Giving further expression to his intent to speed up the process of administration, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has brought to an end the administrative device of Groups of Ministers and Empowered Groups of Ministers, a carryover from the Atal Behari Vajpayee era that bloomed to the fullness of its nullity and meaninglessness under Manmohan Singh.
This decision taken Saturday is meant to signal purpose and meaning in governance. Whether purposive due diligence will replace listlessness and meandering lethargy in the council of ministers is likely to depend in large measure on the clarity of decision-making that the Prime Minister and PMO bring to bear on the situation. There was a time when there were as many as 80 GoMs and a score or so EGoMs, and Pranab Mukherjee, the most experienced hand in the Cabinet before he was elected President, headed some 50 of them. Evidently, these high-sounding bodies were not high-minded at all as they largely became a sink for unresolved matters or issues that were meant to be deferred, not settled.
When the simplest issue defied solution (usually over coalition pulls and pressures), a GoM would materialise and sometimes an EGoM, with a view to fostering meaningful consultation between ministries. Typically, decision-making was a casualty. Apparently, some of these groups could not have a single meeting.
Now Mr Modi has scrapped the very institution of ministerial groups sitting down to find solutions to difficult problems, and asked his ministers to propose their own solutions to problems and to come to him in case of a bottleneck relating to another ministry which can’t be melted through inter-ministerial diplomacy. This is a reasonable idea. Indeed, this is how things were once. If Mr Modi’s party having a majority in Parliament in its own right can help take administration back to the era of common sense and a return to the authority of the Prime Minister in our Westminster-style system, the idea of governance will gain a fillip.
An indication of what is in the PM’s mind can be seen in the decision to formally list “all important policy matters” as being part of his “portfolio”. In the coalition era, ministers sometimes as good as defied the PM’s authority, and this was grievous to the system as the PM is meant to be the “archstone” of the Cabinet form of government. In the 2G spectrum case, the DMK minister in charge of telecom, A. Raja, found clever little ways to circumvent the PM, and Manmohan Singh found himself unable to tell him where he got off. This was due to the precariousness of numbers in the coalition arrangement. Mr Modi is better placed structurally. We hope he can deliver the goods.
