Tuesday marked 30 days of the new government being in office. This is too short a period to make a real assessment of its performance. Grace or honeymoon periods typically last somewhat longer — a few months at least, even if the government were not on such firm political ground. But, apart from the size of its majority, Narendra Modi’s campaign evoked extremely high expectations of the government hitting the ground running. A kind of announcement-a-day fervour seemed to have been generated. It is against these elevated expectations that the first month is to be judged. So how has Mr Modi’s government performed in its first month?
There are unquestionable positives among the things that it has done. On the economic front, what stands out is the announcement that rice from the huge stock would be sold in the open market to help contain prices. This is something that should have been done a long time ago — but it’s never too late, particularly with fears of a deficient monsoon rising. The rather large increase in railway fares and freight rates is also a very welcome step, though the steep extent of the hike and the subsequent rollback of suburban fares surprised people, raising questions whether a graded increase would have been better. The logic of the increase was irrefutable as the railway system reeled under the weight of inadequate investment and there was no way around pricing its services more rationally. What was even more surprising, though, was the government’s insistence that it was merely implementing a decision that was taken by the previous regime. This is hardly the way that reforms will be sold. Each government has to take full ownership of the policies that it announces and a rollback, even if partial, should be avoided. As regards administrative efficiency, the decision to dissolve the large number of groups of ministers that had mushroomed over time and limit inter-ministerial consultation to a maximum of two weeks is a huge move towards efficiency. A ministry that does not meet the deadline is now expected to come and articulate its objections in a Cabinet meeting. This could prove to be an effective deterrent against the endless delays that have plagued the system for so many years.
But there have been slip-ups as well. The most significant is the failure to find a permanent defence minister. It doesn’t speak very highly of the talent pool available to Mr Modi. There is already a sense that all authority is being centralised in the Prime Minister’s Office; vacant senior positions will add to avoidable perceptions of limited bandwidth. The confrontation between the human resource development ministry and Delhi University on the four-year undergraduate programme raises questions about the autonomy of university administrations. The mandate for the use of Hindi on social media unsurprisingly provoked a strong response from the non-Hindi-speaking states; here again, the government’s feeble excuse was that this was a decision made by the previous one.
Overall, though, there has been a sense of determination and urgency displayed by the government. The positives must outweigh the negatives in order for an accumulation of goodwill to allow the government the political space to take the tough measures that Mr Modi has spoken of. In this sense, the 30-day scorecard is a positive — especially in terms of paving the way, through sustained messaging, for a meaningful agenda.
