by Vinod Rai
The challenge for public policy in India emanates essentially from the requirements of good governance. Banks exemplify the challenge better than most other institutions. Despite most of India continuing to remain unbanked, banks have brought forth critical challenges for governments. These include their recapitalization and tackling financial stresses for ensuring that basic banking facilities are extended to the vast numbers that would gradually become part of the banking system as the economy formalizes. Significant initiatives such as the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code, time limitations for National Company Law Tribunals and an ambitious recapitalization plan for public sector banks have been steps in the right direction. However, these steps need to be administered in a manner that enables banks to perform efficiently while reaching out to more and more people. This, then, reemphasizes the persistence of challenges that India took on right since it obtained independence and as alluded to earlier in the chapter: providing effective governance through efficient institutions.
The issue of governance and institutions in India can hardly be addressed without looking closely at individuals entrusted with the responsibility to govern. Civil administration in modern India has increasingly become more and more complex as most of the country’s shortcomings, particularly in the areas of public service delivery, are being attributed to lack of good governance by scholars, practitioners, civil society activists and international organizations. The heightened focus on governance has enhanced challenges for administrators with citizens now empowered with the Right to Information that calls for a far more responsive bureaucracy than the legacy carried from the days of the Raj. It is unfortunate that recommendations of multiple administrative reforms commissions for overhauling the bureaucracy have been either left untouched, or if implemented, then flouted more than adhered.
One of the best examples is the recommendation to have fixed tenures for some key appointments. While incumbents have been shifted out before the end of their fixed terms upon change of governments, the contrary instance of incumbents being retained well beyond their fixed terms is also available. Furthermore, little attention has been paid to the differences in expertise and skills required for governing India at the national and sub-national levels. While for states, administrators need to be proficient in ensuring timely delivery of key services (e.g. education, health, water, sanitation and local rural and municipal services), the demands at the national government level are more of conceptualizing and designing programmes with an eye on their reach and target. Delivering to people what they need in the right mix of quantity and quality, irrespective of agencies formulating the schemes, can fail if states are poor in implementation. State bureaucracies must be trained accordingly with a greater focus on the ‘field’ as opposed to the ‘ivory tower’. Needless to say, the emphasis for national level bureaucrats has to be different with greater focus on conceptualizing schemes, studying efficiently devised projects in other parts of the world and customizing them to Indian requirements. But innovative and ‘out of the box’ thinking are unlikely to figure easily among a bureaucracy accustomed to thinking and acting in set moulds.
The need of experienced technocrats, particularly in key infrastructure sectors (e.g. electricity, roads, ports, telecommunications, urban services) in this regard can hardly be overstated. Such lateral and technocratic expertise can be attached to major infrastructure ministries. The problem though is ‘lateral’ infusion of external skills is not welcomed by the existing bureaucracy given that it is considered encroachment on turfs. Indeed, on many occasions, technocrats have found working in government agencies frustrating and counter-productive given the resistance they have encountered. The half-hearted attempts to implement suggestions of administrative reform commissions combined with the reluctance of bureaucracies to accept external expertise reflect formidable challenges in improving the quality of governance in the country.
India has come a long way from the days when it depended on other countries for supply of essential foodgrain.3 ‘Green’ and ‘White’ revolutions have ensured self-sufficiencies in foodgrains and milk production. While chronic food shortages have become distant memories, the Indian state has fallen well short in providing its citizens clean and hygienic living conditions. Notwithstanding the advances of the country in nuclear science, space exploration and high-end technological solutions, India’s failures are conspicuous in human waste management and environmental pollution. Around 40 per cent of the Indian population still practice open defecation4 and until recently, building toilets and improving sanitation facilities were not among the topmost priorities of the state. The ‘Swachh Bharat’ mission—one of the most important flagship public policy programmes initiated by Prime Minister Modi for creating a ‘Clean India’ by 2019—targets eliminating open defecation, building modern toilets, eradicating manual scavenging and bringing behavioural changes among people. The mission focuses on extensive people participation and combining good habits and clean practices of individuals and households with expansion of sanitation capacities. Quite a few Indian states, notably Sikkim, Himachal Pradesh, Kerala, Uttarakhand and Haryana, have declared themselves Open Defecation Free (ODF) in rural areas. While achievements and rate of progress under the programme will be keenly followed across the world, the salience of ‘good governance’ in making it successful can hardly be reiterated. In the context of the earlier discussion on bureaucracy, the importance of commitment and dedication of local administrators to the otherwise mundane, but incredibly important civic objectives of shifting people from open defecation and ensuring appropriate garbage disposal, can hardly be overstated.
