Some 145;governmenting146; please

During the years of my NRI existence, one major cause for angst was that I found the newspapers boring. This was true in Caracas, London, Lo...

During the years of my NRI existence, one major cause for angst was that I found the newspapers boring. This was true in Caracas, London, Los Angeles, Chicago, everywhere. Having returned to the bosom of the motherland, I have no complaints on this score. Au contraire, life in Bangalore is very, very interesting. Picking up the newspaper in the morning is exciting. This is heaven for news addicts. We had a government 8212; of sorts. We have a government 8212; of a different sort. We will have a government 8212; of yet another sort.

In fact, I think we should convert government into a verb and start conjugating it for practice. I government. We government. You government. He governments. She governments. It governments. We all government. You all government. They all government 8212; and so on. You get the picture? One might argue that while everyone is 8216;governmenting8217;, there is no governance in the air!

The fascinating drama of the Congress, the BJP, the JDS, the JD, the AIPJD, each of which has at least three factions of loyalists, traitors and ultra-loyalists, would require a Plutarch or a Holinshed to chronicle. We poor residents of this proud IT-BT capital of India are not lucky. All we have are puzzled TV anchors who succeed in confusing themselves and us. In the midst of all this high decibel activity, let me outline what I think are compulsory and essential, irrespective of which super-duper coalition governments us.

Firstly, we must all drop this false dichotomy and imaginary conflict between urban Bangalore and rural Karnataka. Bangalore cannot succeed unless the rest of Karnataka is also pulled up economically and socially, maybe not at the same gruelling pace as Bangalore, but definitely in a manner that is discernible, noticed and appreciated by all the residents of this state. As for the rest of Karnataka, without Bangalore, its febrile energy, its burgeoning wealth, its sustained revenues, the state will sink into the irrelevance of Bihar. Surely not even the most vehement advocate of rural welfare will want that.

Secondly, there are more areas of convergence and agreement between people of different political persuasions than we care to admit, or the media will permit us to have. We all realise that Bangalore8217;s traffic problems need fixing on an S-O-S basis. This is important, not just for software programmers gadding about town, but for legislators to go back and forth between the Vidhana Soudha and the airport. We all realise that we need to strengthen, widen, improve and complete the highways leading out of Bangalore. This, incidentally, one can argue is even more important for the welfare of rural residents than for city-dwellers. This, along with better air connectivity, is critical if other cities Mysore, Mangalore, Hubli-Dharwar, Gulbarga, and so on are to become mini-Bangalores, again an objective on which we are all in violent agreement.

We need to come to closure on a plan for a mass transit system for Bangalore, call it Metro, Monorail or a combination thereof. We cannot wait six years for committees of secretaries and ministers, expert committees and non-expert commissions to keep talking about this. We need the decision to be made in months and work to start immediately after that. This can be a transparent and open process, where everyone is free to lobby for the line to go past their neighbourhood or cut through someone else8217;s. Let the choice process and its subsequent implementation be run by a Sreedharan or a Sreedharan-clone. Once the project starts, let us all agree not to continue guerilla warfare against it, even if some details are not to our liking.

Thirdly, the recent economic success of Bangalore is an opportunity, not a problem. It is an opportunity to start several public-private partnerships to harness the IT and bio-tech sectors to build up the human capital base of all parts of Karnataka. These are ideal initiatives for the knowledge sector to undertake. The resulting acceleration in development can easily lead to double digit growth rates across the board. It is essential that we move away from the 8220;either-or8221; syndrome to an 8220;and-and8221; frame of mind.

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We boast about democracy and how development that is underpinned by a democratic process is more stable and resilient than that which is a top-down, authoritarian one. One weakness though of democracy as we practice it, is the temptation of every new government to not only halt the constructive activities of its predecessor in mid-stream, but actually in many cases try to reverse the same. This time around I sincerely hope this does not happen in Karnataka. We need continuity in governance 8212; sorry govermenting! We cannot be changing-changing all the time! National highways are great not just because Atal Bihari Vajpayee thought so. Guess what? Augustus Caesar thought so, as did Sher Shah Suri.

The other thing we need to watch out for is getting paralysed by our need to portray a non-corrupt posture. Quite frankly, we can and we should complete 15 flyovers in three to six months. This can easily be done. If we can play flood-lit cricket, why can we not have flood-lit road construction activity? The fact is that accelerating these civil works will call for renegotiating tenders and contracts. Nobody wants to do that lest he or she be accused of corruptly favouring a contractor. In other fields, accelerated activity is good. Our government is scared of 8220;undue8221; haste: a most absurd and distasteful expression. How can haste in development ever be construed as undue or undesirable? We cannot let fear of being accused of corruption lead us into a gridlock.

In a state where Vishweshwarayya, Mirza Ismail and Hanumanthayya worked boldly and imaginatively on major projects, no one should hold themselves back out of such 8220;undue8221; fears! Bangalore and Karnataka today represent a laboratory for proving that democratic politics presents opportunities not only for excitement and juicy headlines, but also for making progress however haltingly and hesitatingly it may be, and for shedding false dichotomies and embracing an inclusiveness that is our true destiny.

The writer is chairman and CEO, Mphasis