Just do it

When will the government stop announcing promises and plans,and start implementing them?

When will the government stop announcing promises and plans,and start implementing them?

A few days before the cabinet reshuffle,the prime minister and his key colleagues reportedly took decisions to bring the economy back on track by pushing through a number of key reforms. Many of the reforms relate to key infrastructure ministries. These ministries,such as railways and roads and highways,now have new ministers who have been,by all accounts,brought in for political reasons,rather than considerations of efficiency or effectiveness. In these circumstances,will the prime minister still be able to deliver? Or,will the compulsions of an election year mean that no action will be taken,or will take so long that the economy will slip further? The credibility of the government is arguably so low today that more promises and plans do not draw attention or trust. The only thing that would count is action. The government does not appear to have acknowledged this writing on the wall.

If the new time-bound plans help to spur some visible action in crucial sectors,that will,of course,be good news. But most of the decisions that have been taken appear to involve work in progress that should not require time-bound decisions. The setting up of another group to take charge of railway projects and speed them up seems to be part of the saga of setting up more committees and taskforces to do what the bureaucracy should normally be doing. A time-bound decision to set up another group appears to be only an addition to bureaucratic process. Has the CCI not been effective in getting stalled projects to move? Why,then,was a task force set up recently,and now a sectoral group? Will the rest of the term of the UPA be spent on setting up new groups and committees to address issues of stalled projects,sector by sector?

The government does not seem to have understood that once a problem is spread across sectors,it is a system-wide problem,and addressing it sector by sector is not going to solve it. Even the CCI has not been as effective as was originally hoped because,in many cases,even if the PMO gives clearance for a project without a change in the legal framework,the uncertainty remains.

‘Grave insult to wounded people’: Cong lashes out at PM Modi amid his first Manipur visit

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As Prime Minister Narendra Modi visits Manipur for the first time since ethnic violence hit the state in May 2023, the Congress on Saturday called it a “farce, tokenism, and a grave insult to a wounded people”.

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