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

PICTURE SPEAK

Creation of a plethora of departments has killed accountability and delivery. The number of ministries has shot up from a mere 18 in 1947 to 53 in 2004.

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.

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 departments in the Government of India grew from three (Public, Secret, and Revenue) in 1774 to eight in 1833. It then expanded to 10 in 1919 and 18 in 1947. No other country has such a large retinue of ministers.”

Arun Shourie, BJP MP and former minister, says, “Accommodation of politicians leads to accumulation of babus.” In 1948, the number of secretaries to the Government of India was 19 and that of IAS officers 143. The expansion has also imposed a huge cost—as high as 2 per cent in terms of GDP growth—on the economy. Today there are 134 IAS officers just at secretary-level postings, while the number of IAS officers posted in the Central Government is 820. First there is a directorate, then it is upgraded to a department and then to a ministry. And even after the ministry is disbanded—like in the case of disinvestment—the department stays.

True. In a developing economy there are new areas that require government attention. C. Rangarajan, chairman of the Prime Minister’s Economic Advisory Council and former governor of RBI, points out, “There is a need to create new focus areas and retire old positions which have lost relevance.” As he says: “If there is a sunrise sector, there should also be sunsets.” But that hasn’t been the case with India. It is not that the problem has not been studied or discussed. Between 1947 and 2007, no less than 30 committees and commissions have studied the issue. In fact the Administrative Reforms Commission (ARC) of 1966 had clearly advocated smaller governments. Neither that nor any other report was implemented, and as with the church, sin and evangelism continue to co-exist.

By allowing the multi-layered system to continue, political parties face not just a collapse of governance but also their own future. As India turns 60, it is time for some ministries to be retired, the concept of minister of state buried and funding of line ministries critical to social development relocated to the states. In 1947 we made our tryst with destiny. It’s time we made a tryst with the future.

Drought of Ideas
MINISTRY OF AGRICULTURE
Staff: 11,711
Wages and allowances: Rs 191.25 crore
Total plan and non-plan expenditure: Rs 9,362.21 crore

RATIONALE: To formulate and implement national policies and programmes aimed at achieving agricultural growth through optimum utilisation of land, water and plant resources; formulate overall cooperative policy, oversee research and maintain statistics.

REALITY CHECK: Production of grains and pulses is stagnant for over a decade, productivity is down, almost 20,000 farmers commit suicide every year. There has been no breakthrough in seeds or yield since the Green Revolution and agriculture is unviable. The Centre’s defence is that the problem lies with the states.

Indeed everything under agriculture—agricultural education and research, protection against pests, prevention of plant diseases and improvement of cattle stock—is listed as a state subject in the Seventh Schedule of the Constitution. So what is the big idea of hosting an army of people in Krishi Bhavan? Agriculture, which is India’s largest private sector enterprise, supports 56 per cent of the working population while delivering 19 per cent of the GDP.

Too many people are dependent on a crashing enterprise. The Indian farmer is growing less on a shrinking holding, spending more for inputs for an income that is not only falling but has to be shared with a growing number of dependents. Yet there has been no attempt to restructure the sector. India needs to go in for manpower-intensive, value-added crops. Post-land reforms, with land holdings at less than two hectare per capita, it cannot adopt scale-neutral methods. The situation calls for drastic action, not the usual mix of incrementalism and pious sermons. Yet the focus is on more committees. At least six committees have studied credit to farmers, four have studied use of genetically modified seeds, three have studied investment in irrigation, but there has been no action on the ground. But that has not prevented every minister from expanding the ministry. Established in 1871, the ministry has gone through 48 avataars. It deserves moksha.

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