Every leader is expected to articulate a personal vision. Every Prime Minister sets forth inspiring national goals. This is par for the course. That unforgettably ungainly phrase uttered by former US President George W. Bush in a moment of irritation, and now part of the lexicon of leadership, comes to mind as we get ready to listen to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Independence Day speech from the ramparts of the Red Fort. Can there be too much of the “vision thing”?
Mr Modi has been seeking suggestions from the public for his speech on August 15. Last year, in his first Independence Day speech as Prime Minister, Mr Modi splashed the Pradhan Mantri Jan Dhan Yojana, his big idea for financial inclusion and extending banking facilities to the unbanked.
Since no one knows for sure what the big idea is this time, everyone is allowed to speculate feverishly. If the Delhi grapevine is to be believed, the bets are on an announcement of a Universal Health Insurance Plan. A fondness for big ideas and big schemes is not necessarily a bad thing. But it is not enough. Mr Modi has been ceaselessly energetic in outlining his vision for the country. His government has launched many schemes, though some of them, like the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan, are not novel. But how many of these schemes are working? How many have made any significant change on the ground?
More than a year down the line, it is necessary to go beyond the vision statement and also start flagging the nuts and bolts of how the big ideas are best actualised. It is time for a reality check. Take Mr Modi’s recent remarks at a campaign rally in Gaya. With Bihar headed for Assembly elections later this year, the Prime Minister reminded his audience that there are only 25,000 engineering seats for 80 lakh students in the state. “In states which are smaller than Bihar, there are many more engineering seats. Who is to be blamed?” he asked, before promising more engineering colleges in Bihar if his party came to power.
Bihar will definitely be better off with more engineering colleges. But will opening such colleges be enough? What about the quality of the faculty? What about the curriculum? What about the English language skills required to understand engineering textbooks? One may think these would be automatic corollaries of starting an engineering college, but that has not happened with other schemes announced by the Prime Minister. So there is a need to ask these questions.
If Mr Modi had wished, he could have delved into the nuts and bolts of creating an engineering talent pool in Bihar. He could have spoken of the steps needed to achieve excellence in teaching and research, on how talented and accomplished faculty can be retained. For a man who prided himself on being called the chief executive when he was chief minister of Gujarat, Mr Modi is woefully short on details nowadays. And the devil lies in the details.
The big speech and the big idea could do with a supplement, a big dollop of plain speaking in public about the operational challenges, the bottlenecks and the mechanisms being put in place to surmount the obstacles. Consider one of his flagship programmes — Jan Dhan Yojana. The government tells us that as of July 15, more than 16.9 crore bank accounts have been opened under this scheme with a balance of Rs 20,288 crore. But these impressive figures do not tell us the full story. According to a news report a presentation made before the Prime Minister revealed that on any given day, of the 1.27 lakh “business correspondents” or representatives of banks tasked to provide basic banking services, i.e. opening bank accounts for people in remote areas of the country with the help of Aadhaar-enabled hand-held devices, only 12,000 are really active in the field.
Take another example — Swachh Bharat Abhiyan (SBA). The first step — making toilets a talking point, trying to push toilet construction — was admirable. Mr Modi picked up a campaign launched by the first National Democratic Alliance government and continued by the United Progressive Alliance. But he gave it a much-needed momentum when he relaunched it under a new name on October 2, 2014.
The SBA aims to ensure an open-defecation-free India by October 2, 2019, the 150th birth anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi. How close are we to achieving that target? Out of over 110 million rural households without toilets across India in 2012, the government has been able to assist 11 million to build toilets. That is 10 per cent, no mean feat. But the big issue is to make sure that these newly-built toilets are being used. Similar programmes in the past have led to toilets being built but left unused or used for other purposes because people did not see their value.
A June 2014 survey released by the Research Institute for Compassionate Economics in 13 districts of Bihar, Haryana, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh revealed that 40 per cent of rural households with a toilet had at least one person still defecating in the open.
Constructing a toilet is no guarantee that it will be used. It needs behavioural change. Such change is possible. There have been remarkable results in districts where collectors have taken the lead and have used a mix of strategies to increase toilet use. Pali and Bikaner in Rajasthan, Nadia in West Bengal, Angul in Orissa and Kurukshetra in Haryana, instantly come to mind. A Prime Minister is not an inspector who visits houses to check toilet usage, but he must ensure that at the district level there is an effort to raise awareness about hygiene, and that this is institutionalised. Else it’ll be a mission half accomplished.
Communication is at the heart of Mr Modi’s style of leadership. He has a taste for big schemes. But now he needs to speak not just in broad brush strokes about his big ideas, but also talk to us on the issues on the ground — the challenges, the gaps, the problems, the lessons learnt, the successes as well as the failures. We need a frank conversation on where we are headed and the nitty-gritty of what needs to be done. With Parliament log-jammed, the Independence Day is a good time for some plain speaking. It could well turn out to be a powerful political weapon, apart from advancing that “vision thing”.
The writer focuses on development issues in India and emerging economies.
She can be reached at patralekha.chatterjee@gmail.com
