Much has been said on the high
expectations, over promising and under delivery already, but this is an
interesting read:
Dear Modi-ji,
It is one year since you assumed
office. Your government can surely point to a general boost to the country’s
morale and self-confidence. But actual accomplishments remain modest. Against
the scale and magnitude of what is required to catapult India into the ranks of
the first powers within our lifetime, the effort is frustratingly half-hearted
and the pace of change frightfully slow. At this rate, far from catching up
with the world’s A-listers, India will keep slipping farther behind with each
passing year.
There are four portfolios that
you should prioritize with a sense of extreme urgency. First, choose a tough
law minister to chop, rationalize and simplify the plethora of laws surplus to
requirements for running a modern economy. S/he should ask: Is this regulation
really necessary? Excessive rules — a sad legacy of 60 years of License Raj
mentality — add to the cost burdens and incentivize corruption. Please trash
them.
Second, appoint a powerful
minister to perform radical surgery on the bureaucracy. Business executives
rate India’s bureaucracy the most inefficient in Asia. The top bureaucrats
likely have urged caution, emphasizing the importance of continuity in public
policy. With respect, prime minister, if the people wanted continuity, they
would have voted the Congress Party-led coalition back in with Rahul Gandhi as
leader. Instead they gave you a decisive majority — the first in 30 years — to
break the continuity and chart a radically new course. Throw out the seniority
principle in choosing departmental heads, give them five-year contracts to
implement reforms, and change the entire structure of recruitment, training and
promotions.
I was disappointed you did not
choose a non-career diplomat as ambassador to Washington. Your diplomats are
individually brilliant, but their collective impact amounts to the whole being
less than the sum of the parts. Quadruple the entry into the foreign service
immediately and then be increasingly selective in performance-based promotions.
In all walks of life, some
promising people disappoint, others burn out early and others blossom late.
Choose proven performers from business, journalism, universities, the defense
forces, sports and the arts to fill up to one-quarter of your ambassadorships.
Imagine the impact if a famous actress like Shabana Azmi or a legendary
cricketer like Rahul Dravid were your ambassadors to Washington and London.
They are individuals with proven character traits of integrity, conviction,
maturity, dignity and tact. Their access to all sectors of society in the host
countries would be the envy of other ambassadors.
Third, your finance minister has
been a disappointment: cautious and middling when the need of the hour is for
bold and decisive leadership. The retrospective tax law was one of the worst
cases in the world of a country shooting itself in the foot; it should have
been thrown out in last year’s budget. Instead, the tentacles of tax terrorism
are threatening to spread to the middle class. Please break the protectionist
mentality, switch from penalizing imports (many help the cost competitiveness
of Indian manufacturing and are essential to “Make in India”) to facilitating
exports, have faith in the Indian trader’s world beating entrepreneurial
skills, and force the bureaucrats to serve the people and business houses
instead of bossing them around. Limit the government to providing high quality yet
affordable public goods of health, education, infrastructure and law and order.
Finally, India has no future
without world-class education. As someone intimately familiar with the world of
higher education, I am saddened to see the widening quality gap between India’s
and the world’s secondary and tertiary educational standards.
Consider the recently published
fifth edition of the QS world university rankings. This year it drew on
responses from 85,000 academics and 42,000 business executives to rank the
world’s top 50 universities subject by subject across 36 disciplines. Only one
Indian institution made it on the list: Delhi University is ranked 17th in the
world in development studies. Thus no mention of the supposedly world-class
Indian institutes of management or technology: they are world-famous only in
India.
By way of comparison, my own
university is rated in the top 50 in 23 disciplines and in the top 10 in four
(including mine, politics and international studies), while Tokyo is judged in
the top 50 in 29 and in the top 10 in six subjects. Chinese institutions are
listed a total of 50 times (remember: India has only one). Among them, Peking
University is listed in the top 50 in 22 subjects (and in the top 10 in one),
Tsinghua University in 15 disciplines (in the top 10 in two), and Shanghai Jiao
Tong University in seven disciplines. How exactly is India going to compete
with China in the future?
