Manmohan Singh’s right-hand man, Pulok Chatterji had warned UPA about the poor implementation of projects

NEW DELHI: It was a grim warning on what was going wrong for UPA — a government working in silos, failing in implementation of its policies and with major worries in all sectors.

And it came from none less than the country’s then most powerful bureaucrat and Manmohan Singh’s right-hand man, Pulok Chatterji.

In a speech made at a closeddoor conference to top bureaucrats on April 21 last year — which has been made public now —Chatterji said the government had done reasonably well in the policy realm but there were serious shortcomings in implementation and delivery.

“Even good policies have not always had the desired impact due to problems in implementation and in delivery.

One critical lacuna has been the unsatisfactory levels of stakeholder participation and oversight at the cutting edge levels,” Chatterji had said in his valedictory address on Civil Services Day to the country’s top Babus.

Chatterji, then principal secretary to the Prime Minister, was all powerful in the previous regime and this would count as a rare bare-all critique of the government he was working for.

“We continue to have major worries in regard to availability of quality education and healthcare facilities, nutrition, housing, drinking water, sanitation and so on. World development indicators suggest only 16 countries outside Africa had a lower per capita gross national income than India in year 2010,” Chatterji said.
He also admitted the government had “still not been able” to fully empower the grass root-level elected representatives in panchayats and local bodies.

“There is a need for speedier implementation of many recommendations of the Administrative Reforms Commission, which gave its reports several years ago and on which we have been somewhat slow to move,” he said.

One of the ARC recommendations was to merge various government ministries for a leaner government. Modi has already stressed on electronic mode for delivering government services and information.

Chatterji’s speech had then stressed on the same aspect. “The Central government’s mission mode projects are progressing but not fast enough. Many states have taken pioneering steps on their own. We have come a long way from where we were 10 years ago but much more can be done in the country that has supplied software applications to the rest of the world,” Chatterji told bureaucrats.

Then, without naming Gujarat, Chatterji also pointed out that there were “excellent examples of good governance” that exist in our own country. “We do not always need to look elsewhere. I think it is necessary to decipher the DNA of these good governance practices and try to adapt and replicate them elsewhere. This is in fact easier than innovation itself because as a tribe civil servants tend to look for precedence. The wheel always need not be re-invented,” Chatterji had said in his address.

The former top bureaucrat also admitted that government departments in UPA were working in silos. “A lesson we can learn from corporate governance and from elsewhere is team work. I just heard some of you speaking of different organisations and departments working in silos. It is true. Problems and issues are often seen from a narrow perspective of a particular organisation or department or branch. In today’s complex and inter- dependent world, a solution that is good from a narrow perspective may not always be good or best from a larger and national perspective,” Chatterji said.

He also had a word of advice for his peers. “Let us learn the art of saying ‘yes’. Whenever we see a good idea, a good proposal, an innovative suggestion, we must evolve the intellectual honesty to recognise it and spawn the courage to say yes, he said.