India still has vestiges of licence permit raj lurking in the bureaucracy, the executive branch of the state
Prime Minister Narendra Modi, fresh from his return from the United States which, under its new President is witnessing dramatic changes and whose future is still unpredictable, has announced that the government will set up a deregulation commission to “further reduce the role of the state in all spheres of governance and to promote ease of doing business”. It is a welcome decision that is fraught with inherent dangers unless taken up with a great degree of transparency and candour.
India still has vestiges of licence permit raj lurking in the bureaucracy, the executive branch of the state. As a democracy making baby steps after living under colonial rule for about two centuries, India was cautious in every action it took and every law it passed in the early years of Independence. The concern was not to do maximum good but to reduce the possibility of bad coming out of a government decision. Planning at the Central level was an essential part of governance given the diversities and dissimilarities in any two parts of the country would still be unimaginable. Licence permit raj had its own logic at that point of time.
This has changed. The institutions the nation nurtured over the decades came of age and can stand on their own, warts and all. Planned development has borne fruit, though in a limited fashion, but in such a way that parts of India that would have remained chained to ignorance and the attendant social evils for ages have garnered sufficient confidence to give life a chance. It has prepared societies to accept and own technology, that has come as a great leveller and disruptor.
Deregulation is the next logical step. The entrepreneurial spirit of the Indian citizen need not now be regulated as before, and the chances of them finding a level playing field are more than they used to be in the past. The bureaucrat need not sit in judgment on every application; instead, he could trust the citizen, observe him and intervene, firmly and legally, should there be a violation of the law.
The archaic laws that forced government officials to always keep citizens under the eye of suspicion have little relevance now; technology can help a determined babu keep a non-invasive regulatory oversight. This realisation started in the eighties when a techno-savvy Prime Minister started easing restrictions which was taken up in a systematic way by every government that followed. If Mr Modi wants to make this leap, he must be welcome to do so.
However, the Prime Minister could be proved wrong if he thinks “there should be less interference of the government in society”. Doing away with old world regulatory mechanism and making it easy for businesses to go ahead with their job is one thing but zero government intervention in the affairs of society is a totally different one. The very fact that India still “provides nutritional support to 80 crore people”, as the external affairs minister put it, calls for more governance, not less. It will be worthwhile to remember Mahatma Gandhi’s words, “recall the face of the poorest and the weakest man whom you may have seen”, while contemplating major changes.
