Don’t waste time on implementation

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sectors. This is good but can easily slow down if states and cities are not helped in preparing themselves well from a financial point of view, building capacities and setting up projects While the Centre is not necessarily the agency responsible for doing all this—nor is the Budget, the main instrument—it is extremely important for the government to realise that if it does not get seriously involved in a much more direct way in pushing states to get ready, these can easily become the main bottlenecks for slow progress. Another important thing that the finance minister can do is to publicly state which are the flagship infrastructure projects we have achieved, as committed during the year, and why have we not made progress in the others. The Budget time can also become the right platform to recognise good work done.

Last year, the Budget made a provision of a Rs 100-crore fund for getting enough projects into a fast pipeline. Unfortunately, the low utilisation of the fund is a clear indication that making funds available is not enough. The Centre needs to prod states, particularly the ones that need infrastructure the most, as they are also the ones that need pushing for groundwork. For the finance minister and the Planning Commission, a radical thought would be to tell states that they can’t get money for infrastructure programmes next year if states can’t show project-programme preparation this year (somewhat akin to the current practice of looking at utilisation certificates before releasing all future installments).

Another important issue is this whole business of bringing in a sense of urgency in reforms. It has always been important for the finance minister to directly link the financing of infrastructure through various programmes and schemes to major reforms and a change of mindset in tackling the far deeper issues in each of these sectors—distribution reforms in power, focus on operations, maintenance and safety of highways, cost recovery and a willingness to charge in the water sector. We know by experience that financial assistance is a strong instrument to kick-start such a change of mindset. We can at least begin with an output-oriented Budget if not an outcome oriented one that the finance minister had talked about earlier.