Putting pressure on the government to extend flexibility to top private sector professionals so that they function autonomously and achieve desired outcomes, corporate heavyweights including Nandan Nilekani, S Ramadorai, Arun Maira, Sam Pitroda and P Raghu Raman have asked Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to streamline the institutional framework under which they perform their duties once they are part of the ?system?.
Realising that lateral entrants into the government find it frustrating when rulebooks are thrown at their face often by the bureaucracy, Pitroda, representing the group, met the Prime Minister recently and presented a five-pronged strategy to design government organisations such that they deliver. ?This system (what we have now) was designed by the British raj to maintain status quo. It is not for faster development, something that we need today,? Pitroda told The Indian Express.
Prime Minister Singh has asked principal secretary Pulok Chatterjee to study the suggestions and take necessary action. Pitroda’s note suggests that whenever an agency or an entity is formed or carved out of the government to carry out a specific function, its chief executive must be given considerable operational freedom and autonomy. More importantly, it strongly recommended that the PM must support such agencies’ smooth functioning by setting up a monitoring and facilitation cell in his office.
The note says that the chief executive of the proposed organisation must have domain knowledge and a track record in creating and managing organisations that deliver. Further, existing organisations, whose governance has been corroded by creeping interference from entrenched government systems, should also be assisted by the cell in the PMO. Finally, all government departments must be pushed to apply this concept of ?agencification? ? the process of agencies being carved out of government departments to carry out specific executive functions within a mandate and framework of policy provided by the relevant ministry ? to improve delivery performance.
The letter and a three-page note that Pitroda handed to the Prime Minister was, however, not a one-off instance.
In January this year, P Raghu Raman, CEO of National Intelligence Grid, an organisation set up under the Ministry of Home Affairs, to create a national security database, disclosed his constraints to a group of eminent people including S Ramadorai, advisor to the Prime Minister in the National Skill Development Council and vice-chairman, TCS, Nandan Nilekani, chairman, UIDAI and co-founder Infosys Technologies and Arun Maira, member, Planning Commission, who was earlier Boston Consulting Group’s India chief. This triggered the move to request Pitroda to broach the issue with the Prime Minister.
Earlier, under the ambit of the National Innovations Council, Pitroda and Maira had met secretaries to various government departments to understand their innovation efforts. During the interaction, they received feedback that suggested that government itself was a bottleneck to efficient public service delivery. ?The government machinery does not perform; it comes in the way of innovation ? this is what the secretaries told us,? Maira told this newspaper.
While Raghu Raman, who was CEO of Mahindra Special Services Group prior to his current assignment, has been struggling even to hire private sector professionals for the last 18 months at NATGRID given the lack of autonomy and independence, Maira hit a wall recently in his attempts to reform the Quality Council of India (QCI), a government-private sector initiative. Appointed as QCI chairman by the Prime Minister about 18 months ago, he finally submitted his resignation to commerce and industry minister Anand Sharma last week after the department of industrial policy and promotion did not let him recruit a secretary general as per the profile decided by the QCI board.
Pitroda said it was not difficult for him to wade through the bureaucracy given his earlier stint when he set up technology missions during Rajiv Gandhi’s prime ministership. Nilekani too has had the Prime Minister’s backing with the UID project. But, it is not so easy for others. When contacted, Raghu Raman said: ?One has to realise that such roles have extremely contradictory requirements ? bias towards results or outcome (which is expected from the private sector) and an extraordinary focus on process (the government’s mindset).?