Prime Minister Narendra Modi wants the bureaucracy to deliver results at bullet train speed but where’s the manpower?
Prime Minister Narendra Modi will today inaugurate the Eastern Peripheral Expressway that is likely to decongest Delhi’s roads and possibly reduce winter pollution. To extract maximum political mileage in an election year, he will go on a 9-km long road show in an open jeep.
It’s another matter that the expressway had to be completed by July 2016. In April 2017, we were told it would be completed by August 2017.
It is only thanks to the Supreme Court’s constant rebuke to the National Highways Authority of India (NHAI) that it is opening now, and not by the ‘New India 2022’ deadline.
Even now, it is being opened hastily to meet the SC directives.
Earlier this month, a reporter found it to be in a state of unreadiness even as the NHAI told the Supreme Court it was done.
The NHAI also said it was not being opened to traffic because the prime minister wasn’t available to inaugurate it. The Supreme Court said that whether the Prime Minister was available or not, it had to be opened by 31 May. And this is only half the project: there’s similarly the Western Peripheral Expressway through Haryana that’s yet to be completed.
Four years on, this is typical of what’s wrong with the Modi government. The speed of its execution of projects isn’t really faster than what we saw with earlier governments, never mind the relentless propaganda. Delays and deadline extensions are routine, as they used to be. The Modi government has failed to re-invent Bharat Sarkar the way it had promised.
The delays, deadline extensions, and publicity blitzkrieg over half-finished projects is so all-encompassing that the Modi government postponed its report card date from 2019 to 2022.
Impossible targets, fudged numbers
One of the Modi government’s early successes has been the Jan Dhan Yojana, under which it is claimed that 31 crore bank accounts have been opened so far. Extending banking services to the unbanked is great, but the targets were so tight that some bank officials opened fake accounts to meet them. Some converted existing accounts into Jan Dhan accounts to meet the targets.
When the trick was caught, many bank officials put Re 1 in the fake accounts so that they are not scrutinised as unused accounts.
With the alarm over the misuse of Jan Dhan accounts during demonetisation (that greatest of all failures), banks closed 4.5 million Jan Dhan accounts.
Bank officials created fake accounts because there wasn’t enough manpower to open so many accounts in a short deadline. That’s the heart of the problem: India just doesn’t have the execution capacity to deliver overnight results the way Prime Minister Modi wants. Despite these discrepancies, many people got bank accounts because there was a banking infrastructure to do it. The picture is a lot bleaker in other areas.
A survey of 7,500 rural households in 2016 found that 29 per cent toilets under the Swachh Bharat scheme were built only on paper. No, this wasn’t for corruption. It was to meet the impossible deadlines set to declare India free of open defecation. Another 36 per cent toilets were simply unusable. The Modi government isn’t too concerned over such details as long as it gets to make grand announcements of success.
Yet even the fudging isn’t enough to meet deadlines, which are often quietly extended. The deadline to declare India free of open defecation is October 2019 – a few months after the general election – and it will in all likelihood be extended.
It was perhaps realism that made the government cut funding to treat solid waste under Swachh Bharat. Unlike toilets, solid waste treatment plants don’t even make for good publicity material.
Under “Digital India”, the government had said it would make high-speed internet lines reach all of India’s 2.5 lakh gram panchayats (GPs). We’re only talking about the line reaching the GP, not active internet availability in homes. The deadline was end of 2016. After several extensions, it is now March 2019. The government claims that over 1 lakh GPs are already “service ready” but a survey found these claims to be rather exaggerated.
State capacity
The Modi government, like most governments in India, has a penchant for announcing scheme after scheme, programme after programme. It makes the government look like it is doing something, it is trying.
Politicians don’t like to focus energies and budgets on things that don’t directly earn votes the next election. The greatest victim of this is execution capacity. This is the main reason why PM Narendra Modi’s grand ideas are not delivering grand results. Execution and delivery were also his big promises in 2014. We no longer hear the phrase “minimum government, maximum governance”.
A recent study by Devesh Kapur and Aditya Dasgupta found that the main officials responsible for executing social sector schemes, the block development officers, are hugely over-worked. Meanwhile, central and state governments keep increasing their burden with ever newer schemes and targets.
Contrary to the image of a bloated bureaucracy, the Indian government has a manpower shortage at every level, from central ministries to the panchayats. The sanctioned staff strength is not enough, but even that is not filled. India’s population keeps growing, the size of its bureaucracy keeps shrinking because even the sanctioned posts are not filled. This is true of both state and central governments.
Going by 2011-12 data, only 3.5 per cent of India’s population works for the government. The figure is 16.4 per cent in the UK, 15.3 per cent in the US and 5.9 per cent in Japan.
There’s a 23 per cent shortfall in the sanctioned strength of IAS officers. The UN recommends 222 police personnel per 1 lakh population. India has around 140. Against the ideal of 50 judges per 10 lakh population, India has only 18. India needs at least 8,559 fire stations in the country. There are only 2,087.
When the Indian state succeeds – such as in conducting elections or the Pulse Polio programme – it does so by mobilising massive manpower – often school teachers who should be focusing on teaching. New India won’t arrive in 2022 either if the government doesn’t solve its manpower crunch.