It is also important in this context to consider the role of political parties, their contributions to the causes of waste management and environmental preservation in the country. Elections in India are not fought on the issue of pollution. India’s global commitment to bringing down carbon footprints through the Paris Protocol Agreement on Climate Change is accompanied by a striking absence of discussion on pollution and environment in the domestic political discourse. Indeed, nonchalance of political parties to control of pollution in the country is remarkable and is best borne out by the appalling situation in the national capital of Delhi. Since November 2015, and in the aftermath of the Diwali celebrations, Delhi has been experiencing intense air pollution. The situation has persisted leading to serious repercussions on public health. Courts appeared to be the only actors keen on finding an end to the problem providing directions on limiting vehicle movements on the roads of Delhi. Two years later in October 2017, alarm bells began ringing again as dense smog engulfed Delhi, presumably from burning of crop stubble by farmers in neighbouring Punjab. Over the next few weeks, everyone watched in stunned disbelief as regardless of pollution assuming crisis proportions, the affected state governments failed to thrash out a solution and the Central government too refrained from proposing corrective measures. While the prospects of a long-term solution to curbing pollution in Delhi seem remote, it reinforces the limitations in quality of governance that continue to affect provision of public goods in the country. Indeed, environmental pollution, including the lack of preservation of waterbodies, has been a great concern. Pollution levels in the country’s major snow-fed rivers like the Ganges and the Yamuna do not show any signs of abating despite millions having been spent on action plans for cleaning them. Elsewhere in the country, waterbodies such as lakes and backwaters are getting choked with water hyacinth destroying marine life. What is worrying is the scant concern of local governments, administrations and commercial developers to the fact that Indian residents enjoy a right to clean and healthy habitats and ensuring such conditions is a collective responsibility.
Regardless of disappointment over governance and functioning of critical institutions in India, there are occasions which provide hope. One of these, undoubtedly, is the effort by the Centre and states to come together for putting in place a uniform indirect tax system in the country. What had begun as the Value
Added Tax (VAT) has eventually taken shape as the Goods and Services Tax (GST) after nearly two decades of labour. The existing GST is hardly perfect and several sectors are facing teething problems. Nonetheless, the fact that states and the Centre could rise above political differences and short-sighted economic calculations to agree to far-reaching constitutional amendments for institutionalizing a common indirect tax framework gives hope for more cooperation between Centre and states and a greater display of cooperative federalism in improving governance. As far as improvement of quality of delivery of public services is concerned, much in this regard will depend on how central and state agencies and bureaucracies act together in administering a federal framework. The experience of the GST would be a great example in this regard. Not only would it involve extensive coordination between national and sub-national institutions, but also embrace of technological solutions by the latter. Both of these are substantive challenges for people and agencies not accustomed to change.
About the book
Hope, more than anything else, reverberates across the various themes discussed in this book. Written by some of the most distinguished public policy practitioners from India and noted scholars with years of expertise on India, the chapters that follow bring together a gamut of issues integral to seven decades of independent India. These include India’s external security and its engagement with the world, particularly Asia-Pacific; evolution and management of India’s elections and the democratic process; India’s globalizing economy and the planning experience; prospects and issues in agriculture and industry; critical challenges in land market and employment; regulations and issues in health, education, skill development, tax framework and corporate governance; and the changes and churnings characterizing Indian media, sports, civil services and caste and society.
While critical and candid, these essays are objective commentaries on India’s course followed thus far and the course corrections that might be required as it goes ahead. Given the connection between public policy, governance and institutions highlighted in this chapter earlier, the papers weave around them the synergy between India’s visions of itself in the current century as evolving from the journey it has traversed and the experiences it has had in policy and governance. And while reflecting, the papers do not fail to touch upon the obvious notwithstanding their honesty: resilience is what has seen India through till now and hope is what will take it forward.
I
India’s External Security Challenges
Shivshankar Menon
Today, India is in the fortunate position of not facing any existential threat to her security. In that respect it is better placed today than in the past. She also has an increased capacity to deal with external challenges to her security now.
This cannot, however, obscure the fact that the international environment in which India makes her foreign policy and national security decisions has worsened recently. At the same time, her internal security challenges, many of which have strong external linkages, have also increased. Despite her improved capacity to deal with these challenges, it appears that India is entering a new era, which will require new responses from the country.
The Regional Context
A major determinant of India’s external security is the international context within which it operates and seeks to develop and transform itself.
Today’s world is less supportive and offers more difficult choices than the binary ones of the Cold War. Nor does it offer the economic opportunities of the years before the world economic crisis of 2008. Both world politics and the world economy are fragmenting and becoming increasingly regional. Protectionism has grown around the world. The rise of China, and her quest for primacy, first in Asia and then globally, along with a hierarchical view of an international order centred on herself, epitomized by the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), pose a new set of questions and challenges to the established order and to Western supremacy. China now uses economic means, such as the BRI programme, to pursue geopolitical outcomes. In effect, economics and politics are no longer separate in today’s world. Indeed, politics may now be driving economics.
