The second Manmohan Singh government has got off to a more ambitious start in its first 100 days than any since perhaps Rajiv Gandhi’s in 1985. To be sure, the Vajpayee government did the atomic big bang once it assumed office, and the Narasimha Rao government did the big bang economic reforms in its first few weeks, in 1991. UPA-II has done nothing remotely comparable in terms of ‘big bang’ impact. But in terms of the range of initiatives, legislative and executive, perhaps only the Rajiv Gandhi government compares. A quick reading of the list should make this clear.
For starters, there are the two big legislative initiatives, on food security and the right to education—both as far-reaching as the first Singh government’s rural employment guarantee programme and the right to information law. All four might properly belong to Sonia Gandhi in terms of intellectual parentage, but the vehicle for action is the government. In terms of executive action, quite a few ministers have been burning up the track. The human resource development minister, Kapil Sibal, has come out with proposals for comprehensive reform of the education system, the first such exercise in decades. The finance minister, Pranab Mukherjee, has put out a draft Direct Tax Code which is the most radical re-writing of direct tax laws since perhaps the Nicholas Kaldor report prompted changes half a century ago. Both sets of proposals need refining, and seem to suffer from some defects, but the work has begun. Meanwhile, the environment and forests minister, Jairam Ramesh, has turned his ministry inside out; he has cleaned the Aegean stables (let’s face it, the ministry had become a by-word for organised corruption), he has introduced an admirable degree of transparency in the business of environmental clearances for projects, he has laid out a clear programme of action and, for the first time since the birth of the ministry in the 1980s, the ministry is functioning as it properly should.
Then there is the hard work put in by Anand Sharma at industry and commerce, to undo some of the damage done to India’s standing in the global trade talks by his predecessor’s grandstanding. He has gone around the capitals of the world, re-establishing India’s interest in the success of the Doha Round, ahead of this week’s “informal ministerial” meeting in New Delhi to get the Round re-started. Kamal Nath at surface transport has been breathing fresh life into the moribund roads programme, which had ground to a halt under the forgettable Mr Baalu in the last Singh government.
There is also an effort to bring the collective wisdom of ministerial groups to sorting out problems in troubled sectors. A Raja at telecom can no longer act as the Lone Ranger; other ministers have a say in what happens (such as in the pricing of 3G spectrum). Praful Patel in civil aviation finds that the problems that he partly put on his own plate are being tackled with the help of many others in the government. Murli Deora, perhaps the minister with the most questionable record, now finds that there is virtue in getting the larger government system involved in potentially controversial decisions. None of this means that the best possible solutions will be found, but this looks more like Cabinet government than the last one did, when far too many individual ministers picked up the ball and ran in any direction they wanted.
It hasn’t all been positive. The Prime Minister thought he was trying to get things moving with Pakistan again, but realised (whether he admits it or not) that he took a mis-step; the government has now managed to retrieve the ground lost at Sharm el-Sheikh. The agriculture minister has quite a lot to answer for in his belated responses to the drought situation, with matters not being helped by a Met department that got its forecasts hopelessly wrong. The swine flu could have been handled better, to prevent its spread. The price for these last two will be paid in the coming months, and will be substantial. Then there is a difficult fiscal situation to be addressed, and rapid deterioration in railway finances, both finding reflection in the two Budgets presented. But overall, UPA-II has been more purposeful and infinitely more cohesive than UPA-I, which ran into problems with the Communists almost from the word ‘go’. It must be hoped that the good beginning will be followed up in the coming months with sustained action on an even broader front. There is, after all, no shortage of challenges facing the nation.