Image courtesy: phanlop88/freedigitalphotos.net

 

President Pranab Mukherjee’s address to Parliament, coupled with the Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s subsequent, allied speech, constitutes a daunting agenda for the new Government.

Bereft of any cost estimates and implementation strategy, the agenda can at best be called a charter of dreams, redeemable promises and redundant resolutions.  It is easy to spin a web of dreams. It is, however, extremely difficult to turn dreams into realities because it costs a fortune to implement welfare projects, in addition to carrying the welfare legacy load of the UPA Government. To get the projects off the drawing board, the new Government would require exceptional skill to resolve NGOs-engineered conflicts among various stakeholders of the resource-constrained, heterogeneous society. The agenda does not suggest any holistic conflict resolution mechanism to realize collective dream of providing work, basic amenities, peace and prosperity for all.

The ruling alliance requires political acumen to facilitate efficient legislative work, which is a pre-requisite for fulfillment of certain promises. The agenda has not spelt out priorities and timelines on the law-making front.

To realize the collective dream, the political Executive should have the courage to restrain judiciary from dabbling in formulation of policies and governance of certain segments of economy such as mining. The agenda is silent on this issue.

The aspirations of millions of Indians for jobs, houses and access to water and power can’t be realized as long as the Executive and the Legislature shy away from holding the judiciary accountable for decelerating economic growth. 

The agenda has also conveniently skipped population control and the urgency for linking of subsidies and other welfare benefits with small family norm.   

With the existence of so many ticklish and unresolved fundamental issues, the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) Government should introspect whether and to what extent it can translate its agenda into credible action and notable outcomes.

The NDA Government should have done home work to bring clarity to the promises and goals mentioned in the inaugural speeches of Parliament and Prime Minister.   

For want of proper groundwork by NDA, Mr. Mukherjee’s address to Parliament might suffer the same fate as the ones delivered by his predecessors. 

The preceding post-elections Presidential address to Parliament ultimately turned out to be more hype than action. They now adorn the archives. This opinion gets validated by the fact there is no inter-connection between any two post-polls Presidential speeches given after a span of five years.

The absence of linkage between two consecutive speeches is ironical to the concept of continuity in Government that prevails even after the change of the ruling alliance.

In fact, the President’s latest address should have made references to the two speeches delivered by his predecessors at the formation of UPA-I and UPA-II governments. This would have helped NDA Government in drawing lessons in the failure to fulfill rosy promises within the limitations of existing system of governance. 

President’s Address should thus mark the transition from electoral rhetoric to clear-cut and pragmatic roadmap for achieving electoral promises.   

Mr. Mukherjee’s speech is similar to the address his predecessor Pratibha Devsingh Patil, gave to Parliament on 4th June 2009 after the Lok Sabha polls.

Stating that her Government was “acutely conscious of the challenge of rising expectations,” Mrs. Patil unveiled the agenda for United Progressive Alliance’s (UPA’s) second term. Her address was also full of robust promises some of which remained unimplemented. UPA annual report cards were silent on the progress in implementation of Agenda for UPA-II as specified in Mrs. Patil’s speech.

And Mrs. Patil’s speech was similar to the one that her Predecessor Dr. A.P.J. Abdul Kalam gave on 7th June 2004 in which he articulated UPA’s National Common Minimum Programme (NCMP). UPA-II never discussed the successes and failures in the implementation of NCMP.

There are thus common elements in all the three speeches. NDA should have drawn lessons from UPA’s failure to implement several promises mentioned in the two Presidential speeches. 

The need of building linkages between the latest and previous post-elections address to Parliament can be appreciated by taking a few concrete examples. 

In her address, Mrs. Patil said: “My Government's effort would be to create a slum free India in five years through the Rajiv Awas Yojana.” 

The UPA failed to ensure even a slum-free suburb in any part of the country. It did not even reconcile the differences between two or more sets of official data on slums. 

