The call for ‘Digital India’ was timely indeed and it has already helped the forward march of the Indian economy in a highly competitive world and also ensured that India was able to function as a welfare state as well be-cause of ‘direct transfer’ of monetary assistance to the needy. Digitisation will help to actualise the concept of ‘minimum government maximum governance’ which implies that we must move towards a slim bureaucracy where the empowerment and accountability of each member of the administrative hierarchy would be clearly defined.

The tendency to wait for ‘a nod from the above’ passes down the line with the result that the wis-dom accruing from an objective examination of the pros and cons of a project is denied to the decision-makers. Political executive changes now and then but the bureaucracy is there all the time and it is expected to do what was in the best interests of the democratic nation.

In the Indian context, the political executive at the Centre does not bring its own administrative heads to assume power -- unlike what happens in the US -- and this allows for a distinction to be made between those who run the regime and those who take care of the machinery of the gov-ernment for implementing policies framed by the former. Process reforms therefore need not be impeded by the political complexion of the ruling dispensation -- in reality though, politics did in-fluence bureaucracy in setting the direction of ‘reforms’ and fixing priorities. In the Modi regime, the initiative for reforms that made the governance service-oriented has come from the Prime Minister himself.

The machinery of the government would do credit to the regime if it was efficient, sensitive to the people’s needs and known for an image of uprightness, impartiality and firmness. All reforms should aim at achieving this. A regime that upholds nationalism, promotes unity without distinction of caste and creed and follows the principle of equality before the law, gets due recognition from the people and adds to the incentives and morale of the businesses, too.