How to shrink Delhi

KIRAN KARNIK

ONE of the catchy slogans popularized by Prime Minister Narendra Modi was 'Minimum government, maximum governance’. It reflects an aim to provide effective, efficient, and extensive governance while optimizing the cost, control, and size of the government. This laudable goal is now global and is a continuation or fallout of the Thatcher-Reagan ideology, when the objective was to reduce the size of the bureaucracy.

In the US, this legacy is now being taken forward in a big way: newly-elected President Donald Trump has announced a goal of cutting two million government jobs, creating a Department Of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to help do this and to improve processes. DOGE is overseen by industry hotshot Elon Musk, well known for radical action (including drastic and sudden job lay-offs) in his business empire. Therefore, immediate steps are no surprise: within a few days of the new administration taking over, tens of thousands have been given marching orders and entire agencies — like USAID (United States Agency for International Development) — shut down.

In India, similar precipitate and knee-jerk steps would be ill-advised. However, changes in the governance structure and mechanisms are long overdue. First, the steady inflation in ministries must be reversed. Over time, a whole host of new ministries has come up or new ones been created by bifurcating existing ones. While a few have a common minister, the bureaucratic paraphernalia is separate for each and perpetually growing. It is time for a rationalization. Also, as the government role has diminished in some sectors, a ministry may be unnecessary.

Domains like power, telecom, and banking have a preponderance of companies, both private and public (with the former being dominant) and an independent regulator. Is a separate ministry/department required at all? A close scrutiny of each ministry is needed and its existence justified to an independent panel. In fact, it may be best to begin with a blank page and then list only the ones that are essential; the rest can be phased out.

Apart from a gargantuan bureaucracy, what the growth in ministries does is delay and fragment work. Many things are handled by more than one ministry, resulting in approvals and actions having to go through multiple ministries. Take skilling/training, an area which is receiving a lot of emphasis. This involves multiple ministries and departments, including Skills, MSME/Industry/Heavy Industry, HRD, Labour, and the domain ministry. In addition, Finance weighs in on everything, even after clearances and budget approvals, and some require a nod from Home. Foreign investment generally adds one more stop on the journey.  These are in addition to numerous approvals required at the state and local body levels.

Despite all the talk about ease of doing business and single-window clearances, the convoluted processes through multiple ministries add time, effort, and cost to all projects. In this situation, agility and global competitiveness are obviously hard hit. Apart from business ventures, individuals too suffer similar travails in their quest for permissions and approvals.  

The other dimension is the extent of centralization. Most visible and odd is its physical manifestation. Barring two, all Central ministries and departments are in Delhi. Even within Delhi, as many as possible are crowded into a few dozen buildings, almost all in central Delhi. A noteworthy point is that the only two that are not headquartered in Delhi (Space and Atomic Energy) are — by general reckoning — the most effective and efficient ones. This writer has argued that their distance from Delhi is one cause for their success! 

The replanning and changes envisaged (and now underway) in “Lutyens’ (central) Delhi” represented a grand opportunity to change the topography, (organization) structure, and physical form of government. My efforts to promote thinking on this, however, came to naught. Maybe this issue can be opened up again as preparation for a new and rejuvenated India, taking note of the important but reduced role of government, and the need for it to be agile and quick-acting.

Technology has opened up multiple new possibilities in governance and also in the extent of decentralization. The Covid lockdowns demonstrated the feasibility of work-from-anywhere (WFA), and the whole government machinery navigated this period successfully using video conferencing and communication links, with most employees in WFA mode. Clearly, government offices don’t have to be cheek-by-jowl to function efficiently. In fact, they now need to be closer to the “action” in their sector.

With the lockdown experience, a future restructuring of government functioning — keeping in mind the aphorism at the beginning — could be highly decentralized for efficiency, with the collateral benefit of reducing congestion in Delhi and possibly creating new growth centres. First, the number of ministries could be drastically reduced, with regulators or empowered commissions (as in Space and Atomic Energy) making the ministry redundant. Second, the ministries should be moved from Delhi to locations closer to the core of their sector. As examples, the Shipping Ministry could be headquartered in Gujarat, which has major ports, or Mumbai; Steel should be in Jamshedpur, Bhubaneswar or Kolkata; Agriculture in Punjab or Madhya Pradesh; Forests in Ranchi or Shillong; Technology/Electronics in Bengaluru, and similarly in other sectors (assuming these ministries are required at all). This will ensure closer interaction with industry, rather than with other bureaucrats, translating into quicker and better governance of the sector.

Delhi could be home only to a few key ministries, which too could be dispersed in different parts of the capital. The beautiful Central Vista, from the new War Memorial through India Gate, to the grand Rashtrapati Bhavan, could be flanked by parks, gardens, museums, art galleries, performance venues: centres of art and culture which are freely accessible public facilities. 

Such a restructuring would be both physical and of mindset. Instead of hundreds of crores of rupees’ expenditure on a reported Metro (train) connection between the government buildings now planned, India could be a pioneer in use of tech to link different agencies of government which are dispersed around the country: a major step in promoting a more decentralized governance that moves closer to the other two tiers (state and local bodies) and to citizens. Wouldn’t this exciting possibility be a great way to start the 2030s? 

Kiran Karnik is a public policy analyst and author. His most recent book is ‘Decisive Decade: India 2030, Gazelle or Hippo’