Mixed signals

On the face of it, the first meeting of the National Development Council organised by the UPA government was a success. Its agenda was to discuss the Mid-term Appraisal (MTA) of the Tenth Plan, which the Planning Commission had submitted to the government a few weeks ago.

The Appraisal came out with several important recommendations for change across the range of sectors. Given that the tone of these recommendations was firmly in the "reformist" category, serious reservations, if not resistance, could have been expected from the assembled body of chief ministers.

As it turned out, at the end of the two-day event, the recommendations were accepted and the Commission was given the go-ahead to prepare the approach paper to the Eleventh Plan.

There were rumblings, of course, some perhaps understandable, others motivated by baser concerns. The Planning Commission has been emphasising the need for levying and enforcing user charges for a variety of infrastructure services, particularly in rural areas, as a requirement for ensuring that such services are provided reasonable quantity and quality.

This naturally means that subsidies have to be cut. Chief ministers pointed out the difficulties in doing this across the board, to which the Centre's response was that the basic intention was that subsidies should be minimised by effective targeting, which itself will require significant efforts by state governments. On the baser concerns, the one issue which evoked angry responses, even from a Congress chief minister, related to fixed-term appointments for bureaucrats.

This was in spite of the Prime Minister touching upon the issue in his inaugural address. Clearly, the power to shuffle the bureaucratic pack as and when required is something that chief ministers as a group put a huge premium on. This collective rejection of an eminently sensible suggestion, combined with the dominant visual impression of the event, leads to misgivings about the value of the exercise and the genuineness of the commitment shown to the MTA recommendations.

Many newspapers carried on their front pages photographs of various chief ministers soundly asleep. Nobody should grudge these extremely busy people their occasional naps, even in an event of this significance, but the impression it conveys is one of general indifference to the proceedings, of simply going through the motions.

If this were indeed the case, then the acceptance of the recommendations without any real debate does not bode well for their implementation. It is almost as if the chief ministers are telling the central government that it can say what it likes but the outcome is going to be pretty much business as usual.

This would indeed be unfortunate. Taken as a whole, the recommendations made by the MTA represent a realistic and feasible blueprint for sustainable growth. They deserve to be treated with far more respect than this.

The government is having a hard enough time convincing its coalition partners about the merits of its approach. Indifference at the state level, particularly by chief ministers belonging to the ruling party, makes the task even more daunting. Clearly, much greater effort needs to be put into communication and persuasion.