 "Ashok Lavasa")
In Delhi, it is never a good idea to ask a government top boss to show up at The Taj Mahal Hotel on Mansingh Road for a chat. Someone on the way to or back from the assorted Bhawans that house several ministries would inevitably show up to break in on a conversation. So I was apprehensive when Ashok Lavasa, who has just taken over as finance secretary, suggested the House of Ming. I told him what I was expecting. Let’s make it a weekday dinner, he advised.
Away from the phone-laden government chambers, Lavasa is visibly relaxed as he walks in. He is carrying three monographs under his arm and shoves them across the table towards me as we sit down. I decide to take a look later.
He does not mind. One of them, he points out, is a report by a group of secretaries on Ganga Rejuvenation. Lavasa led the group as the rapporteur and is quite pleased with the result. He says there is a lot of good material there. I am willing to believe it but suggest we get something to munch on. He is one of the large and expanding tribe of civil servants perfectly comfortable with wine but vegetarian in the choice of food. “I want a white wine,” he tells the waitress. She produces a Zonin Soave. It is Italian by the way, I remind him. “Oh, is it! I will survive the drink,” he laughs and orders a plate of water chestnuts with garlic and pepper. I go for sweet and sour pork with pineapple.
Lavasa has been a survivor. He survived the fallout of Enron’s India misadventure as joint secretary, infrastructure, in the Union finance ministry when the company dragged India into a court case in London. “Do you know I had to sign some papers regarding the case even after I had moved back to my state (Haryana)?” He says Enron was a difficult experience. Day after day during India’s first tryst with power reforms, he says, “there was this whole phalanx of people from the company sitting across from me while I had just a director and an under-secretary to fend them off”. “It was a thin army to go to battle with,” he adds, polishing off the water chestnuts.
So what has made him the favourite with governments of different political persuasions? “In my experience, all political parties want an officer who can deliver. And has no personal agenda to promote.” He says once that lakshman rekha is established at the office, ministers are willing to offer secretaries a lot of support. This has helped him navigate the minefields of Haryana politics and central government postings, he adds.
In all these postings, the power sector has sort of dominated Lavasa’s career graph — from the Union finance ministry to a spell in his Haryana cadre, where he got involved with the setting up of a few power projects, including a nuclear power plant in Gorakhpur, and then back to the Centre as additional secretary in the power ministry at the height of the coal crisis and that of the ultra-mega power projects. Lavasa had a brief nine-month spell as civil aviation secretary — when minister Ajit Singh was playing a cameo for domestic airlines — before turning up at Paryavaran Bhawan, the headquarters of the environment ministry. So how much of his work in the environment ministry is about relaxing rules to set up power plants, I try to poke him.
“I haven’t changed the rules at all,” he says deadpan. The big problem for project developers, mainly in the power sector, he says, was the time it took for a decision to come through. “I have cut it down to 30 days. In that time, a developer will know if he can begin his environment impact assessment or wait for additional observations from the ministry. This simple step earlier took close to seven or eight months.”
But he said he had changed no rules, I persist. “None,” he says. “I am a great believer in the dictum that you need to systematise processes and things — that is how you become eco-sensitive. Once I came into the environment ministry that is where I began.” Last year, for instance, he issued a circular asking all officers in the ministry to keep him posted in advance on when they would meet the minister concerned (Prakash Javadekar). The circular created quite a flutter but Lavasa says that, too, was meant to put some order into a slightly chaotic system, and yes, he survived that as well.
“I have not questioned what they were doing but how they were doing it. Can you improve the process? Can you bring in technology to aid decision-making? These are the questions I asked,” he explains. It will help, for instance, in pinning responsibility on manufacturers, to make them pay for the waste their products generate. It has to be a mix of incentives and penalty for non-compliance. Some of that money can go to municipalities to support their battle against garbage, he adds.
Is there nothing in the suggestions from some civil society groups that environmental rules are being given the go-by after the National Democratic Alliance government came to power at the Centre? Lavasa puts down his fork and knife to explain. He says the ministry has now put every application online; applicants can know where their case is at any stage. “This is a great relief.” For the next stage, which is forest clearance, the ministry has introduced timelines.
He reels off statistics to establish his point. My head reels a bit trying to remember the numbers, what with the regular Soave refills. The average time for securing an environmental clearance has dipped from 599 days to 193 days in the past one year, he says. No effect of the wine on him, I surmise. “We reported this to Parliament. Similarly, for forest clearances. And this is based on an analysis of more than 800 cases where this change came through.”
We ask for a plate of crispy spinach with fresh red chilli to support the deluge of wine and numbers.
I decide to turn the discussion away from power and environment. As civil aviation secretary, did he have to deal with troubled liquor baron Vijay Mallya? In true survivor style, Lavasa arrived at the civil aviation ministry “after Kingfisher had begun to sink under its debt”. Mallya never met him. “There was one issue left, though,” Lavasa says. “Since most of his fleet was on lease, unpaid at that, the rates for leasing for other airline companies in India shot up.” He says there wasn’t much he could do to help them negotiate the rough patch. As the main course of vegetable noodles and spicy Szechwan eggplant arrives, Lavasa deftly mixes them up with tales of bureaucracy and Haryana politics. I tell him his book An Uncivil Servant had arrived a bit too early. He should write another one now. “Well, I can reflect more now, but writing them up...,” he laughs.
Lavasa has expressed his strong connection with nature through his photography. Years before SLRs became commonplace, he and his wife Novel were clicking pictures of nature during their travels. He has showcased his repertoire in exhibitions. The last one, if I remember correctly, was held at the Open Palm Court Gallery at the India Habitat Centre in 2014. He hasn’t had time to mount another one since then. With his daughter now in the Indian Administrative Service, I can’t help telling him his stock of civil service anecdotes must have expanded enormously.
At this point we decide to skip dessert and stick to wine, but minus the dictaphone.
