Translating policy into results !
R.C.Acharya
Narendra Modi is a man in a hurry ! Fired with a zeal to get India to move into a $ 5 trillion economy his intentions are honest and well meaning.
Aware of the numerous problems facing the nation he has come up with a plethora of initiatives to tackle them head on. Jan Dhan Yojana was one such initiative which has been a run away success with 41.58 crores new accounts.
For this he persuaded the banks to open accounts even with ‘zero’ balance, enabling the poorest to enjoy the Direct Benefit transfer scheme for subsidies built on the Aaadhar card platform for a fool proof system of customer verification. The 1.26 lac strong team of bank ‘Mitras’ delivering branchless banking services played a crucial role in scripting of this success story.
Ujjwal Yojna, was another initiative when more than five crore BPL (Below Poverty Line) households got cooking fuel connections for a nominal amount of Rs 1,600. Interetingly the connections were issued in the names of the woman of the household, which aimed to empower women by transferring the subsidy amount to their bank accounts and not be frittered away by menfolk.
The well meaning Swatch Bharat Abhiyan has had a limited success for lack of running water at every village for which he initiated the next scheme of providing taps. Not to be outdone the Finance ministry in particular has not missed an opportunity to come out with an announcement of some monetary scheme or other, mostly involving loosening of government’s purse strings.
However like all men of action, he is impatient to get things done at a much faster pace than ever before. Suffering from an overload of initiatives he had faced a wall of a bureaucracy whose ages old work culture is offering ‘passive resistance’ to any change. Resultantly with no other means to translate his policies into action the desired results have not been realised within a specific time frame.
Added to this is Modi’s penchant for bringing about a change by disrupting the existing scheme of things earning him the dubious moniker of ‘The great disruptor’. Some of these initiatives have been the brain waves of ‘babus’, with no clue of what makes a particular organization tick !
Learning from the fiasco of ‘demonetisation’ he has since
then moved a little cautiously leaving initiatives in
critical areas such as Defence and Foreign Affairs to
the experts who have been in the field, such as Jayshankar an
ex top bureaucrat as his Minister in MEA (Ministry of External
Affairs).
Public memory is short, and some of the things promised by Modi in various election rallies such as creating 2 crores jobs ever year and crediting Rs 15 lacs in every Indian citizen’s bank account by bringing back the black money illegally stashed away in Swiss banks has been long forgotten.
His choice of advisors and personnel to man key posts has unfortunately not yielded the desired results.
What is urgently needed now is for 1,000 Modis with impeccable credentials and an excellent track record of getting things done to man all crucial delivery points to ensure his policies get translated into results on the ground and not end up as mere statistics !
‘God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can,
and wisdom to know the difference.’
Called the The Serenity Prayer it was written by the American theologian Reinhold Neibhur who lived In the early twentieht century in USA. His prayer originally asked for courage first, and specifically for changing things that must be changed, not things that simply can be changed.
Thus the prayers was slightly modified to read ‘God, give me grace to accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed, Courage to change the things which should be changed, and the Wisdom to distinguish the one from the other’.
The operative part is ‘Wisdom’ which is always in short supply. Morover unless a person is a genius and an expert with proven record in his or her specific field of work very few can claim to have such a ‘wisdom’ to know the difference between what needs to be changed and what cannot be changed – or it will require too much effort and simply not worth it !
His latest push to get the ‘big’ business a foothold in the agro economy is perhaps one such intitiative needing a fresh look, and wisely dropped. Could perhaos be revived later when tempers have cooled down and its advantages fully understood and appreciated by the farmers.
R.C.Acharya,
former Member, Railway Board
