In less than two months from now, a new government will be in place at the Centre. The first task of the parliamentary leader of the party or the coalition that is invited by the President to form the new government will be to put together a new council of ministers in charge of different ministries and departments.
Those expecting reforms in the newly elected government's own functioning may be disappointed. For a fresh piece of legislation is in place that will allow the new government to have a council of ministers that is bigger in size even than the one that is currently in place. The Vajpayee government has 78 ministers. And the new government can have 79 ministers.
The new law allows that the size of the council of ministers should not be more than ten per cent of the legislature or Parliament. So, which prime minister will have the heart to deny himself the privilege of a large council of ministers when the law guarantees it?
And even if he has the heart, will he have the courage to annoy his coalition partners and party colleagues by not appointing the full quota of ministers that he is now legally empowered to do?
That does not augur well for administrative reforms within the government. Every finance minister since the reforms began in the early nineties has been talking about reducing the size of the government. But not much progress has been achieved by any of them on this front in the last thirteen years.
The total number of central government employees has continued to hover at around 3.5 million in the last several years. Quite a few committees have been set up to suggest ways to downsize the government. But the reports of these committees are gathering dust in government cupboards and nobody seems to be keen on implementing the recommendations to wind up some redundant departments.
Whatever little hope one could nurse about the government's resolve to downsize itself disappeared once the Vajpayee government stipulated that the central government can have the luxury of appointing a maximum of 79 ministers.
For, any attempt at downsizing can yield result only when the exercise starts at the top. It is, therefore, important to reduce the number of ministries if the government is serious about downsizing itself.
So, if the next prime minister wants to start his innings on the right note and send out the right signals, he should promptly and voluntarily impose a ceiling on the size of the council of ministers. This is not entirely impossible.
A new government with a new mandate can afford to take such tough steps. There are many departments which can be either abolished and merged into other ministries.
There is no need for him to set up another committee to examine which departments are dispensable. The new PM should pick up one of those reports (the Geethakrishnan report is the latest) and start implementing them.
There is yet another complicated issue in government administration that the next PM should try to resolve to speed up the decision-making process. The biggest problem the government faces today is one of implementation of schemes and projects.
The economy is doing well. The policies are on the right track and can certainly be speeded up. But where all the gains of a buoyant economy and the pursuit of right policies get neutralised is the inordinate delays in the implementation of projects.
Experts and analysts tracking the Indian economy point out that the big challenge lying ahead of the new government at the Centre is how to speed up the implementation of infrastructure projects. It is not enough to mobilise and channel the investments required to these infrastructure projects.
Equally, if not more, important is the need to get them implemented within a reasonable time. Airports have to be modernised. The railway network has to be strengthened by building new corridors between cities to facilitate movement of fast trains.
New power projects have to be set up to add to the existing capacity. New roads and road bridges have to be constructed to improve connectivity. Mass rapid transport systems have to be set up in at least all the eight metro cities which have a population of more than three million.
There is no dearth of viable projects in this country. The problem is that the government does not have an effective system to ensure that these are efficiently implemented without delays. It is time the government thought of making a shortlist of the most important and critical 50 infrastructure projects in the country and identify the chief executives who should implement them.
The government should go out of its way to ensure that these chief executives are given a free hand and bureaucracy or inefficiencies do not come in the way of the implementation of these projects.
Without such focused attention to projects implementation, it is likely that the nation will continue to suffer from infrastructure problems for many more decades. The next prime minister, who takes over in May, will do well to bring about at least these two changes in the way the government functions.