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NaMo’s Minimalist Wave

The paralysis afflicting the Narendra Modi government is uniquely Modiesque

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NaMo’s Minimalist Wave
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Headless Hunt

Modi seems in no hurry to fill up key posts lying vacant

  • 67 posts of joint secretaries and directors
  • Head of Indian Agriculture Research Institute
  • Head of Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR)
  • Chief Information Commissioner
  • Head of Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR)
  • Head of Defence Research & Development Organisation (DRDO)
  • Head of Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR)
  • Head of Central Drug Research Istitute (CDRI)

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  • Head of Glass & Ceramic Research Institute
  • Head of Indian Institute of Chemical Biology
  • Head of S.N. Bose National Centre for Basic Sciences
  • Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics
  • Head of AICTE
  • Twelve central universities are without vice-chancellors

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A  clean Ganga—this is one of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s pet projects. A foreign delegation had been invited to make a  presentation on how to clean up the Ganga, holy to millions of Hindus. An impatient babu asked the delegates how long the clean­-up would take. The delegates said it had taken 30 years to clean up the Rhine, which is only half the length of the Ganga. There’s no time to lose and money is not a limitation, the delegation was told. “Chlorinate the river, do whatever.... We want a clean Ganga flowing past Varanasi in the next few months.” No problem if this delegation refuses such a haphazard assignment. There are other options. “We’ll give it to the Australians.”

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Such impertinence was also experienced by a group of French journalists who were invited to spend a week in India before the prime minister’s visit to Europe later this month. One of them said every official they met parroted the same tune: India will register a growth of 10 per cent or more per annum for the next 30 years. They weren’t convinced. “They (Indian officials) were rude and evasive to some pertinent questions about their tall claims.”

While bureaucrats are anxious to expedite the ‘PM’s projects’ and occasionally display ‘senseless urgency’, and while some projects do move at breakneck speed, there is much that is stalled. With ministers interminably waiting for instructions from the PMO and unwilling to stick their neck out, decisions are taking much longer. According to sources in the PMO, the highest number of files pending has gone up from 1,500 during Manmohan Singh’s tenure to 6,000 by mid-March “The prime minister, being a control freak and travel freak at the same time, compounds the problem,” says a former cabinet secretary.

Rhetoric is to be unleashed this month about the government’s achievements as it completes a year in office. The big claim is: Modi’s magic has left investors spellbound. The i&b ministry is reportedly preparing 60 bilingual slides to highlight the success story of India, for the first time, being set to humble China’s growth. And to say this has been made possible by good governance, which has translated into solid work.

The real story, however, is different from the rhetoric. One of the more visible effects of this over-centralisation is seen in the long list of headless organisations (see list). The number of vacancies at the director and joint secretary level has crossed 80. A large number of scientific, technical and educational institutions have been headless for six months and more.

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The Council of Scientific and Ind­ustrial Research (CSIR), which manages 38 national laboratories and is a dee­med university, is among the hardest hit. For an idea of the adhocism, consider this: the director of the Indian Institute of Integrative Medicine, in Jammu, is also managing and overseeing the Central Drug Research Institute, in Lucknow, some 1,000 km away. As many as 15 labs run by CSIR have trudged along without full-time directors for almost a year now.

The PMO also appears guilty of having rendered the Cabinet Appointments Committee redundant. Neither the Union minister of home affairs (MHA) Rajnath Singh nor ministers of other departments have any role in the transfers and postings of officials. In documents produced before the Central Administrative Tribunal (CAT), the former chief vigilance officer of the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), Delhi, Sanjeev Chaturvedi, alleged that the PMO had cleared the ‘cadre transfer’ of as many as 29 officers, and that in 14 of these cases, rules were flouted or their observance waived. Chaturvedi himself has been drawing salary for the last seven months at AIIMS without doing any work, while Union minister Prakash Javadekar sits over the request of Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal to lend Chaturvedi’s services to the state government. An official in Javadekar’s ministry points out that the minister is helpless. He is just carrying out instructions from the PMO.

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Customarily, members of the appointments committee of the cabinet would arrive at a collective decision on who gets to be named to posts of joint secretary level and higher. Now it’s just the PMO. Bureaucrats are no longer able to lobby for postings in departments aligned to their education, ability, aptitude or intellectual interests. “No one knows who decides transfers, postings and appointments at the PMO,” says a joint secretary in the MHA. “We are just informed.”

There’s bureaucratic sloth. There’s a reluctance to be proactive. There’s the fear of being held accountable. There’s   the fear of being entangled in an investigation by the CBI or other central agencies, sooner or later, in service or in retirement. All this has paralysed government departments and held up decision-making. All government decisions, complex as they are, may seem malicious from a distance, explains a bureaucrat, who has just gone back to a posting in his home cadre.

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There is also speculation that the delay in making key appointments is due to the anxiety to accommodate RSS ideologues. A senior BJP functionary says, “The government is trying to find right people for the right positions.” Not all key positions go to the RSS, he said, and cited the example of Lokesh Chandra, an 87-year-old Indira Gandhi loyalist, with links to leaders of the erstwhile Soviet Union. He was recently appointed president of the Indian Council for Cultural Relations (ICCR)—the country’s cultural interface with the rest of the world.

But a hyperactive PMO seems to have put off a section of bureaucrats, who are now reluctant to leave states and move to the Centre in a reversal of the earlier trend of bureaucrats lobbying for central deputation. “The fear factor is at play,” says a joint secretary, who agreed to talk at a coffee shop in Noida. “We are just carrying out instructions. We get very specific instructions, several times not in writing. You can’t afford to not act on such verbal communications and you can’t act on it unless due process is followed,” he says of the dilemma.    

The prime minister’s frequent travel—he’s been on foreign trips for 40 days in his first nine months in office—has also taken a toll on governance: the number of vacancies rises, but there is no reshuffle in sight. Ajit Kumar Seth, cabinet secretary of the former UPA regime, still remains in office. He has been given extensions. Asked about the delays, Manmohan Vaidya, national prachar pramukh or propaganda head of the RSS, shot back: “I will not say a word on this. I understand the media is trying to create a misunderstanding. We know our work. Government is doing their work.”

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K.N. Govindacharya, a former RSS pracharak who used to share a room with Modi in 1989-90 at the party office on Akbar Road in Delhi, is openly critical. He points to hypocrisy disguised as ideology. The RSS and the government, he says, are dealing in “half-truths, or sometimes, convenient truths”. Is the national interest above party interest or the interest of the rss? This arrangement of hypocrisy and compromises is not sustainable, he warns (see box).

By Mihir Srivastava in New Delhi

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