Govt Lists Year & #8217;S Reforms Agenda

In an effort to push reforms, the government has prepared a list of things to do in 2003-04.

It includes setting up an asset management company for handling divestments, a disinvestment proceeds fund, a company law tribunal, and a competition commission.

The repeal of SICA and the disinvestment of a number of public sector units, including oil marketing companies, are among the priorities.

The list, drawn up by the Planning Commission and various ministries and departments, includes 176 action points covering 62 departments.

While the environment and forests ministry has the longest list of ten things to do this year, agriculture and co-operation has a list of seven.

This agenda, which was drawn up after the Prime Ministers call for a focused reforms programme for the fiscal, will now be forwarded to the Prime Ministers Office (PMO).

The reforms list, which the PMO wanted to include feedback from stockholders, will be, in certain cases implemented on a pilot basis, followed by a scaling up after incorporating changes as and when required.

While work on the priority agenda outline has been going on for around four months now. The PMO had also issued guidelines for formulating the agenda and implementation of the reform proposal.

These included using the recommendations of the Govindarajan Committee Report on government regulations, identifying areas for Public-Private partnerships and focusing on e-governance.

Ministries were asked to identify their underlying objectives and to study them to see whether they were relevant, reasonable and comprehensive from the perspective of creating a conducive, fair and enabling sectoral environment.

Policies and programmes used to achieve these objectives were then to be scrutinised to see whether they achieved the objectives in an efficient manner, without cumbersome procedures, restrictions, excessive bureaucracy or direct role of the government.

The PMO had asked the ministries to list out the minimum set of regulatory concerns that needed to be addressed to achieve the objectives and to devise non-intrusive, minimalist and client friendly mechanisms to fulfil them.

The PMO, in fact asked them to refer to the Govindarajan Committee Report to identify termination of unnecessary regulations.

It also directed them to identify means to identify areas where conducive environment for private initiative could meet laid down objectives and to identify public private partnership approaches to provide better value for money and enhanced quality of services to the people.

In addition to the Priority Agenda, ministries were also asked to draw up a detailed Policy Reform proposal with feed back from stockholders, which was to be implemented after necessary approvals.

While the Priority Agenda has been finalised, the detailed proposal is still being worked on.

The priorities

The list includes an asset management company to handle selloffs, a disinvestment proceeds fund, a company law tribunal, a competition commission

The repeal of SICA and the disinvestment of a number of public sector units, including oil marketing companies, are also among the priorities

The agenda was drawn up after Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee called for focused reforms in 2003-04