Dear Modi-ji,
It is one year since you assumed office. Your government can surely point to a general boost to the country's morale and self-confidence. But actual accomplishments remain modest. Against the scale and magnitude of what is required to catapult India into the ranks of the first powers within our lifetime, the effort is frustratingly half-hearted and the pace of change frightfully slow.
There are four portfolios that you should prioritise with extreme urgency. First, choose a tough law minister to chop, rationalise and simplify the plethora of laws surplus to requirements for running a modern economy. He should ask: Is this regulation really necessary? Excessive rules – a sad legacy of 60 years of licence raj mentality – add to the cost burdens and incentivise corruption. Please trash them.
Second, appoint a powerful minister to perform radical surgery on the bureaucracy. Business executives rate India's bureaucracy the most inefficient in Asia. Babus have likely urged caution on you, emphasising the importance of continuity in public policy. With respect, if the people wanted continuity, they would have voted the UPA back in with Rahul Gandhi as PM.
Instead they gave you a decisive majority – the first in 30 years – to break the continuity and chart a radically new course. Throw out the seniority principle in choosing departmental heads, give them five-year contracts to implement reforms, and change the entire structure of recruitment, training, promotions and mid-career upskilling.
Pity you did not choose a non-career diplomat as ambassador to Washington. Your diplomats are individually brilliant but their collective impact amounts to the whole being less than the sum of the parts. Quadruple the entry into the foreign service immediately and then be increasingly selective in performance-based promotions.
Choose proven performers from business, journalism, universities, the defence forces, sports and the arts to fill up one-quarter of your ambassadorships. Imagine the impact if a Shabana Azmi or a Rahul Dravid were your ambassadors to Washington and London: individuals with proven character traits of integrity, conviction, maturity, dignity and tact. Their access to all sectors of society in the host countries would be the envy of other ambassadors.
Third, your finance minister has been a disappointment: cautious and middling when the need of the hour is for bold and decisive leadership. The retrospective tax law was one of the worst cases of shooting oneself in the foot; it should have been thrown out in last year's budget. Instead the tentacles of tax terrorism threaten to spread to the middle class.
Break the protectionist mentality, switch from penalising imports (many help the cost competitiveness of Indian manufacturing) to facilitating exports, have faith in the Indian trader's world beating entrepreneurial skills, and force the bureaucrats to serve the people and business houses instead of bossing them around.
Limit the government to providing high quality yet affordable public goods of health, education, infrastructure and law and order. India has no future without world class education. As someone intimately familiar with the world of higher education, i am saddened to see the widening quality gap between India's and the world's secondary and tertiary educational standards.
This year's QS world university tables rank the world's top 50 universities subject-by-subject across 36 disciplines. Only one Indian institution makes it on the list: Delhi University is ranked 17th in the world in Development Studies. No mention of the supposedly world-class Indian institutes of management or technology: they are world famous only in India.
By way of comparison, Chinese institutions are listed 50 times. Among them, Peking University is listed in the top 50 in 22 subjects, and Tsinghua and Shanghai Jiao Tong University in seven disciplines. How exactly is India going to compete with China in the future?
A university degree is neither necessary nor sufficient for a good minister. But your present minister just does not inspire confidence in her vision and competence to oversee and overhaul India's education system. Success in this key enterprise will also make redundant the distorting and damaging programme of caste-based quotas that have divided Indian society and shackled the economy.
You have travelled extensively to foreign lands in the past year. The ambitious agenda outlined in your many speeches is admirable. I appreciate you are seeking desperately needed foreign investment to kick the sluggish Indian economy into high gear. They will not come because you travel abroad to court them with slogans and promises.
They will come if you deliver results by tending to the urgent domestic reform agenda so that the size of the Indian market grows dramatically, business is easy to do, price signals determine investment choices and healthy profits can be made. This means making it easier to hire and fire workers, expanding the base of skilled labour, increasing worker productivity, connecting suppliers to markets by building fast and reliable transportation corridors, eliminating the discretionary authority of bureaucrats and politicians that imposes arbitrariness and magnifies opportunities for them to extort money from businesses and ordinary people alike.
Prime Minister: Prove yourself different from the sclerotic Congress party. They wasted 60 years. Do not waste the remaining 48 of your 60 months.
Yours sincerely,
A well wisher.
