The Department of Administrative Reforms and Public Grievances (DARPG) within the personnel ministry has issued the much-awaited product of a major process of policy consultation initiated by Prime Minister Narendra Modi at the end of last year. In December, eight teams of secretaries to the Government of India were formed and allotted a theme to focus on; on New Year's Eve, they made presentations to the PM and action points were agreed upon; over the course of the next few months, internal discussion in ministries followed, and various action points were incorporated into the Union Budget for 2016-17. Now, the eight groups' recommendations are available on the DARPG's website as an e-book titled Transforming India. At almost 100 pages, with several points, targets and schemes on every page, the e-book stands as testimony to the government's energy under Mr Modi. If everything outlined in its pages approaches implementation by the ambitious target dates, then India will indeed, as the book promises, have taken great steps towards sustained, inclusive growth.
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.
