Delhi Diary/By A K B Krishnan
Let me begin this week’s Diary noting with two personal anecdotes to illustrate a point.
Anecdote No1. A couple of weeks ago I had the occasion to travel from Delhi to Kerala by the Rajdhani Express, touted one of India’s most prestigious trains. Its first stop after leaving Delhi’s Hazrat Nizamuddin station is Kota in Rajasthan, a straight run of five-and-a-half hours.
So, by the time the train got to Kota, the toilets need to be cleaned and the overhead water tanks have to be refilled. A member of the railway staff climbed atop the cars and went about dropping water hoses into respective tanks. Water was being pumped in at a fair clip. In a matter of a couple of minutes the tanks were full.
But the Rajdhani is a 17-18 car train and there was just one man to turn off the water once the tanks got filled. True to form the chap went about his job lackadaisically moving from car to car to turn the tap off. The result: the tanks overflowed wasting hundreds of litres of water.
The exercise was repeated at several stations because the train has long running spells between stations. The Rajdhani is only one of 14,300 trains that run in India every day of the week. There is nothing to suggest that staff elsewhere would show more alacrity or that there would be more staff to man these jobs. The wastage can only be imagined.
Anecdote No 2. My son, who works for the IT industry, also owns a small office space which he has leased to an IT firm. When the lease deed was being drafted, the question of Service Tax had to be addressed. For those uninitiated in Indian tax laws, this is a tax imposed on services provided in India. The service provider collects the tax and pays the same to the government. In most cases it is 12.36% of the sum involved. In the present case, my son is the service provider. (Almost any activity that has money changing hands is considered a service here).
His auditor told my son that he should first get a service tax number allotted. For this he has to provide copies of his Permanent Account Number (PAN), proof of his residence, copy of his bank statement into which the rent will accrue, address and PAN of his tenant, and sundry other documents, photographs, etc., all either self-attested or notarised. My son spent the better part of two days collating all these documents. The auditor told him that that was only half the work, the other half to be taken care of at his end, meaning standing in long queues and going from desk to desk at the service tax registrar’s office before finally submitting the application.
All this, mind you, is to make a payment to the government!
These are just one-off experiences by one individual. Imagine someone who has to face these or other more serious issues on a daily basis! And there are millions of instances like this happening everyday.
The first anecdote here has to do with conservation, environment and economy, the second economy pure and simple. The first has to be addressed by the railway ministry and the second by the finance ministry. And this is that week in the calendar when both these ministers will be the focus of the nation’s attention as they present their respective budgets in parliament.
Presentation of the two budgets is an annual ritual and if Finance Minister Arun Jaitley is to be believed it is just another day at the office because, according to him, governance is a 365-day process and no one day can be singled out to be more important than the rest.
Jaitley is also of the view that the government takes several important steps outside of budget day, so this one day is not when all governmental action is concentrated.
The finance minister can say all he wants to play down the importance of budget day but there is no running away from the fact that this budget week is perhaps going to be the most crucial seven days in India’s history as far as economy, and by extension politics, is concerned. And if he were to look for the one man responsible for events to come to such a pass, he won’t have to look far. For, Prime Minister Modi himself has sold Indians the dream that he is the man to unleash the real potential of this nation of 1.25bn and he was going to do it through that simplest and most elementary of catchphrases: “It’s the economy, stupid.” Fix the economy and the rest will fix itself.
So he talked of bullet trains, high-end rolling stock on European and Japanese models, a diamond quadrilateral of rail links (a takeoff from Vajpayee’s golden quadrilateral of roads) and freight corridors through which goods would move from one end of the country to the other in double-quick time and efficiency. Modi wanted to convert Indian Railways as the safest, cheapest and fastest surface transport. There is little evidence till date that any of the above is going to happen any time soon. If millions of gallons of water are wasted every day while filling overhead tanks, one can only imagine what other expensive things are wasted through sheer callousness and lack of planning. (Can’t they simply have an auto cut-off mechanism for these water hoses?)
Railway Minister Suresh Prabhu is due to present his budget tomorrow. Till date Indians have been brought up on a regular diet of a few extra trains here and there and some populist sops in fares and such. But surely the times have changed and Prabhu, one of the sharpest brains in the cabinet, must be aware. Anything short of a massive overhaul of structure and upgrading of services coupled with a meticulously programmed roadmap for the future will leave Indians unhappy.
Two days after Prabhu’s presentation it will be Jaitley’s turn to stand up and be counted. Jaitley, as much as Modi, has been promising “achche din” (good days). He had brushed aside criticism of not exploiting his party’s majority in parliament to push through bold/tough reforms in his maiden budget last year. He had talked about plucking the “low-hanging fruit” first before going in for plans that could find resistance.
Well, the opposition seems to be in no mood to give in despite the best efforts of Modi who has been keeping the company of people like Sharad Pawar, Mulayam Singh Yadav and Lalu Prasad lately in a bid to forge consensus. Many of the ordinances that the government had issued are being met with stiff opposition and it is the government that is now climbing down. No less a person than Deepak Parekh, HDFC’s respected chairman, is of the view that if big-bang reforms don’t come now, the government is going to lose whatever little fondness the people have for it. The coal blocks auction is a big positive, but the results on ground will take time to reflect.
India’s ranking in the worldwide “ease of doing business” scale has slipped to 142 in a list of 189 countries. In enforcing contracts it is even worse at 186, just beating Angola, Bangladesh and Timor-Leste. Modi and Jaitley are trying to improve this so as to attract vital foreign investments. They could perhaps start with the service tax department.
After Modi’s suit Kejriwal’s muffler?
During his high-profile visit to the US last year, Narendra Modi invited Indian-American businessmen to invest in India. He told them that as a Gujarati, business was in his blood.
But few would have imagined that Modi would take that business sense into a whole new level and auction off one of his own suits for a whopping Rs43mn. That may just be one clear drop in the murky and muddy waters of the Ganges which Modi wants to clean in the next four-plus years and for which the proceeds from the suit sale would be used but then little drops do make an ocean.
If his invitation to the heads of governments of the South Asian Association for Regional Co-operation (Saarc) countries for his inauguration took everyone by surprise, the auctioning off of the suit also set off oohs and ahs not just because the suit in question was in the news for all the wrong reasons, so to say, but also because of the ingenuity with which Modi turned a negative into a positive and brought in a tidy sum in the bargain.
Modi has now set a precedent that others could well follow in future. That leads us to the next question: If Modi can do it, can Arvind Kejriwal be far behind? The Aam Aadmi Party chief and Delhi’s popular chief minister is rumoured to be considering putting his celebrated muffler on the block. Any takers?
