While such ambition and energy are welcome, there are some obvious questions that need to be asked. Perhaps the most fundamental one is about the nature of the state that will be tasked to accomplish these heroic feats. It might raise a few eyebrows that a Department of Administrative Reforms should have produced a major vision document for the future of the Indian state without suggesting reform of how the state operates. Staffing, accountability and responsiveness within the state need to be made much more transparent and flexible if the Transforming India agenda is to reach anywhere near fruition. But, perhaps unsurprisingly given that this document was drafted by committees of secretaries, the question of genuine administrative reform is never even addressed.
The other question is about the overall unity of the plans provided in the document. Individual targets in various sectors are all very well; but how do they hang together? The old and discredited planning process at least did, however imperfectly, attempt to solve the problems of prioritisation, of backward and forward inter-linkages, of spillovers and bottlenecks. These are largely ignored in the Transforming India version of planning. This means the numbers do not hang together, and therefore fail to persuade. There is a palpable lack of a unifying underlying model that could serve as a guide for implementation. Absent such a model, there is no question that Transforming India, for all its big ideas, comes across as a scattergun approach rather than a focused attempt to fix India's problems. Two years into the government's tenure, it is gratifying that there is an attempt to at least outline its efforts in various directions. But these efforts need to be systematised and not just outlined.
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