So it wasn?t that difficult, to give up a majority share holding and still retain government control over things that matter. But obviously you wouldn?t expect the political bosses to come out with that sort of thought openly.
Probably in a wise move, they have let Nandan Nilekani say what we should have thought was obvious. Making social inclusion really come alive does not require the government to have majority holdings in companies that deliver. Strategic control can be equally retained by executive order or means like golden share. The key is to organise into one place several best practices of the government to create a template for fast execution.
The report of the Technology Advisory Group for Unique Projects (TAGUP) led by Nilekani has added up those best practices to tell the government and India something very obvious. If we want to create headroom to deliver social justice through government services, the way ahead is to embrace technological revolution and private sector participation, big time.
What the report suggests is to take the government out of its bread and butter role of measuring the result of the day to day functioning of projects like the NPS, goods and services tax, debt management or monitoring results of government expenditure. Instead, the report says, the daily grunt stuff should be left to the IT skills of a new set of companies, freeing the government to focus its limited resource on policy issues. These companies would have majority holding from the private sector but with strategic government control. Once that?s done the government departments would set the policy for the projects, execute them thoroughly but leave the job of tracking and measuring the results to those who have made a career of doing so.
But wouldn?t such savvy back offices usurp quite a lot of the freedom government officers enjoy to play favourites? Also the checks and balances this plan lays out could also sharply emasculate the role of the audit department.
As a concept, this can be a huge game changer. Take the plan the report has suggested to track expenditure. For the past many years, the finance ministry has come out with an outcome document to give some indication on if the money spent has served its purpose. But as D Swarup former PFRDA chairman and expenditure secretary explains, there is a big catch here. As soon as the finance ministry releases a crore of rupees to a state for a programme, the money is counted as spent. It might take more than a year for the sum to shape up as a village road, but that last mile execution is impossible to track for most projects.
This is where Swarup, Nilekani and others who worked on the report recommended a quality revolution. They have suggested establishing companies as national information utilities. Once those are mandated by the government for specific projects, government officers will not have to waste their time thinking up detailed compliance reports, which still do not say when a rupee slotted for a village has reached it because the feedback method in the government just does not allow such micro management. Even where a feedback loop exists, its a rare government department that will give an accurate report of the efficiency of its own programme. The backroom efficiency of the NIU will come in useful here to track funds from the time it leaves the finance ministry to when it actually reaches the project that needs it. This automatically creates the mechanism to measure the efficiency of a project delivery.
Essentially what TAGUP is suggesting is a very powerful tool for the government to use and create value.
It is also here where the problems are bound to crop up. The primary road block is of course going to be handing over such key overlordships to a private sector led entity. The Indian government will create its own obstacles to baulk at it. Yet, as the report explains, without being freed from government management, it?s impossible to bring in top notch professionals at every level to set up these companies. The other is how seriously the departments take the report. NIU for tax information network or expenditure management can conceivably give daily reports of cash utilisation for projects and kilometres of road built. This can be most annoying for departments. We have a highly under-used ministry of programme implementation. Will that one be wound up?
The other is, of course, the emasculation of the audit departments. What can an audit report say about a project six months later that an NIU would not have flagged already?
Postcript: Despite the strong complementary role for the private and government it assigns for the projects, the report does not mention public private partnership even once. A possible indication of how badly the term has fallen out of favour?
subhomoy.bhattacharjee@expressindia.com
