The last mile
From one perspective, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s gaffe on Nagela Fatela was fortuitous. It highlighted in the most public of national forums a chronic problem that unites Indians like nothing else, from the poorest villager to the richest Indian. From the Nagela Fatela contretemps readers will have no difficulty in recognising this failing as that Last Mile Gap.
In India, this gap represents the divergence between: Politicians’ wellmeant intentions and the execution of policy by state functionaries; businessmen’s ambitions and their expe- rience in building a business; and the average Indian’s hopes and access to basic necessities. It stands for the amalgam of corruption, poor institutional mechanisms and absence of accountability embedded in India’s operating environment, legacies of decades of wilful policy distortions.
All these failings are neatly captured in the feverish exchange of letters between the Centre and state authorities concerned explaining why a village that was declared “electrified” by the country’s leader from the Red Fort’s dramatic ramparts on August 15 gets no electricity.
It is a sorry story of an ambitious rural electrification drive started in 2005, and apparently re-energised in 2015 after the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) replaced Rajiv Gandhi’s name with Deen Dayal’s as the label under which India’s villages would be illuminated. The problem, as Business Standard’s Shreya Jai explains in an informative blog “Nagela Fatela and the real story behind rural electrification,” (August 23) is how the model works. Under the programme, the states identify villages to be electrified, set cost estimates and implement the project after the Centre releases the funds. The state also issues a certificate when a district is supposedly “electrified”, which is to say the infrastructure (transformers, electricity poles, feeder link to the generating station and so on) is in place. To this self-certification process, the NDA government sensibly introduced more checks: A monitoring website and a mobile app called GARV. This apart, some 1,000 young engineers or Gram Vidyut Abhityantas (GAVs) were sent to un-electrified villages to monitor the ground situation.
So how come a GAV report from ground zero showed otherwise? That’s because the GAV only has to confirm that the infrastructure is in place, not whether the crucial last mile of whether households are metered and receiving electricity. That is the responsibility of local officials in the state’s distribution set-up. What Ms Jai’s report revealed was that many households in Nagela Fatela were, in fact, receiving power but entirely through illegal means, by placing hook-ups on the feeder line and bribing local officials for the privilege of not installing meters. This nexus is the relic of a long history of free power delivery to rural India and it flourishes owing to old mind-sets and, no doubt, the fact that power theft carries no penalty.
Variations of this problem can be seen in, for instance, the Public Distribution System, the rural jobs programme and almost any goods and service in which state delivery is involved.
Successive regimes have made random attempts to fix this systemic problem, notably by leveraging technology. But these efforts can go only so far and they exclude poorer Indians who may be dependent on government goods and services. So getting a passport is significantly easier and faster than it was a decade ago — as the prime minister proudly recorded in his Independence Day speech. But applicants will attest to the inability of the policeman responsible for the security check and the postman who delivers the document to relinquish the rent-seeking opportunities that remain in their hands. Companies dazzled by faster clearances by the Centre and in some state bhavans have still to endure the wait in grotty offices for water, power and the host of other local approvals. Corporations and rich people all have the requisite bandobast to deal with these lastmile niggles, which should be invisible in a country that aspires so crassly for global recognition. It’s the poor and middle class that bear the brunt of this gap in public service delivery. Perhaps no one is more aware of this than Mr Modi, who built his reputation in Gujarat by minimising last-mile hitches. As leader of India, however, his best intentions lie hostage to states with their varying records of institutionalised venality. Nagela Fatela showed that in his multiple visions for transforming India, it’s the very last mile that counts the most, and covering that short distance is the longest slog of all.
It’s the poor and middle class that bear the brunt of this gap in public service delivery