I've ruminated once before about Lee Kuan Yew's dismissive comment on the India-China comparison: "Chinese do, Indians talk". Looking today at the government struggling to get projects off the ground, it is hard to disagree. The prime minister has plenty of advisors, but is desperately short of doers. He has the benefit of wisdom from the National Manufacturing Competitiveness Council, the National Knowledge Commission, the National Skill Development Council, the National Advisory Council, the Prime Minister's Economic Advisory Council, the National Innovation Council, and the National Security Advisory Board, besides plenty of individual advisors, with and without prefixes. That's a lot of people giving advice, writing reports and occupying sundry "bhavans" and multi-acre homes in Lutyens' Delhi. But look for the doers in the system, and they are scarce. The Delhi Metro's E Sreedharan stands out as a rare exception, perhaps alongside Nandan Nilekani. As for the rest, the less said the better.
Has the National Manufacturing Competitiveness Council delivered a more competitive manufacturing sector? Negative. The rupee has fallen substantially in value against virtually any currency of substance over the last decade, yet the country has a record current account deficit and most Indian companies have a deteriorating balance sheet when it comes to net foreign exchange earned or spent. That means the problem with the current account deficit goes beyond gold, and lies in a competitiveness gap.
Has India's knowledge sector improved? If you look at how Indian universities score in the international rankings, you wouldn't think so. By common consent, the skill development initiative has not worked out as hoped. And as for the National Advisory Council, its leading lights ignored warnings that the national roll-out of a rural unemployment guarantee programme would lead to large-scale diversion of funds. Now the same leading lights complain that the programme has been poorly implemented. There must be a Chinese saying that good intentions are not good enough; if there isn't, we should invent one.
Or take defence, where the effort has been to make up for past deficiencies in preparedness. Yet the fact is that the defence posture is undermined by delays and poor execution. In Daulat Beg Oldie, the Chinese had superior mobilising capability because a road from Ladakh's capital of Leh to DBO, sanctioned in 2003, was yet to be completed 10 years later. Indeed, the entire border roads programme - admittedly sought to be put into higher gear - contrasts poorly with the pace at which transport infrastructure is being built on the other side of the Line of Actual Control. The sagas surrounding the indigenous development and/or manufacture of tanks, light combat aircraft, nuclear and conventional submarines and aircraft carriers, all of them behind schedule by many years, some by decades, add to the story. There is a desperate scarcity of people who can deliver what is promised - or, if the people exist, the system neutralises them.
It was never very different; the doers were always a mere handful in a sea of mediocre non-performers. In the history of the railways - whose maximum speed today is the same as it was in 1969, while China has built tens of thousands of kilometres of high-speed track - the only effective manager who improved performance dramatically was M S Gujral, railway board chairman in the early 1980s. V Krishnamurthy did well at the Steel Authority of India before he took to the advisor's role, so did D V Kapur as the founder of a National Thermal Power Corporation that set new benchmarks in performance. So how about getting rid of many of the advisors, and finding some doers instead - if, that is, the government wants to avoid getting swamped by the hype about a certain doer in the Bharatiya Janata Party?
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