Opinion Committees and Governance

It was very encouraging to read that the new Agriculture Secretary briefed a press man to the effect that he is not waiting for the Alagh Expert Committee on Pulses set up earlier but is going ahead with a pulse programme immediately. Good actionable ideas should be implemented without waiting. One of the first things the Expert Committee did in the only meeting organized for it was to endorse the Kharif pulse programme and to ask all its working groups to meet and send to the Department,late as it is,any additional suggestions they may have on action in this crop season,while working on their medium term approaches. Appreciating the Department’s action focus,my worry is that on many other pressing matters,another Committee becomes a way of delaying decisions on urgent matters,where the knowledge base with the authorities is fairly good.

Around six years ago we had sent to the authorities a report on recruitment and training to the higher civil services. I find from a flurry of articles on the civil services examinations largely by ‘competition masters’ from coaching classes as also some serious governance reform NGOs largely set up by former senior civil servants that the major recommendations of that committee have been implemented. The Preliminary exam will now test analytical and problem solving abilities and the examination itself will concentrate on governance,constitutional obligations,the emerging nature of civil service-civil society interface,the challenge of non-renewable resource constraints and internal security,the ability of newer methods of governance,including the ability to network and fashion newer forms of governance institutions like co-ops,self-help groups,producer groups and public-private partnerships for solving problems rather than ‘I know all and will do all’ babus. There will also be an emphasis on technology as the flip side to all our problems. It is interesting that while the system of exams has been deigned to eliminate coaching shops and so they were earlier very condescending on the Alagh Committee they are now describing to show relevance.

Advertisement

When I was working on the report,a senior civil servant helping it half seriously said that the predecessor Kothari Committee was not largely implemented because he had written a six page note evaluating it then. I told him that our report would meet the same fate because his successor would go to the same file. But since some very outstanding Indians from all walks of life had helped the Committee,we should see why it should takes us many many years and about two thousand civil servants entering on the old system to implement it.

It is good to see that Anand Kumar,a brilliant and very successful agro policy implementer has been mandated to work out the implementation of a nutrient-based fertilizer policy. He is going to work on the agro climatic level and work out the market signals and policy interventions to enhance soils and productivity with the limited monies we have. Again,in a very lengthy policy analyses chapter on the NBS these outlines were worked out in some detail in the fertilizer pricing policy report we presented many years ago. To do it many years later and many committees later costs a lot. He should have been asked to do it millions of tonnes,thousand of crores of rupees and many crore green premia rupees not there in GDP earlier.