Let ministers fly

In olden days, when socialism was sacrosanct and we were so poor that foreign exchange had to be rationed...

In olden days, when socialism was sacrosanct and we were so poor that foreign exchange had to be rationed, most Indians developed a foreign exchange complex. I can remember that when I first went abroad in the seventies my ration of dollars was so small that I would have spent it all if I had taken a taxi from Heathrow airport to London. I can remember hesitating before buying myself a coffee. I can remember when foreign travel was so controlled that princesses and the daughters of high officials became air-hostesses just to see the world. A clever career move anyway, because almost the only Indians who traveled then were the scions of rich business families, and many ended up marrying air-hostesses. These ladies now rule in Mumbai as the grande dames of Page 3 and cruel people make jokes behind their back about traveling from trolley to lolly.

Where am I going with this? What happened last week to revive memories of our foreign exchange complex? It was the prime minister8217;s injunction to his ministers to tighten their belts in general and cut back on foreign travel in particular. 8220;I am writing to you to severely curtail expenditure on air travel, particularly foreign travel 8230; as we ask the people to bear some of the financial burden of our oil imports, it is not only necessary from the resource conservation point of view but also as a moral duty to cut out all wasteful expenditure in our establishments.8221;

It seems that the prime minister continues to suffer from a foreign exchange complex or he would have noticed that ministerial high-flying is the least of our problems. We could afford to send his entire cabinet on holiday if we could cut out more serious wasteful expenditure.

If he wants to see criminal waste let him get his office to calculate how much Indian taxpayers lose because of delayed infrastructure projects. It goes into hundreds of thousands of crore rupees. And, the delays are caused entirely by the convoluted way in which the Indian bureaucracy works. We blame corruption, but the truth is that corruption is sometimes useful because it speeds up a system that moves so slowly that what China builds in twenty months we take twenty years to build. Drastic administrative reforms are the answer, but as we are not going to get them, can we appeal to the prime minister to send for the files on all delayed projects and sack the bureaucrats responsible for wasting our money?

Another thing that he could do is examine why every government department is awash with clerks and peons. With Soniaji as his boss, it would be the politically correct thing to do as well, since recently declassified documents show that Jawaharlal Nehru tried his best to be rid of peons but failed. 8220;I want to abolish the whole institution of peons, and I hope I shall succeed.8221; He wrote this in a letter to his private secretary M.O. Mathai and in the same letter pointed out that 8220;nowhere in the world do they have such big staffs as we have in India.8221; If things were bad then they are a thousand times worse today.

Another area of 8216;wasteful expenditure8217; that this column has campaigned tirelessly against is government housing. If the prime minister moves his ministers into smaller bungalows on the vast grounds of Rashtrapati Bhawan, as I have suggested before in this space, he will free up some of the most expensive real estate in India. An acre of land in Lutyens8217; Delhi has a market value of more than Rs 100 crore so if the government makes good use of this land it would probably pay our oil bill. The next move should be to bundle all our Members of Parliament into a hostel of some kind like the old Akbar Hotel. They have no business to be living in huge flats and houses at our expense, especially since the vast majority of the people they represent live in single-room tenements. This is all they can afford. Land prices in cities like Delhi and Mumbai are artificially high because politicians and officials are sitting on acres and acres of very expensive real estate.

Now that the prime minister has personally urged an austerity drive, let him tackle the big issues of 8216;wasteful expenditure8217;. India has more than enough foreign exchange now so there is no reason for us to grudge our hard-working ministers a summer holiday in some exotic destination. It costs us nothing compared to what we spend on housing them and subsidising the standard of living they have grown accustomed to. The PM promised administrative reforms when he got his job four years ago. Here is his chance to deliver.