NEW DELHI, Aug 4: At a time when the Government is talking about cutting bureaucratic red-tape, it should ideally be cutting down bureaucracy as well. But unfortunately, nobody is talking about this.

So while Finance Minister Chidambaram has carried on with the job of cutting government controls, little has been done in terms of cutting down the economic ministries and the numerous agencies they run. As Public Enterprises Selection Board chief N Vittal puts it, "We suffer from the Cheshire Cat syndrome - the cat may have disappeared, but the smile remains."

For instance, the office of the Controller of Iron and Steel was not closed down when severe shortages in steel production were overcome. The office whose job was to allocate steel evenly across the country, was converted into the office of the Development Commissioner of Iron and Steel. Now the Government is trying to justify its existence by giving it more work.According to a former bureaucrat, the Narasimha Rao Government alone created around 25 new posts of secretaries and departments - with the wage bill of even the smallest of the current 60 departments around Rs 2 crore, the implications for expenditure are obvious. Says P K Kaul, a former cabinet secretary who was involved in an aborted exercise to cut bureaucracy during Rajiv Gandhi's days, ``There are large areas where there is no need for Government intervention, where bureaucracy can easily be cut.''

That apart, with an increasing number of public sector units (PSUs) like the navratnas being promised autonomy, the justification for some ministries themselves is vanishing. Take the ministry of steel, for example. With a staff strength of 628, its primary task was to decide annual targets for steel production, to chart the course for PSUs in its charge. Now if SAIL is given genuine autonomy, where is the need for the ministry?

A similar argument holds for the telecom ministry. With the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India looking after its monitoring and regulatory functions, surely its numbers need to be truncated? More so, when disinvestment on the cards for its PSUs - MTNL, ITI, HTL, VSNL - and DoT is about to be corporatised.

Lets take the Industry Ministry where the impact of reforms is most palpable. In the last few years, several industries have been delicensed. As a result various registration schemes like exempted industries registration scheme; registration with directorate general of technical development and other technical authorities have been abolished. The locational policy of the Ministry has also been amended so that companies need not take permissions to set up new units. As result of all this, the applications received and registered has been falling. From 777 in 1995 to 531 in 1996.Two of its departments department of public enterprises (DPE) and the department of heavy industry (DHI) are devoted to running the public sector enterprises.

As the disinvestment process progresses, the work of the Departments will reduce. The 49 PSUs under DHI for instance are run by one secretary and three joint secretaries and a staff of about 120. Similarly, there is one secretary in the DPE, two joint secretaries and about 130 other staff who plot and plan the future of public sector enterprises.

Copyright © 1997 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.