The recent elections saw the emergence of an aspirational class exercising their franchise in an unprecedented manner. The electorate put its faith in Prime Minister Narendra Modi, in an attempt to prevent the moral and operational decay of India's governing institutions.
Following Modi's election, political discourse has been dominated by talk of good governance. The term occupies such a hallowed position that we have christened (pun-intended) "Good Governance Day." However, notwithstanding the wisdom of the Indian electorate, there has been something amiss amid all this rhetoric. While it is possible to meaningfully and objectively evaluate a claim of Kerala being better developed than Bihar; on what grounds can one evaluate the claim that governance in Gujarat is objectively better than governance in Maharashtra? A prerequisite to make good governance the benchmark of an effective government is a mechanism to evaluate and assess the same. Previous attempts by government agencies have resulted in incomplete or discarded projects. This shifts the onus upon private institutions and civil society organisations. India must have a system that introduces accountability and allows the public to evaluate the claims of good governance on the basis of evidence and not mere rhetoric. Given this backdrop, there is a dire need to establish a governance index for Indian states. Such a tool will create a ranking system that gives poor performance little chance to hide, while simultaneously encouraging constructive competition and empowering civil society to hold their governments to account.
The development of a governance index for Indian states is not limited to reasons of accountability alone. Tying assistance to good governance conditionalities is imperative. For example, the Millennium Challenge Corporation determines US foreign aid contributions based purely on governance improvements of poor countries, completely divorced from political compulsions. In a similar vein, a certain amount of central assistance in India could be conditioned on the governance performance of states. In this scenario, the political futures and revenue sources of leaders and governments becomes dependent on their governance performance.
Furthermore, the establishment of a comprehensive data set and index of governance will effect informed academic research and help develop more robust theory drawing links between governance and development, lack of governance and conflict and so on. It can also be used to question policy; asking how two states with similar human and natural resources end up with very different levels of security and development.
The debate over the need for a composite governance index has many parallels to the Sen-Haq debate prior to the development of the Human Development Index (HDI). Amartya Sen thought that capturing a concept as complex as human development in a single number was a "crude" and "vulgar" idea. However, Mahbub ul Haq convinced Sen of the merits of a composite index that would give policymakers the ability to fall back on a statistic that was more accessible and easier to understand and convey. The simplicity of a ranking system, in other words, is the defining characteristic that makes it a powerful tool that is easily accessed, digested, and understood by ordinary citizens to hold their governments to account. This is fundamentally the reason that ranked indices such as the HDI, Ease of Doing Business, Corruption Perceptions Index and so on gain front-page traction in media outlets in India and across the world; and thus become better tools of accountability, while World Bank's Worldwide Governance Indicators fail to achieve this level of outreach.
However, before quantitatively evaluating good governance, one has to conceptualise what good governance means. Some global indices measure governance by the outcomes it produces - indicators of health, education, infrastructural development and so on. This is problematic, as it equates governance with development and thus makes the link between governance and development tautological. It also ignores, for example, the fact that the development of the health sector and the under-five mortality rate is not exclusively determined by public governance; but is often a result of a complex interplay of societal structure, citizen actions, private sector performance and public sector efforts.
Thus, there is an urgent need to focus on governance as the interplay of institutions, processes and mechanisms as opposed to development outcomes. It is necessary to think about not just what good governance achieves but particularly on how good governance works and who it works for.
While acknowledging that institutional processes and mechanisms have legitimate reason for contextual variation, governance in the Indian context must acknowledge the normative constructs that are already deeply embedded in the Indian polity - transparency, decentralisation, human rights and other normative dimensions of democracy cannot be ignored because of the intrinsic value that the Indian polity has already ascribed to them. Any effort to build a governance index must also take into account other factors unique to the Indian context - the efficiency of the bureaucracy, federalism and devolution of power through Panchayati Raj, special interest capture, autonomy and independence of institutions, minority representation and so on.
Academics, policymakers and other key stakeholders must enter into a comprehensive dialogue to debate and define governance in the Indian context before commencing a substantive home-grown project to build upon existing literature, gather data and design an index. Unless we develop a rigorous method to quantify the quality of governance and hold government and politicians to account, the clarion call for good governance is doomed to failure.
The writers work for a London-based research foundation
Disclaimer: These are personal views of the writer. They do not necessarily reflect the opinion of www.business-standard.com or the Business Standard newspaper
