The Hindu Business Line : Reforming governance — Implementation should be the new mantra

India must create momentum to build and sustain commitment for implementation. Let the gap between knowledge, planning, policy and actions be bridged.

IN 1910, B. Mukherjee of Lucknow University wrote to Cambridge economist Alfred Marshall, asking him what India should do to become a great nation. Marshall wrote back that "If India had a score or two of men like Mr Tata, and thousands of men with Japanese interest in realities, with virile contempt of speechmaking in politics and law courts, India would soon be a great nation" (page 268, Volume 3 of Marshall's Correspondence, Whitaker, 1996).

Few will disagree that India has now developed a strong base of entrepreneurs. Reliance, Infosys, Wipro, Ranbaxy, Dr Reddy's Lab, Amul and HDFC have shown to the world what India is capable of. So, Marshall's "score" should not trouble us anymore. Marshall had a point when he talked about the country's inclination towards debate and rhetoric.

Only if India reduces its rhetoric can it become a developed nation. Recently, in his maiden address to the nation, the Prime Minister, Dr Manmohan Singh, talking about the need to reform Government urgently,said, "I am convinced that the government, at every level, is today not adequately equipped and attuned to deal with this challenge and meet the aspirations of the people." Therefore, a new culture of action and implementation has to be encouraged and rewarded to avoid the economy's underperformance.

Big ideas and insights are important. But nothing can substitute concrete action. The country should realise that implementation of ideas needs top priority. Structure should follow a strategy, and systems should support the structure. Nothing less than a "paradigm shift" — the grandiose phrase for the search for the next Big Idea — will do. Yet, it is just such times of change that demand even more attention to the nitty-gritty of execution. Change of any sort brings with it confusion and other dangers. A good idea means little without follow-up and follow-through. As the means to carry policy-makers' formulations to the common men, the bureaucracy has had a roller-coaster ride through time and gained in strength and stature. Today, it is an essential tool for the effective functioning of any government.

A healthy public service has five time-rested features: It should be recruited from the cream of the academia; it should be given the resources and organisational capacity to succeed; it must be given the opportunity to accomplish something worthwhile for the country; it must be rewarded for a job well done, and it must be respected by the people and the leaders it serves.

On all the five counts the civil service in India has been losing ground over the last decade or so, yet public service somehow seems to have retained, even enhanced its necessity and relevance. It appears that to emerge successful in its new role, public service has to marry the virtues of the new world order with those it has retained and reinforced over the years.

While speaking of change, it must, however, be recognised that to achieve the desired results and to address the basic lacunae, one must go much beyond mere window-dressing of the structure and work pattern of governance. The hour of reckoning has arrived for the bureaucracy. It needs to show that it has the potential and the inner resilience to make s it amenable to change. Bureaucracy should not only be aware and conscious of the Waberian virtue of anonymity, objectivity, hierarchy of formal structure and so on, but also the power of competition, markets and incentives, as also the power of individual responsibility, accountability and transparency. In a market economy there is a limited but crucial role for the government. Working in a changing scenario nothing gives a bureaucrat more pleasure than alleviating poverty. After all, one can hardly denythat in the ultimate analysis it is the common men around whom the entire system is woven around. Hence, the bureaucracy has to remain responsive to the needs of the poor so as to make India economically vibrant. The bureaucracy is the most important delivery tool available with the government and hence it has to be used for effective implementation with efficiency and accountability. They have to aware about what works on ground.

As for most other things in life, a clear-cut action plan is an essential prerequisite for the effective functioning of the public servants. Executives are doers: They execute. Knowledge, like mere resolve, does not take one far unless those are backed up by deeds. But before springing into action, the executive needs to plan his course, to take stock of the probable restraints, future revisions, check-in points, and the various alternatives in response to future changes and their implications on the goals set by the executives.

The action plan, thus, is more a statement of intentions rather than a commitment. It must not become a strait-jacket and should retain functional flexibility to have an inbuilt automated response to every success and failure. As time is of essence, one of the vital planks of planning has to be time-management; bureaucracy should change society's perception that it is by nature a time waster. Moving to actions, it is decision-making that emerges as the stepping stone. Decision-making calls for accountability on the part of its implementers who should be aware of the role they are required to perform.

The masses have paid a heavy price for lack of proper and timely implementation of big projects in public, joint and private sectors. A policy has no meaning unless it can be truly and effectively realised in practice. The biggest challenge of this policy is to translate it into practice. Hence, the need for an implementation strategy.

India must create momentum to build and sustain commitment for implementation. Let the gap between knowledge/planning/policy and actions be bridged. This means creating an implementation machinery that members can identify with. One in which they share a sense of pride. Execution and implementation should be new mantra for catching up with the WTO-navigated world. So, commitment to implementation is the key to make India competitive and prosperous.

(The author is a member of the Indian Revenue Service. His views are personal. )