At last, the season of good governance?

So, for instance, we spend vast amounts of money and time appointing officials to administer education and healthcare and implement the public distribution system but have no time to observe that officials and buildings are useless without teachers and doctors. When it comes to the public distribution system, so vital to the very poor, it is the same story of much effort spent on setting up a cumbersome bureaucracy and anti-poverty schemes and too little on actually reaching the food to the poor.

When children start to die of hunger in rich, industrialised Maharashtra (more than 9000 died last year) we do not send food to the villages in which the children are dying, we set up another complicated system whereby if the children can get to hospital in time they will be saved from death because of a scheme that entitles parents of dying children to Rs 40 a day while the child is in hospital. When it goes home it goes back to living on one meal of watery gruel because its parents earn less than Rs 10 a day but officials have spent so much time covering up for chronic starvation that they cannot suddenly admit that children continue to die of hunger in India, the emerging economic super-power.

Our anti-poverty programmes are a tragic farce but things are no different in other areas. Whether you want to pay your taxes, get a driving license, admit your child to a state school, pay an electricity bill or set up a small business you face paperwork that is needless, expensive and counter-productive because the only people who make money are corrupt officials but very few politicians appear to have noticed this. Even someone as supposedly clever as our Finance Minister resorts to making things worse by giving famously corrupt officials more opportunities to be corrupt without earning significantly increased revenue for the government.

It is all to do with bad governance but few politicians acknowledge this. Congress politicians hesitate to because they will be blamed for not changing things in the decades they ruled India and the BJP knew no better till it was too late.

Against this backdrop imagine my astonishment when Chavan’s first comment was, ‘‘Our civil service was designed to rule a colony.’’ He said this in the context of what he described as the Prime Minister’s biggest challenge which was to improve governance.

The Minister then expanded on what was meant by improving governance. The first requirement was administrative reform, by which is meant that our bureaucracy, the biggest obstacle to change, will be brought to heel for the rest to happen. Administrative reform is easier said than done and others have talked about it in the past but what made Chavan’s speech remarkable was that he went on to list specific areas where the Prime Minister plans changes to give us new and improved governance.

Political and electoral reforms so that political parties become more transparent about their funding. Elections, the Minister said, were funded in such a way that this not only bred corruption but bred a parallel economy. In the areas of police and judicial reform the Minister said there would be no more police commissions but implementation of the many reports that have gathered dust for years.

On judicial reform he admitted that it takes ‘‘forever to punish anybody’’ and irrelevant laws made a hundred years ago are still being implemented. The Minister went on to talk about reforms in economic governance, meaning more regulatory bodies rather than controls, and the restoration of the fundamental right to property.

At the end of his speech a businessman observed that this was ‘‘a dream wish list’’ but could he give us any deadlines on when these things were going to happen. He could not or would not but even if all that Dr Manmohan Singh succeeds in pushing through are administrative and judicial reforms he will be remembered as the Prime Minister who reinvented governance in India.

Write to tavleensingh@expressindia.com