3 Years of PM Modi: ‘A’ for effort
Bhavdeep Kang
ADMITTEDLY, several of the ambitious programmes conceptualized and announced by the central government have yet to get off the ground.The Ganga and Yamuna are no cleaner than of yore. Small and marginal farmers are not much better off than they were five years ago.The crucial bottleneck is that implementation is in the hands of the states.The centre is free to launch any number of programmes, but actualizing them is the province of the state and local self-government bodies.
As the Prime Minister Narendra Modi-led NDA government approaches its threeyear anniversary, its report card should reflect, if nothing else, an 'A' for effort. It has created a greater buzz than any government ever before, ushering in a bewildering array of new schemes, or rejigged old schemes, under an alphabet soup of acronyms.
It is fashionable to dismiss these schemes as smart marketing and mere social media hype, while pointing out that nothing has changed on the ground. Swachch Bharat, for most Indians, is just a slogan, because it hasn't been translated into cleaner urban environs or better solid waste management systems. The toilets feverishly constructed in rural areas are often dysfunctional, hastily erected and poorly engineered, in order to meet targets.
On the other hand, Indore – which topped the Swachch Survekshan rankings – is a lot cleaner than it used to be. Young women are turning down grooms or leaving husbands who do not have toilets in their homes. Residents' Welfare Associations are discussing ways of keeping their parks and streets clean and putting pressure on corporations to perform. Citizens are looking at garbage mountains with disapprobation. For the first time, sanitation is no longer a household affair, but a subject of public discourse.
Similarly, the Indian Railways’ outreach to passengers has had an impact out of proportion to its material effect. Only a handful out of the 23 million citizens who board trains every day may have their complaints addressed. But the very fact that a few of them have merited the personal attention of the Railway Minister Suresh Prabhu through nothing more than a tweet, creates a sense of empowerment. Wellconnected citizens will still get better treatment, but the very possibility that an ordinary passenger's complaint will be heard and acted upon is a major departure from busines as usual. Passengers are more assertive and railway staff more accommodating.
Energy efficiency has also entered public consciousness. The exponential growth in LED (light emitting diodes) manufacturing is clearly driven by demand from households, at whom the Ujala scheme for low-cost, energy-saving bulbs is directed. In rural areas which typically suffer from low voltage power supply, the LEDs work where incandescent bulbs did not. What makes this even more significant is the fact that it is a zero-subsidy scheme, which relies on aggregation of demand, bulk procurement and easy EMIs to keep prices low.
Or take the #GiveItUp campaign, which called on the relatively well-off to surrender their LPG subsidies – a subsidy they perhaps did not even know they had, because it was built into the price of the cooking gas cylinder. Even if one dismisses the subsidy saving figures touted by the government, the buzz around the scheme cannot be discounted. Thousands of citizens, if not millions, preferred to surrender their subsidy rather than go online and link it to their Aadhaar number.
Admittedly, several of the ambitious programmes conceptualized and announced by the central government have yet to get off the ground. The Ganga and Yamuna are no cleaner than of yore. Small and marginal farmers are not much better off than they were five years ago. The crucial bottleneck is that implementation is in the hands of the states. The centre is free to launch any number of programmes, but actualizing them is the province of the state and local self-government bodies.
Madhya Pradesh, for example, has two of India's cleanest cities and several of the dirtiest. Unless soundly whipped by the state government, urban local bodies have no incentive to perform and even if they wish to, do not have the funds. Water Resources minister Uma Bharati, with the best will in the world and all the support of the central government, cannot prevent municipalities and villages from dumping their sewage in the Ganga.
There is no better illustration of the power of local bodies to influence the quality of citizens' lives than Delhi. The East Delhi Municipal Corporation is desperately poor, because it is dominated by illegal colonies and therefore cannot raise revenues from property tax. It cannot even pay its safai karamcharis and drowns in garbage from time to time. Life is very different for denizens of South Delhi, where the municipality is shored up by large tax revenues and even better for those who live in New Delhi, where money is no object for the local body.
As the PM said, accountability is a non-negotiable aspect of good governance. He may keep his ministers on a tight rein, but finding a way to ensure transparency and accountability at the ground level, even if that means stepping on the toes of the state governments, is his biggest challenge.
The author is a senior journalist with 35 years of experience in working with major newspapers and magazines. She is now an independent writer and author