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Journalism of Courage
In our form of government,responsibility is collective. The cabinet as a whole serves while it has the confidence of Parliament. But holding government up to scrutiny must go beyond that: individual members of the council of ministers should nevertheless be held to account,their performance evaluated,oversights highlighted,accomplishments marked. That is what this newspapers Minister-
meter attempts to do. In its latest instalment,there might be few surprises among the big,newsy names: Home Minister P. Chidambaram gets 8 out of 10,for shepherding India through 2009 without a major terrorist strike; Telecom Minister A. Raja,whose presence in the cabinet can only be justified if one buys into the most cynical of explanations about coalition politics,is awarded a charitable -2; perennial absentee Mamata Banerjee gets merely 2.
to deal with an unreformed ministry and a medical establishment
that just cant seem to get its act
together. Yet proper support of the NRHM should be a priority; Azad has to ensure that he can transform the support of the PM and the party into a goad with which to poke his recalcitrant charges into line.
Then theres the unmitigated disappointment that is C.P. Joshi 0/10,the Rajasthani Congressman picked to be rural development minister with additional charge of panchayati raj. There is little doubt that the UPA expects the NREGS to be its crowning glory,an accomplishment of historic magnitude and scale. Unfortunate,then,that it has chosen to entrust its extension and management to someone whose sense of the NREGS potential doesnt quite extend beyond the next north Indian by-election. It isnt just his ham-handed attempts to brand NREGS with Rajiv Sewa Kendras and to load the monitoring panel with
Congress sympathisers; he has confrontationally deployed NREGS as a weapon against non-Congress states,blaming them for implementation problems rather than helping them fix it. Surely the UPA doesnt want its flagship programmes to
decline and fall as have so many other government schemes.
