Survival lessons for Mr Sinha

With the FM constantly shuffling his babus, it’s not surprising he gets flak for all that’s wrong

EVER wondered why everyone’s constantly gunning for Finance Minister Yashwant Sinha whenever anything goes wrong with the economy, whether it’s the UTI problem, the cash-crunch at IDBI, or even the slowdown in the Indian economy? And while it’s fun to make cracks at Sinha’s saying certain things weren’t brought to his notice, it’s useful to keep in mind that even Manmohan Singh’s defence in the great Harshad Mehta scam of 1992 was that he was unaware of the goings on in the stock market. So why does everyone target Sinha when Singh got away unscathed? After all, even during the last major reshuffle, speculation was rife that Sinha would be shifted out of finance.

Well, one reason for Sinha being constantly targeted, of course, could be his regular shuffling around of his core team of bureaucrats. He’s had four finance secretaries already in his four years in office, and is believed to be looking for a fifth one. He’s had three advisors/consultants already, and is looking for a fourth. Naturally, the rest of the team such as the revenue/expenditure secretaries have also changed many times over. So, when Sinha’s constantly moving his bureaucrats around, he’s finally seen as the one responsible for everything that goes right, or wrong — after all, he’s the only common element in all the teams! That, by the way, is not altogether a bad thing because politicians are generally so slippery that they hardly ever get the flak for anything.

Now I’m no great supporter of either Finance Secretary Ajit Kumar or Revenue Secretary S. Narayan (these are everyone’s ‘favourites’ for those definitely being moved out in the impending bureaucratic shuffle), but if they’re seen as inefficient/obstructionist, can we just remove them quickly and get on with running the country? It is now over four months since we’ve been hearing about a big bureaucratic reshuffle. With all this uncertainty, it is a wonder the secretaries have done anything worthwhile at all.

Here is an example of what ‘authorship’, or ‘ownership’ does as far as bureaucrats are concerned. Again, this is no endorsement (or the opposite) of N.K. Singh, but one of the things he was pushing when he was in the finance ministry was the repeal of FERA, and replacing it with FEMA and the Money Laundering Bill. Well, FERA got repealed, FEMA got legislated, but the Money Laundering Bill didn’t, leaving a gaping big hole for criminals to escape from. Clearly if N.K. Singh was still in charge of this legislation, he would have been pushing for it, and forcing his political bosses to add their bit. It is not as if the others in his place, or in the political class, are not pushing the same thing, but the author of a move tends to push it just that much harder.

Similarly, Govindrajan who used to be Secretary Fund-Bank in the finance ministry was transferred to the Department of Company Affairs, and just when he began to get a hang of all the investigations into various companies for siphoning off of funds and other irregularities, he was transferred. There is now talk of him coming back to the finance ministry. Clearly, you can’t get ‘authorship’ if you’re there in a post for just a year, or even under that. Remember the Yes Minister adage ‘‘permanence is power, rotation is castration.’’

The reason for the constant shuffling around of secretaries, of course, is the political leadership’s refusal (and it’s not just Yashwant Sinha we’re talking about) to accept that the major reason for things not happening is, by and large, not the bureaucracy, it’s the politicians themselves. If there’s no progress in the pace at which privatisation of public sector units is taking place, why blame poor Pradip Baijal for this? After all, it is not his fault that the government developed cold feet over the sale of Maruti Udyog for the last one year after Shiv Sena supremo Bal Thackeray warned the government that half its stake in the firm had to be sold to Rahul Bajaj, and through a certain investment-banking firm. Or if, as he told the Economic Editors Conference on Friday, the government kept plans on selling off computer-services firm CMC for over two years.

The government is, after a lag of eight months, believed to be once again toying with the idea of shifting telecom secretary Shyamal Ghosh. At the time of the Gujarat earthquake, orders were signed transferring him to look after rehabilitation in the state. The ostensible reason for wanting Ghosh out is that he didn’t vigorously pursue the recovery of close to a thousand crore rupees from licence fee defaulters like the Rais and Mittals. Again, this is not to endorse Ghosh’s stay as telecom secretary, but surely the role of Ram Vilas Paswan and his deputy Tapan Sikdar played a very major role in the matter — Sikdar personally wrote notes on why Sunil Mittal need not pay anything in the Evergrowth case.

So let’s get on with the great bureaucratic reshuffle if we have to, but then can we get down to looking after the economy?

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