The ruling United Progressive Alliance has decided to try and develop a roadmap for cleaning up much of the functioning of India's administration. Administrative reform has been a recurrent theme in the Centre's agenda for governance, but so far that has fostered more academic debate than actionable plans. Now, after a slew of scandals that hit the UPA government in the past months, and the political fight-back that began at the Congress's
Burari meet, the government has announced an ambitious frame of reference for an empowered group of ministers: to examine the discretion available to ministries, to find ways of fast-tracking corruption prosecutions, and to make government procurement more transparent and accountable.
The clean-up is, in immediate terms, aimed at retrieving political space for the Congress-led UPA. But amidst a dreadful deadlock in Parliament and piercing scrutiny by the courts, it frames a larger crisis: the eroding credibility of the executive to address perceived wrongdoings in a transparent and accountable manner. Consider the 2G licensing issue. Here is something which is, above all, an executive decision: the formulation and management of policy that ensures the distribution of scarce public resources — the rights to use the telecom spectrum. Yet there is a general belief that there were irregularities in how the decision was made to distribute those resources. The Supreme Court is monitoring the investigation and has been trenchant in posing questions to the government. The Central legislature, meanwhile, is in a paralysing stand-off, with the opposition insisting on a joint parliamentary committee to probe the 2G spectrum allocation and the government firm that it is not required when the Public Accounts Committee will examine the Comptroller and Auditor General's report, as is its remit. The government is further under attack for the manner of appointment of the Central Vigilance Commissioner, with the SC already questioning his oversight of the 2G probe.
The UPA government has already lost one session of Parliament and precious time to its inability to manage the situation. The simple truth is that no government can effectively function when it has a sense of being under siege from the legislature. It is incumbent on the UPA to break this deadlock — by whatever mechanism that enables both government and opposition to move forward. Simply put, each of the three pillars of government relies on and supports the other. For a substantive and durable clean-up, the government needs to recover a working relationship with the opposition in Parliament. And given the stakes, it may have to make the first move.
