By Swapan Dasgupta
On November 16, 1905, two days before he left India
for the last time—and in controversial circumstances—Viceroy Lord Curzon
delivered a remarkable speech at the Byculla Club in Bombay. The popular
expectations from a Viceroy, he suggested, were unbearably exacting: “He must
be prepared to speak about everything, and often about nothing. He is expected
to preserve temples, to keep the currency steady, to satisfy third-class
passengers, to patronise race meetings, to make Bombay and Calcutta each think
that it is the Capital city of India, and to purify the police…If he does not
reform everything that is wrong, he is told that he is doing too little; if he
reforms anything at all, that he is doing too much.”
Arguably, Curzon was protesting too much. As an
unapologetic advocate of “one-man supervision” (to be distinguished from
one-man rule) which he viewed as the best alternative to bureaucratic
government—“the most mechanical and lifeless of all forms of
administration”—this most “superior” of all Viceroys revelled in
micro-management. Predictably, this insistence on the Viceroy being the
fountainhead of governance and policy-making led to a clash with the India
Office and forced his premature return to the far less glamorous world of
domestic politics in Britain.
There is some merit in re-reading Curzon’s Byculla
Club speech in the age of 24x7 news channels. Over the past few years, there
has been an engaging debate over the role of government and governance in
India. For many, the rapes in Delhi, the mushrooming of pornographic clips on
mobile phones, the cheating of small investors by suspect chit funds and the
persistence of malnutrition among children point to the need for more
government and, perhaps, more intrusive governance. Conversely, the suggestion
of cronyism in the allotment of telecom licences and coal blocks, the sheer
incompetence of state electricity boards and the leakages identified by the
Comptroller and Auditor General’s report on the workings of the Mahatma Gandhi
National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MNREGA) has prompted the conclusion
that the Indian state is not merely bloated but incompetent and venal.
A remarkable feature of this fierce debate that
rages incessantly on TV screens, Parliament and other public forums is that
they are invariably case study based. Those who are demanding the censure of
the Government for depriving the public exchequer of rentier income in the sale
of spectrum and allotment of coal blocks may well be those who were earlier in
the year resentful of the controls the state sought to exercise on the social
media. The middle classes are outraged that the Right to Education Act has
resulted in state-sponsored hiccups in the admission procedures of schools. Yet
the same middle classes pillory the West Bengal Government for doing too little
to stop the proliferation of shady chit funds that invariably end up cheating
small investors. In Punjab, farmers often seek an end to regulations that
prevent the free movement of grain and other crops, but are active in their
insistence that fertilisers be subsidised and electricity for farming be
provided free of charge. And, finally, there are companies that have made a
fortune from what passes for Information Technology—outsourcing and body
shopping—that seek to combine complete deregulation with subsidised land to
build sprawling campuses.
Given these contradictory and flexible impulses, it
is small wonder that political leaders have consciously avoided elevating the
debate to arrive at a meaningful conclusion on the role of the state in a
market-oriented economy. There is incessant chatter about ‘good governance’ but
relatively little concern over the ideal reach of the state.
Perhaps Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi may the
odd man out. Unlike his colleagues in the Bharatiya Janata Party who have
desisted from elevating their natural misgivings over an over-regulated economy
and society into a coherent philosophy, Modi has actually tried to address the
core issue. What has over-simplistically come to be described as the “Gujarat
model” has, in Modi own words, come to mean “less government and more
governance”. Whether this approach corresponds to the late Margaret Thatcher’s motto
of a “small state but effective state” is an issue that will no doubt surface
nearer the general election, but the common refrain of the editorial and
chattering classes has boiled down to a simple assertion: ‘Gujarat isn’t
India’.
That this is a truism is undeniable. The so-called
‘Gujarat model’ is an over-simplified journalistic invention that in popular
parlance has come to imply a single-minded focus on growth and, by implication,
a relative neglect of what is called ‘human development’. The extent to which
there has been a conscious diversion of resources from ‘human development’ to
infrastructure is debatable. Economist Bibek Debroy, for example, has suggested
that this facile conclusion is the consequence of an inability to get the most
up-to-date figures. The overall improvement in the quality of life in Gujarat,
he maintains, has kept pace with its sustained double-digit GDP growth.
Regardless of the political debate over the nature
of Gujarati capitalism, some tentative conclusions are in order. First, Gujarat
operates under the same set of laws and regulatory regimes that in vogue in the
rest of India. The Dholera Special Investment Region, for example, has been
created out of an enabling legislation that is available to all Indian states,
including West Bengal. Why, it may well be asked, has only Gujarat chosen to
avail of the opportunities?
Secondly, there has been no discernible rollback of
the state in Gujarat. Where Modi has succeeded is in transforming loss-making
public sector units into relatively more efficient entities that show modest
profits. The Gujarat State Electricity Board is a case of a PSU that has shown
good results without having to travel down the privatisation route. Modi, for
example, has been inflexible on the issue of reasonable user charges as the
price for uninterrupted domestic power to both cities and villages—a price the
consumers have been more than willing to pay. Power subsidies for agriculture
haven’t been done away with. Instead, there has been a rigorous drive to
segregate power for agriculture from ordinary domestic and commercial usage. In
short, the subsidy regime has been sharply targeted.
Thirdly, there has been a conscious attempt to
remove small irritants in the path of entrepreneurship. The scale of Inspector
Raj—a problem that plagues traders in, say, Uttar Pradesh—has been reduced
quite dramatically and there is a greater emphasis on self-regulation.
Fourthly, there has been a stress on bureaucratic
accountability and a sharp reduction in the discretionary powers available to
the state machinery. The process of transfers and postings that preoccupy so
many of India’s politicians has been made transparent and almost entirely
rule-based. Bureaucrats have also been given relative security of tenure as the
price for accountability and efficiency. Likewise, the use of IT to access
government records has improved the quality of service in areas that involve
the interaction of citizens with the state. Add to these the small innovations
such as the introduction of evening courts which have yielded dramatic results.
Finally, and this is important, the profound changes
that have reshaped Gujarat in the past decade have been effected without the
creation of a new, ‘committed’ bureaucracy. It’s the same set of people who
have proved slothful and venal elsewhere who have delivered wholesome
governance in Gujarat.
The debate over the role of the state, it is clear,
has been overstated. A rollback of the state remains a difficult proposition
considering the unevenness of India’s development. What is more relevant is a
sustained focus on the efficiency of governance. Politics, after all, is the
art of the possible.
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