An idea of India

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Both, in a manner of speaking, convey a sense of grappling to find the truth, much like the six blind men of Indostan trying to figure out what the elephant really was, by feeling his tail, trunk and other body parts like the tusks.

As Saxe put it a hundred and fifty years ago, "Though each was partly in the right, and all were in the wrong!"

This collection of papers presented at a three-day seminar in November 2000 (needless to say, though full of interesting facts, the book is a bit dated), is a lot like that, leaving the reader feeling a bit schizophrenic at the end of it all.

The first few essays, for instance, give graphic accounts of just how bad the fiscal situation in the states is.

In 1997-98, for instance, before the fiscal crisis really set in, the major states had an overdraft with the RBI (that's the facility to draw money without having cash in the bank) of 30 days in a year.

By 2000-01, this was up to 97 days, and there are increasing instances of state governments not paying salaries and simply closing down their treasuries.

Since state governments have resorted to huge borrowings to fund expenditure, usually through para-statals, this has worsened the problem "" remember all the newspaper reports about cheques/paper of various state irrigation departments bouncing?

All told, if you include all this, and the power sector losses, the combined state government deficit has more than doubled from 2.6 per cent in 1995-96 to 5.4 per cent in 1999-2000.

In fact, and the book doesn't explicitly make this point, but some of the most-industrialised states, like Gujarat for instance, can really trace their relative decline to the rapidly deteriorating state of the fisc.

But move on, and other essays in the book are full of the great work happening in the states, not just in e-governance, but in overall governance as well. Makes you wonder if it is the same states being talked of.

Take Andhra Pradesh for instance. The state is in the throes of a huge fiscal crisis thanks to the fact that while Chandrababu Naidu has this major reformer image, his performance on cutting subsidies isn't so hot.

Yet, if you look at Naidu's record in e-governance, it is quite stunning. Under the Computer-aided Administration of Registration Department (CARD), for instance, about 214 registration offices have been computerised since 1998.

Till February 2000, around 700,000 certificates of registry/valuation were issued by these offices, in less than an hour in most cases.

The Vijaywada Online Information Centre (VOICE), similarly, delivers municipal services such as building approvals, birth and death certificates, and even handles collection of property and water taxes in seven kiosks closer to where the citizens are located. Which is the real Andhra, the fiscally stressed one, or the e-governed one?

In Karnataka, similarly, the Bhoomi computerisation of land records has already computerised 20 million records, and over 10 million farmers have already got copies of their records from this programme.

And it's not just e-governance that Karnataka has excelled in, it has come up with a transparent and fairly effective system which restricts the huge number of transfers that take place among bureaucrats/teachers and other government employees, an endemic problem in all states.

Reducing this does two things "" longer tenures allow employees to actually do some work, and also cuts corruption since the scope of payments-for-transfers reduce.

The Sarita programme in Maharashtra has computerised the registrar's offices and as a result, the time taken for registration had dropped from a few days earlier, to a mere 30 minutes now.

As a result of this, the number of documents being registered in Mumbai alone went up by 27 per cent in 2002.

Indeed, collections for the government from the scheme have gone up a whopping Rs 400 crore, and in just two years, 30 lakh documents have passed through the system.

That these details of Sarita are not part of the book, since they happened after the e-governance essay was written, just go to show how dynamic the e-governance process has become.

The state government is now working on SETU, a single window system for issuing all licences, permits for citizens, and a programme is being worked on to computerise land records at the taluka level as well. Maharashtra, by the way, like Gujarat, is another state that is in a sorry fiscal situation.

The moral of the story? E- and other governance initiatives are important, to help the government stretch its rupee-spend and to give citizens better service-delivery, but a broke state cannot spend on infrastructure and other development that is vital for the state's growth.

With a few exceptions, like Gujarat and Maharashtra, fiscally-strapped states have poor infrastructure since they can't spend on it, and therefore poor growth as well "" in the two exceptions also, growth began flagging some years ago. Finally, the maths catches up.

STATE-LEVEL REFORMS IN INDIA
Towards More Effective Government

Edited by Stephen Howes,
Ashok K Lahiri and Nicholas Stern
Macmillan
Pages: 325/ Price: Rs 450