On The spot
Tavleen Singh
It was in my view the most important thing the Railway Minister said and it saddened me that it got the least attention. This was that after he finishes paying salaries and maintenance bills all he is left with is Rs 6 out of a hundred to spend on such necessities as modernization and improving safety standards. What disappointed me was that I did not hear him once mention that he would in future make better use of the vast tracts of urban land that belongs to the railways. If he monetizes this land bank (to use the jargon economists favour) he could probably be so flush with funds that those dreams of bullet trains and railway stations that resemble airports could find it easier to become reality. He might even end up with some money to spare.
Now why did he not consider this when he was making his Budget? Could it be because it was put together mostly by the same officials who have done these things for every other Governmen? Personally, I detected their signature in the expansive introduction, in the quotes from famous poets and in the dreary, rambling use of language. I detected the Modi touch in the mention of bullet trains and modern, clean railway stations. I detected it in the hints of privatization and FDI but by and large this was a Budget that could have been presented by the last Governmen’s Railway Minister just as easily. Perhaps the Prime Minister has decided to take things slowly and not make drastic changes in case it frightens officials but he needs to realize soon that without drastic changes there will be no change at all.
So in the case of public transport he has to privatize Air India as soon as he can and in the case of the railways he needs to bring in commercialization at every level. Personally, if I were the prime minister I would announce that by the time of the next Railway Budget next February the railways would no longer be a Governmen department. It would have become a corporation or several corporations: so no more railway budgets. Only when a commercial work culture is introduced will passengers on Indian trains get the services that rail travelers get in other countries. Only when this happens will the railways start moving freight more efficiently and in larger quantities. At the moment the railways move around 30% of freight traffic and that is abysmally small compared to its potential.
Narendra Modi needs to keep reminding himself that he won the election because people voted for ‘vikas’ and ‘parivartan’. Development and change and what they mean by this is that they usually mean by this is that they would like public services to change drastically. Wherever I traveled during the campaign I met people who told me that they were going to vote for Modi because they believed that he would improve public transport, schools, healthcare and sanitation. He cannot do these things without making drastic changes in the way India is governed. And he will be prevented from making drastic changes every step of the way by high officials who hate change of any kind and who almost never use public services unless it is to get a special ward and special treatment in the best Governmen hospitals if they fall sick. Their children never go to municipal schools and they never need to live outside Lutyens’ Delhi so they have virtually no idea of how ordinary people live in this city. No idea of the broken roads and rotting garbage and no idea how hard it can sometimes be just to get something simple done like renewing your passport.
Already in Delhi there are signs that most ministers have fallen into the clutches of the bureaucracy and are merely carrying on from where their predecessors left off. There is no doubt that on account of the Prime Minister’s vigilance they come to office early and leave late in the evening but in the time they are in their ministries they seem mostly to do routine, meaningless stuff. Last week I spent an hour waiting to see a minister and in this time noticed that the others who waited to see him were mostly people who wanted a favour of some kind or other. An experienced minister would have ensured that his time was not wasted in this way but since most of Mr. Modi’s ministers are new they allow themselves to be guided by bureaucrats who are happiest when they drown their minister in useless tasks and mountains of files.
The Prime Minister himself has too much on his plate to monitor what his ministers are up to but when he comes back from Brazil he would do well to organize a workshop or an orientation course for his cabinet colleagues. They need to be taught how to find their way out of the layers of red tape that their officials will truss them in and they need to be warned to beware of naysaying bureaucrats who stand in the way of any change leave alone drastic change.
What Delhi bureaucrats excel at is misguiding new ministers into the maze of rules, regulations and practices that only they can negotiate because it is they who have created them. Modi himself has long years of administrative experience and so is unlikely to be trapped in this maze or any other but his ministers will be easily trapped and this would be a disaster because the people who voted for ‘acchchey din’ are angry and impatient for change. They did not vote for just a change of Governmen they voted for a change in governance and they will not wait long before they start losing hope if they do not see change happening. Already on television chat shows these days have begun to appear defeated Congress MPs who cannot resist sneering about how there is no sign of good times. Already there are demonstrations in the streets of Delhi against prices and the increase in rail fares and already the Lok Sabha has become a place where a small caboodle of MPs manage to make the business of lawmaking impossible by using street fighting tactics. The new Prime Minister needs to move quickly if he wants to fulfill his promise of giving India the change and development he promised.
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