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Business Commentary/ Mahesh Nair

Of politicians, professionals and portfolios

Kabindra Purkayashta, minister of state for telecommunications, sat smiling at the press in front of him. For almost half-an-hour journalists had tried in vain to know the nitty-gritty of the new Internet Service Provider's policy. Purkayashta's answers were befuddling.

"Minister, who will play the nodal role for obtaining the defence clearances for setting up a gateway"?

"I can assure you it will not take a long time," Purkayashta replied.

"No, minister we are not asking whether it will take a long time. Which are the departments who have to give a no objection certificate for setting up a gateway?"

"That's what I am saying," Purkayashta replied, "I can assure you it will not take a long time."

"Mr Minister if some of the basic telecom service providers like Reliance, RPG and the Tatas who have defaulted on the licence fee approach you, will you give them an ISP licence?" shot another journalist.

"I can assure you if a defaulter is a defaulter he will not be given any licence."

"So these major players will not be given a licence?"

"No," said Purkayashta. He then whispered to the bureaucrat sitting alongside, and grandly announced to the sniggering press, "But we may give them conditional licence!"

Purkayashta is a nice man. His claim to fame is that he is the first Bharatiya Janata Party member of Parliament to be elected from Assam, a distinction he achieved primarily by raking up the illegal immigrants issue. But the trouble with him is that he is a misfit in the telecommunications ministry. He does not have a clue about the massive technological changes that are taking place in the telecommunication sector.

Like Purkayashta, most of the 38 ministers in the Vajpayee government do not have a clue about their ministry. If you were to put each of them in a quizzing box for about five minutes and ask them questions regarding their ministry and their vision unaided by their bureaucracy, most of them would fail miserably. The handful who will pass include the likes of L K Advani, George Fernandes, P R Kumaramangalam, Yashwant Sinha, Maneka Gandhi, Ram Naik and Ram Jethmalani.

If you were to include Murli Manohar Joshi - his core competency seems to be introducing Sanskrit and controversies and not tweaking the wobbly University Grants Commission which fails to hold university exams for years -- you have almost 30 ministers in the Vajpayee Cabinet who are grossly incompetent.

And it is this bunch of inefficient executives who are to a large degree responsible for the sorry state of affairs and misgovernance today.

The reality is that running a ministry, and a government at large, is increasingly becoming a professional task, like running a company. Just as a chairman and his management team's job is to see that a company makes profits, its shareholders earn good dividends, and that its corporate image earns social goodwill, so also is the task of the prime minister and his Cabinet. If the chairman and his team members have no professional expertise, if they are not good at their job, what will happen? Would you accept a director of finance if he doesn't know how to read a balance sheet? Or a director of marketing if he did not the know the nitty-gritty of retailing? If you did, what would be the chances of the company doing a good job -- earning profits and dividends for its shareholders?

Why then should we have a communications minister who does not have the faintest clue of the telecom market? A petroleum minister who does not understand the consequences of ONGC having not discovered a single new oilfield for the past eight years? Or the industry minister who does not realise that by dereserving small scale industries, India could be one of the largest leather, toy and garment manufacturers in the world earning billions of dollars?

The argument is that ministers are politicians and that they do not have to know the details. They only take policy decisions. The indepth knowledge required for each sector is provided by the bureaucracy and other experts attached to the ministry.

But in practice ministers do not take policy decisions. These decisions are usually taken by bureaucrats. For example, the decision not to allow foreign equity in aviation has had the bureaucratic stamp of approval irrespective of which minister sat in the chair.

The decision to remove the administered price mechanism in petroleum products and gradually phase out subsidies (pay three times more for petrol and price kerosene and diesel dirt cheap) was a policy framed by the bureaucracy (Finance Secretary Vijay Kelkar headed the committee).

The decision to allow futures and options trading is based on the recommendation of experts and bureaucrats --Yashwant Sinha has no clue of what futures and options really mean or will achieve.

The trouble with ministers is that they have not been taking any decisions at all. If they had then we would have been through with public sector divestments. There would have been a new telecom policy and a new broadcasting policy. Expressways would have been built. Private and foreign players would have been allowed in insurance. An agricultural policy would have allowed corporate farming.

Who benefits from the reign of ignoramuses? Not us the people. If we did then we would not have had to wait for five months for onions to be imported.

The only people who benefit from having inefficient and ignorant ministers are the bureaucrats. These bureaucrats serve not only as the ears and eyes of the ministers but also their brains. The more ignorant a minister is, the more dependent he is on his bureaucrat. An indispensable bureaucrat is a powerful babu.

But there is a way out of this madness. Since the name of the game these days is reservation how about reserving a certain number of ministerial berths for professionals -- say 10 out of 38? Let parties support professionals during elections; those who cannot win elections (if a heavyweight party backs them they will) could be nominated through the Rajya Sabha.

The current lot of ministries which need a professional head include finance, communications, information & broadcasting, petroleum, tourism, road & surface transport, ports, railways, chemicals & fertilisers, coal, steel & mines, law & justice, health, commerce, industry, food & agriculture (see why we need to reserve more than 10 posts?).

Let the politicians keep home, defence, external affairs, labour, programme implementation, social welfare, education, environment, parliamentary affairs, etc.

Sounds silly, does it? Before you say it's stupid unworkable idea, take a look at the finance minister's post. Have we not seen a more professional approach to this department? Manmohan Singh is a good professional economist. P Chidambaram is a lawyer who has a very fine sense for business. Yashwant Sinha -- gulp! -- suffice it to say was a good bureaucrat!

If there's anybody who thinks professionals will have a more vested personal interest and cannot be trusted to run something as large, sovereign and important as ministries, gimme a break!

Mahesh Nair

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