The Manmohan Singh-led government had 72 ministers including the prime minister - 28 of them with the rank of a Cabinet minister, 11 as ministers of state with independent charge and 32 as ministers of state. That number was very close to the statutory limit imposed on the size of the Council of Ministers.
One of the ostensible reasons for Manmohan Singh to have allowed such a large number of ministers was that he led a coalition government where strong ministerial aspirations of the smaller parties, often disproportionate to their numerical strength in the alliance, had to be met. Another reason for what certainly looked like an oversized Council of Ministers was the prime minister's confessed lack of autonomy in choosing his team, deciding its size and deference to the wishes of the Congress president.
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Modi should suffer from none of these weaknesses. With the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) having secured a majority on its own, the need for him to meet the coalition partners' aspirations will be negligible. In addition, there will be no scope for a dual power Centre in the Modi regime, given the current power equations within the BJP or the National Democratic Alliance.
So, the expectation would be that the Modi government would be lean and his Council of Ministers may be much smaller than what the Manmohan Singh government had to struggle with. A simple look at the various ministries with Cabinet ministers at their helm shows that many of them can be merged and the total number could be halved without any dilution in the quality of ministerial supervision. A cabinet size of 14 ministers with the charge of many omnibus ministries would be easier to monitor and they are likely to be more effective.
Yes, this would require a firm hand at the top, which Modi can be trusted to use to achieve such rationalisation. Remember that Rajiv Gandhi, with the clear mandate he received in 1984, did manage to reduce the size of his Council of Ministers by merging all the four transport-related ministries under one cabinet-level minister. If that experiment was not extended to other areas such as energy and infrastructure, it was not because of any weakness in the idea itself, but for an unfortunate lack of Gandhi's political resolve to make his administration lean and efficient.
If Modi could also replace the three Cabinet-level ministers in charge of different energy-related ministries with one minister and settle for only one Cabinet minister for the four existing infrastructure-related ministries, he would have already reduced the size of his cabinet to 20 - down by as many as eight Cabinet ministers. That is a reduction of over 28 per cent.
A closer look can reveal that there are many more ministries that could be streamlined and the size of the Cabinet could be brought down to as low a figure as 14. The advantages of having one Cabinet minister each for infrastructure and industries, the entire transportation sector and the energy sector would be immense. There will be better co-ordination among different sectors within those ministries. Monitoring will be better. And in a country where getting efficient and able managers is always a challenge, the Modi government can make do with fewer ministers to take charge of the key sectors of the economy.
A smaller ministerial team will also be equipped better to handle the burden of high expectations that the Modi government will undoubtedly carry after the kind of mandate it received in the just-concluded elections. There will be a tendency to show quick results and decisiveness with a view to impressing the markets and convincing the nation that it is not suffering from the kind of policy paralysis that it had accused the Manmohan Singh government of. To fall prey to such temptations could be disastrous. It would be important for the new government to remember that being decisive should not be confused with taking quick decisions using short cut methods.
What the markets and industry must learn to expect from the new government is firm leadership that takes decisions within a given time frame, but without riding roughshod over systems and procedures. Undoubtedly, there will be tremendous pressure on the Modi government to immediately reverse many decisions taken by its predecessor or expedite those that have remained stuck for months and even years. It's true that such quick reversals and expeditious action on them (for instance, the many tax cases or the gas price imbroglio) would cheer the markets and make the Modi government a darling of industry and the foreign investing community. But they would also become controversial and could become the rallying point for civil society and the opposition political parties.
A more sensible approach would be to ignore the lure of pleasing the markets with quick decisions and instead follow a time-bound action plan to resolve the problematic issues through consultation and evaluation by committees. For that to happen, the style of governance has to change. And the starting point would be to have a leaner Cabinet, which then can look at a more efficient bureaucracy committed to operating in mission mode, resolving issues and taking decisions in a more certain environment of implementing a time-bound action plan.