To realize the dream of Slum-free India, is a utopian wish because local governments in cities have to be empowered with piles of cash to redevelop slums into decent habitations. They also have to be empowered to manage the surge of work-seeking migrants, beggars and urchins. 

A news report last month indicated that Mumbai alone would require Rs 55,000 crore to build houses for 1.1 million slum households over the next 10 years. Did the NDA compute the financial resources and formulate governance norms for creating and sustaining slum-free India? No populous, democratic country is free of slums. Even the United States has slums.

Instead of learning from UPA’s disastrous failure to make India slum-free by mid-2014, NDA has scaled up the dreams for homeless, slum dwellers and for the ones residing in obsolete structures that are on the verge of collapse.     

Unveiling NDA Government’s agenda, Mr. Mukherjee said: “By the time the nation completes 75 years of its Independence (i.e. by 2022), every family will have a pucca house with water connection, toilet facilities, 24x7 electricity supply and access.”

Mr. Modi articulated this dream in his reply on motion of thanks on President's address in Lok Sabha. As put by an official release, “He urged all MPs to resolve to ensure that every family in India has a house, with basic amenities of water, power and sanitation, on India's 75th anniversary of Independence in 2022. The Prime Minister said a way would be found to achieve this, and he would seek the help and cooperation of all senior leaders in this endeavour.”

Please note the key words in Modi’s speech – a way would be found. One way as mooted by the Union Minister for Urban Development, Housing and Poverty Alleviation Venkaiah Naidu, is to prod the private sector to build houses for their employees as a part of their social responsibility.

If the Government cannot achieve directives principles enshrined in the Constitution, how can it expect the private sector to become an extension of the Welfare State? 

It is thus clear that NDA Government does not know how it would achieve the unrealistic target of providing pucca houses with water connections and power supply  with access on 24/7 basis.  

Let NDA first demonstrate its resolve on the housing front by preventing retrospective enforcement of eco-sensitive zone regulation on apartments in Noida, which has led to a judicial stay on allotment of an estimated 30,000 flats. The restriction on construction of buildings within 10 kilotmetre radius of Okhla bird sanctuary has also cast shadow over many upcoming apartment complexes in Noida.   

Having promised dream houses to all citizens, the Government must now immediately prepare an exhaustive, integrated scheme to achieve this Utopian goal.

It must ask itself whether it can build water-storing barrages, dams and inter-link rivers in a short span of eight years to provide water for all without incurring the wrath of NGOs and without getting checkmated by the courts?

And the constant reminder in this arena should be the proposed Renuka Dam Project in Sirmaur district of Himachal Pradesh (HP). Mooted in the eighties and finalized in 1994 to bring piped water to Delhi, the project has remained a non-starter due to delay in grant of various statutory approvals, multiple litigation and opposition from NGOs.

Did NDA factor in the intense societal conflicts including periodic violence resulting in deaths over water shortages? Is it not aware of the alarming drop in water tables in several parts of the country? Is it oblivious of the fact that the national capital reels under worst water and power crisis year after year? And what about the situation in drought-prone and power-starved areas that has persisted after spending thousands of crores on related projects?

NDA should have done a ground reality check by just factoring in national capital region (NCR), which received high priority in the scheme of all governments over the years.

The so-called Millennium City/Gurgaon is sustained by diesel generation sets and depleting water tables. The city has no rainwater drainage system. It is jungle of overhead electric cables. It is celestial home to pigs that rummage through garbage littered all around and thus compete with stray cattle, dogs and of course the rag-pickers. 

Another bustling NCR city of Noida suffers from a similar plight with saving grace being the absence of pigs on the streets.

The problem of garbage and related pollution is far more serious in many other parts of the country. Even much-trumpeted PPP projects for waste management have failed to deliver the requisite results in many cities. 

Overlooking this ground reality, Mr. Mukherjee announced: “For ensuring hygiene, waste management and sanitation across the nation a “Swachh Bharat Mission” will be launched. This will be our tribute to Mahatma Gandhi on his 150th birth anniversary to be celebrated in the year 2019.”

