This Quote Means: ‘Minimum Government, Maximum Governance’

“First was the decentralisation of development. This government started the decentralisation process taking the ground situation into account. Alongside this, we adopted the policy of Sabka Saath, Sabka Vikas aur Sabka Prayaas. We brought in people’s participation in all programmes of the government. We ushered in the idea of continuous improvement in performance based on competition. And the idea of improving implementation through the use of technology,” Shah said.

What it means: Minimum interference and e-governance

Essentially, “minimum government, maximum governance” refers to reducing government intervention in the common man’s day-to-day activities and empowering the people to ensure their own as well as the country’s growth and development. While there are several aspects to achieving “minimum government”, it broadly includes making government processes easier by reducing red-tapism and corruption, and encouraging e-governance.

On January 24, Union Minister Jitendra Singh said that the Modi government had eased the common man’s life by abolishing around 1,600 obsolete laws, doing away with interviews for government jobs, and encouraging digitization of facilities like the RTI.

A significant step by the government to push for a ‘Digital India’ as well as encourage citizen participation was the ‘MyGov’ platform, which was launched in August 2014. A press release announcing the launch of mygov@nic.in stated, “This is a citizen-centric platform to empower people to connect with the Government and contribute towards good governance… It also seeks expert advice from the people, thoughts and ideas on various topics that concern India. Citizens can join the discussion to share, debate and add value.”

The MyGov platform in 2021 claimed to have become the “world’s largest citizen engagement platform” with over 1.9 crore registered users.

In 2019, the Department of Administrative Reforms and Public Grievances launched the National e-Governance Service Delivery Assessment (NeSDA) initiative to measure the success of e-governance services. In its last report, which was published in 2021, the NeSDA said that 74 per cent of respondents of a nationwide survey had expressed satisfaction with e-services. The delivery of e-services on integrated or centralized portals over independent departments was driving “higher citizen satisfaction”.

A push for privatisation

“Minimum government, maximum governance” also means lesser public undertakings and a push for privatisation.

A 2012 interview with the Economic Times, when Modi was the chief minister of Gujarat, lends an understanding of the quote. “The government has no business to be in business. It should play the role of a facilitator. In my state, investors don’t have to grease the palm of politicians or bureaucrats. There are well-laid-out policies. I believe that country can progress only if we end red-tapism. No red tape, only red carpet, is my policy towards investors,” Modi said while criticising the then-ruling UPA government’s economic policies.

In December last year, the Finance Ministry stated that the government had made over Rs 4.04 lakh crore ever since it came to power in 2014 through disinvestments. In the financial year 2023 (so far) alone, it raised over Rs 31,000 crore in disinvestments, according to the Department of Investment and Public Asset Management. This, however, falls much short of the full-year budget target of Rs 65,000 crore. Noting this, experts have flagged the need to reexamine government targets.

Arguments for and against ‘minimum government, maximum governance’

Professor Ngaire Woods, dean of the Blavatnik School of Government at the University of Oxford, once said that what’s alluring about PM Modi’s slogan is the idea “a smaller, smarter, more efficient government, comprising clever people who have better skills is going to be better than an over-weaning bureaucracy.”

She was speaking in a panel discussion hosted by the Brookings Institution India Center in September 2014. Woods added that ‘maximum governance’ also allows the “intellectual force of the country” to “leverage the government”. “We need to think about what is the necessary minimum that we need the government to do effectively” in order for stakeholders within a sector to regulate each other, she said, so that we don’t have to rely on a government that is “not expert enough to do the job”.

“The responsibilities of a well-governed, well-functioning society should not reside with the government, they should reside right across the society. The citizens of any society have to keep fighting and acting to be a good society for any polity to work,” Woods added.

Woods, however, noted, “the role of the government in framing the challenges that face a society… the identity of a nation, the aspirations… there government cannot be minimum government, because the government is the only body which can speak with one clear voice.” She added, “Occasionally, in much small governments, where there have been attempts to roll back governments, the governments have also rolled back from that, which is problematic. It’s particularly problematic in a country (like India) that has a lot of potential cleavages and where that framing is so important.”

In the same discussion, Pratap Bhanu Mehta, then-president of the Center for Policy Research, flagged concerns over blurring private-public roles. “The basic principles that make an institution have the energy it does have been completely eroded. So private sector works in areas where the profit motive is effective… Civil society works where there’s voluntary persuasion… we persuade each other. And the State works where you have something which is backed by democratic legitimacy and coercion. (Now) we are inserting the principle of coercion in areas where voluntary persuasion should work. Minimum government is going to mean CSIR will do slum redevelopment in Bombay… you know, it’s designed to fail,” Mehta said.

“I think that confusion of roles where in a sense the motivation underlying every institution that makes it the institution that it is, that gives its distinctiveness, when you blur that to a point, it completely actually erodes the professional identity of all those of institutions. So, now we have companies that are actually beginning to behave like bureaucracies.. and government, on the other hand being totally transactional and profit-minded. And that I think, is a big, big worry in this kind of attempt to tick off slogans,” he said.