Pressing issues for India are the disequilibrium or accelerated imbalances of power in the Asia–Pacific, sub-regional vacuums created by the rise of China and other powers, and the Trump administration’s effective disengagement from the world. While these imbalances and vacuums will be corrected, recalibrated or filled over time, it is a slow process of adjustment that creates friction and tension. China seems to have decided that the time has come for her to reorder the broader region. The United States administration under Trump is yet to clarify its approach to China and the region. The initial signs are of a more transactional and less geopolitical US approach, driven by what it can get out of China and the Asia–Pacific rather than by the effect of its policies on other states, friends or allies, or on regional order. It remains in doubt whether these will amount to a long-term approach that other states can base their policies upon. These processes will, therefore, take time to work themselves through to a new equilibrium.
In the meantime, disequilibrium is liable to: ignite flash-points like the Korean Peninsula; invite overreach by one power or another in territorial and maritime disputes like the South China Sea, the East China Sea, the India–China boundary; or create space for insurgents, extremists and terrorists to exploit fragile societies and states like Afghanistan, Pakistan, Myanmar and southern Philippines. Whether they admit it or not, states in the Asia–Pacific today face unparalleled uncertainty. They are responding by tightening internal controls and building up their own defences, in what amounts to the world’s greatest arms race, seeking partners who share their security concerns, and hedging their relationships with great powers like China and the US.
The commons in the Asia–Pacific are now increasingly contested, whether on the high seas, or in cyber and outer space. Since the commons are increasingly critical to the prosperity and security of the region, and for India, this poses a real problem for all the countries of the region. The traditional regional security architecture, of a hub-and-spokes arrangement centred on the US, or even a new G-2 of the US and China, is unable and unlikely to be able to address these issues. The Asia–Pacific is a crowded geopolitical space with several established, re-emerging and rising powers jostling in close proximity, all of whom have to be part of a solution, if that solution is to be lasting.
Secondly, domestic developments in many large countries have heightened the uncertainty and complexity created by the regional imbalance of power.
Since the 2008 financial crisis there has been a rise of authoritarian centralizers to power in several large countries, including China, Japan, India, Russia, Turkey, the UK and the US. They base their legitimacy on a heightened appeal to nationalism or nativism. In a slowing global economy, and in spite of the diminishing capacity of their governments to deliver domestic growth, they promise more and more and rely on nativist appeals (like ‘America first’ or ‘The Great Rejuvenation of China’). In southern Asia, this phenomenon takes local forms. India is no exception to the global trend; in Pakistan, the power, influence and role of the army has been considerably enhanced at the expense of civilian governments nominally in power.
One result of this phenomenon is to accentuate the fragmentation and regionalization of world politics. As the powers’ capacity to compromise and negotiate is lessened, relations between competitive powers become more fraught than in the past. Some of this dynamic is visible in India–Pakistan and India–China relations over the last year or so. Neither relationship is as smooth or predictable as it was a few years ago, and today pose new challenges to Indian security policy, separately and together.
The 2003 ceasefire along the LoC between India and Pakistan has broken down and political communication between the two states is minimal. As a consequence, the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) summit has been postponed and cooperation in SAARC has been driven down t
o subregional levels, which excludes Pakistan. Even if there were to be a warming of India–Pakistan relations, the underlying causes of tension—cross-border terrorism from Pakistan and its quest for ‘strategic parity’ with India, and strategic depth in Afghanistan—are rooted in Pakistan’s internal condition. Therefore, they are likely to repeatedly assert themselves, and any warming is likely to be temporary. The prospect of difficult India–Pakistan relations is a geopolitical fact that affects and will affect the geopolitical choices of India and other Asian countries.
The last few years have also seen a considerable strengthening of China’s ties with Pakistan, her only ally apart from North Korea. As China steps out into the region, and as China–US strategic contention strengthens, it has hinged the BRI on the China–Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC). Not all projects under the BRI seem viable economically, which suggests that they have been included for geopolitical or other reasons. CPEC, for instance, lacks economic justification, and its strategic portions like Gwadar Port that have been implemented first, give the Chinese navy, which is now building a base at Djibouti, access and presence in the northern Arabian Sea and the approaches to the Hormuz Strait. This changes India’s security calculus. The CPEC is to traverse some of the most lawless and insecure parts of the world. For India there is the added complication that it goes through the Indian territory under Pakistani occupation, and by making a long-term investment on that basis, seeks to solidify and legitimize that occupation. This is clearly unacceptable to the Indian government.