Mr. Modi articulated this proposal by calling for a national “resolve to present a clean India – Swachh Bharat – to the memory of the Mahatma on his 150th anniversary in 2019.”

NDA’s promise to present a clean India by 2019 appears impossible as littering has been part of our ethos for centuries. 

Would NDA create a magic wand with which it will convince citizens to change their littering culture including spitting chewed pan on the walls of the building and on the roads?  Does it have the political will to impose exemplary penalties against littering as is done in Singapore? Does it have will and the money to install closed circuit TVs in all public places to identify people who indulge in littering, book them and shame them?  And can it expect whole-hearted cooperation from municipalities and panchayats in enforcing cleanliness? 

Expecting Clean India by 2019 is not like asking for the moon but yearning for the most distant galaxy in the universe! 

By announcing unrealistic goals through Presidential address, the NDA Government has made itself vulnerable to ridicule to which it would be subjected aplenty in the coming years.   

NDA has also raised the bar on anti-poverty initiatives by substituting the term ‘poverty alleviation’ with ‘poverty elimination’. It must now define poverty elimination and how it intends to go achieve this. NDA would otherwise have to bear constant taunts on this issue from various quarters in the same way as the UPA did.

Yet another lesson that NDA should learn from challenges in implementation of promises made in the Presidential address is UPA’s resolve to set up 14 innovation universities. 

Mrs. Patil had stated that UPA would “develop a ‘brain gain’ policy to attract talent from all over the world into the 14 universities proposed in the 11th plan to position them as ‘Innovation Universities’.”

Not a single innovation university has been set up so far perhaps because the UPA was either half-hearted or wrongly opted for enactment of a law to implement this objective. 

As the Universities for Research and Innovation Bill, 2012 was introduced in Lok Sabha, it has lapsed with the dissolution of previous house and election of new one. A bill does not lapse when it is introduced in Rajya Sabha. 

Introduction of a bill in upper house does not mean that it would be passed by Parliament after constitution of a new Lok Sabha. For instance, the Private Universities (Establishment and Regulation) Bill, 1995, for instance, is pending for approval by Parliament since its introduction in Rajya Sabha in August 1995.

The crucial lesson for NDA is that it should not lock its goals in the legal clutter. It should in fact, scrap all entity-specific laws as well as different laws on the same subject and substitute them with a single omnibus law. A single higher education law for instance, should substitute all university-specific laws. 

Instead of indicating NDA’s resolve to weed out obsolete laws, the Presidential Address should have focused on consolidation and simplification of laws, which is a pre-requisite for faster and inclusive socio-economic growth.  

The biggest deficiency of Mr. Mukherjee’s speech is the absence of a concrete, time-bound plan to create a specified number of jobs. NDA should have stuck its neck out by setting a challenging target to generate employment instead of harping on targets that cannot be simply achieved because of too many impediments. 

As for redundant references in Mr. Mukherjee’s address, the proposal to formulate a comprehensive National Energy Policy is totally uncalled for. The Integrated Energy Policy, which was approved by the UPA Government in December 2008, is an excellent policy. The problem is that it has not been implemented. NDA should have just articulated its resolve to implement the policy in letter and spirit and without any further delay. 

Another instance of redundant or ritualistic reference is the announcement that the Government would pursue “a policy of zero tolerance towards terrorism, extremism, riots and crime.”

Mind you Mrs. Patil also talked about UPA’s resolve on this issue. She had stated “a policy of zero-tolerance towards terrorism, from whatever source it originates, will be pursued.”

UPA, however, never made public its action taken report (ATR) on Administrative Reforms Commission’s (ARC’s) report ‘Combating Terrorism-Protecting by Righteousness’ that was released in June 2008.

What is stopping NDA from making this report public?

 

(Published by taxindiaonline.com on 14th June 2014)

http://www.taxindiaonline.com/RC2/inside2.php3?filename=bnews_detail.php3&newsid=20653