A university degree is neither
necessary nor sufficient for a good minister. But your present minister .doesn’t
inspire confidence in her vision and competence to overhaul the education
system. Success in this key enterprise will also make redundant the distorting
and damaging program of caste-based quotas that has divided Indian society and
shackled the economy.
You have traveled extensively to
foreign lands in the past 12 months. The ambitious agenda outlined in your many
speeches is indeed admirable. I appreciate you are seeking desperately needed
foreign investment to kick the sluggish Indian economy into high gear. It must
be deeply satisfying to be feted by governments that denied you a visa for a
decade. You are human in soaking in the adulation of the adoring Indian
communities resident abroad. I recognize too the merits of courting sources of
investment finance, technology, credits and markets to drive your domestic
agenda by convincing foreign audiences that the new India under your dynamic
leadership is open for business.
They will not come because you
travel abroad to court them with slogans and promises. They will come if you
deliver results by tending to the urgent domestic reform agenda so that the
size of the Indian market grows dramatically, business is easy to do, price
signals determine investment choices and healthy profit can be made. This would
make it easier to hire and fire workers, expand the base of skilled labor,
increase worker productivity, connect suppliers to markets by building fast and
reliable transportation corridors, and eliminate the discretionary authority of
officials and politicians that imposes arbitrariness and magnifies
opportunities for them to extort businesses and ordinary people alike.
Prime minister: Reciting slogans
in foreign lands wins applause but the rush of investment money will begin only
when you make the laws and environment friendly for doing business, creating
wealth and jobs, and educating and training a skilled modern workforce. Prove
yourself different from the sclerotic Congress Party. They wasted 60 years.
Please do not waste the remaining 48 of your 60 months.
Yours sincerely,
A well wisher.
Ramesh Thakur is a professor at
Australian National University.
An early comment on the letter:
However
erudite and thoughtful the entire article may be, but I am amazed at
someone making out as if the only areas from where
"individuals with proven character traits of integrity,
conviction, maturity, dignity and tact" can
be found are Bollywood and Cricket!
The
author seems to be over awed by the fact that these specimen of society earn
bags full at the cost of Indian public, which itself has given in to the various
styles and tantrums of these money making heroes. This obviously is an
unqualified assumption or presumption of the author.
Yet another :
Modi Ji, you had been outstanding
during your pre-election speeches and in making lofty promises of all kinds and
asked for 60 months as against 60 years ruled by Congress. You do not seem to have realized that most
promises which could have been fulfilled without much ado, during the last one
year could not be fulfilled by you and your worthy ministers and top bureaucracy,
putting a question mark on credibility of your so called impressive seeming
speeches and countless promises. Your speeches making new promises from day to day, in
enormously large rallies and gatherings to induce and entice the millions of
your countrymen who worked with great hope to make you the Indian PM, are now turning
out to be hollow and just dramatized performances to get yourself elevated to
the highest executive office of India. Most of your ministers seem absolute misfits
for the posts you have elevated them to, and seem to be not only lacking a will
and dynamism to perform their normal duties but also have proved to be totally
incompetent to hold such high and prestigious offices.
Dear Mr Modi, you, boasted a lot just
after taking over as the PM that yours will be a government that works, but to an
utter dismay and to the contrary, the hand-picked bureaucracy of yours, has
been a total disappointment, as they have yet to display any sense and
capability to achieve any worthwhile targets toward fulfilling your promises,
but have instead been an impediment in performing their normal duties. The
government of yours just does not seem to be working at all, leave alone
working towards achievement of your oft repeated tall and ambitious promises. It may not be long before the millions of your
countrymen start getting a feeling that you only made false and hollow promises
to bluff them in your ambition to become Indian PM. Mr Modi please be advised
that in the absence of sincere efforts on the part of your ministers and
bureaucracy your credibility is seriously
at stake.
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