UPA-2 also had a plan for downsizing government

NEW DELHI: Prime Minister Narendra Modi may have made the idea of downsizing government by having just 44 members in his union council of ministers, but the UPA-2 government had a concrete blueprint to do so as soon as it came to power.

The second Administrative Reforms Commission (ARC), headed by Veerappa Moily, had presented a report in May 2009 outlining a blueprint for reorganisation of ministries and recommending bringing down their number to 25 from 55 during the UPA-1 tenure.

Coalition politics, however, thwarted any attempt to go ahead with this initiative and the second Manmohan Singh government ended up with 70 ministers. The ARC report had asked for creating a ministry of transport, ministry of energy and ministry of local government by clubbing a number of ministries under these heads and based its recommendations on the study of the government structures followed in the USA and UK where the cabinet is no more than 15 and 25 members, respectively.

“The creation of a large number of ministries and departments, sometimes due to the compulsion of coalition politics, has led to illogical division of work and lack of an integrated approach even on closely related subjects,” the report had stated.

“It has been observed that the ministries or departments often carve out exclusive turfs and tend to work in isolated silos. This, at times, detracts from examination of issues from a wide national perspective and in an integrated manner,” it said, adding that the “proliferation” of ministries and departments had led to weak integration and coordination ministries