India needs a master plan

Even the largest and most successful private organisations in the world bring in consultants, occasionally or regularly, to get an outsider’s view on the functioning of the company. Very often, insiders of the company are disappointed and will say, the consultant sat with us, took our ideas, presented them and got paid a bomb for doing so.

But that is the job of the consultant. Take ideas from within and outside the organisation, vet them and present the best of them. What they bring to the table is their hopefully unbiased assessment of what needs to done, what it will take to do it, and what it will cost and how it should be done.

The Planning Commission, on similar lines, brought together experts who assessed the status of various sectors, put forth the priorities in their opinion and the expected outcomes based on certain budgets.

An additional role it has includes negotiations with States on the devolution of funds from the Centre to the states for these identified prioritised projects. And therein lay the difference between a consultant and the Commission.

Each year, as the negotiations took place, there were complaints of bias, numbers were bandied on the progress or lack thereof, the amount of previous allocation used, and so on.

These led to allegations of political support or vendetta based on which side of the fence you were on. For several years now, there have been reports on plans to move this role of the Planning Commission out and make it simpler and provide flexibility to states on the use of funds.

So as we move the pieces here and there and try to devise a new way of doing things, the basics will always be the same — we need ideas on how to grow, make citizens healthy and prosperous, how to split the money we have to ensure as equally as possible.

Whether this body or another does it is of little importance. Getting to the goals we set out to reach is important. I don’t think India has had a paucity of ideas over the years.

We have had larger problems in implementation. I believe that emanates more from lack of participation from the Central and State ministries that have to do the implementation. It may also have to do with lack of accountability and transparency in implementation.

A quick look at the government websites of most of the developed countries will throw up department plans for the next few years. That is something we lack in India.

The secretary of a ministry as the head of the ministry should be releasing his/her plans for the country after due discussions with counterparts in the states and release a milestone-based plan that all of us can monitor.

The ministries can also highlight some pilot projects that are innovative and require civil society’s support. Instead of an unending education cess that taxpayers dole out, we could actually allow taxpayers to choose to fund some of these pilot projects through a special cess from a shortlist of pilots.

The other thing India sorely lacks is unanimity among political parties on key issues. They should sit together and build a master plan that’s valid for the next 50 years; this would include foreign policy, agricultural policy and industrial policy.

Take for example agricultural policy. We need to define how far we would like to be self-sufficient for each category of crops. We need to define the inflection points at which we will revisit a policy. We need to take a long-term call on farmer incomes, consumer prices and inflation.

We need to be able to build and share a long-term plan for changes in acreage led by industrialisation, new varieties that will compensate for lower availability of arable land, set long-term target prices, export markets to target, and so on.

We should be able to identify extraordinary profits by any part of the value chain and discuss it transparently since these profits tend to come from exploiting either the producer or the consumer. We need to have a policy on investments in farms and the how to channelise them. We need a policy on water use and hence how we will wean farmers from choosing water guzzlers in inappropriate locations.

It is true that differences in political orientation could lead to nuanced positions on issues. But there are matters that need to be handled by the nation collectively with a long-term perspective, since we already know that short-term measures and ad hoc knee-jerk measures have not helped us so far.

The factors that led to us to become import-dependent in edible oils two decades ago are repeating themselves today in pulses and we seem to have learnt no lessons at all; we continue to struggle with both.

We could have taken a positive view if Indian farmers were to make more money by replacing oil seeds or pulses with something else. But the farmers don’t seem to be happy, the private markets are not responsive and the need for government intervention in the form of procurement, setting MSPs, opening and closing imports and exports, and so on is not decreasing.

I hope we can, as a country, come together and tackle these issues as soon as possible. Experimenting with ideation platforms is the least of the problems we face today.

The writer is the CEO of Agriwatch. The views are personal

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