WHAT CHANDRABABU NAIDU IS ABOUT
Chandrababu Naidu is India’s most famous chief
minister – at home and abroad – and the most well regarded. He has worked long
hours and travelled far and wide for the sake of Andhra Pradesh. It must be a
matter of some frustration for him that despite his hard work, Andhra Pradesh
is not much more prosperous, nor the dream destination of global – or Indian –
investors. Should he be more patient? Or should he do something different? To
help us answer this question, Sevanti Ninan has ghost-written a book by him
which tells us cogently what he thinks and what he has tried to do (Plain Speaking, Viking). Let me say
right at the outset that I admire Naidu and would be delighted to see him
succeed. In the rest of the article, I shall eschew compliments and stick to
what I think are the harder issues.
What struck me was how ideal this chief minister is. What
are his priorities? First, Human Resource Development. Next, improving the
environment. Third, power reform. Fourth, poverty reduction. Fifth, law and
order. Finally, long-term growth. Can anyone fault this? Wolfensohn would fall
in love with Naidu. The rest of us would doze off. In his own (or Ninan’s)
words, Naidu comes on as too perfect. Is there something he passionately cares
about? Is he impatient with at least some of the do-gooders’ shibboleths? Has
he some strategy – would he do some easy and high-return things first, harder
things next? Compare him with Lee Kuan Yew, Reagan, Mahathir, Adenauer –
leaders who transformed their countries – and you will see the difference. They
were men with a mission, lopsided characters who cared about just a few things,
were opinionated, stuck to a narrow agenda and pushed it through. Being so well
rounded must be exhausting for the Chief Minister, and perhaps not such an
efficient use of his energies.
Second, who are his troops? Reading this book, one would
get the impression that Andhra had no civil service. Consider some of the best
performers in the post-war world – Japan, Korea, Thailand – it would be
difficult to recall a leader who transformed them. Their transformation was
managed by their civil servants. It is true, Naidu has done much to root out
corruption from his civil service and to make it more goal-oriented. But what
is his vision of the civil service? How will he create one which will carry one
the good work when he falters or leaves? The art of leadership lies in
delegation; and all we know about the Chief Minister – his 18-hour days, his
use of e-mail, his phone-in programmes – suggests that he is not good enough at
delegation.
Third, what is his political gameplan? His party, his
MLAs, his cadres are as invisible in this book as his bureaucrats. He does
mention the training courses he has made them take. But politicians are not
school kids. In this country, they are petty businessmen. They are people who
are too poor or incompetent to succeed in business, so they use their gift of
the gab and people-skills to get into representative bodies and make money. Even
an otherwise clean chief minister like Digvijay Singh recognizes this and makes
space for his party men. There are few countries in the world – most of them in
Scandinavia and western Europe – where one finds politicians to be mostly
honest. There they are rich, otherwise provided for (for instance, a German
teacher who gets elected retains a lien on his job forever) or employed and
paid by their party. In Andhra, Naidu is competing with Indian-style parties;
how does he expect to feed his politicians, to keep up their morale, to give
them political space?
Fourth, what about money? Naidu has two chapters on state
finances which are best described as scholarly – good analysis leading to no
solution. He compares various figures for Andhra with those for other states.
He laments the centre’s hardheartedness. He bemoans the fallout of the Pay
Commission. He mentions the subsidies he has cut. He defends his pursuit of
loans from the World Bank. But tax reform? Increasing the elasticity of
revenue? Strengthening budgetary control? Changing expenditure priorities? He
did not think they merited a place in this book; and I suspect they do not have
much of a place in his mind. So at least it would seem from the virtually
invisible improvement in Andhra Pradesh’s finances over the past four years.
Finances will make or break Naidu’s experiment, and evidence is still to emerge
that he has got a handle on them. How about concentrating on fewer tax bases?
Reshaping taxes to make collections more secure and corruption more difficult?
Capping rather than reducing subsidies? Relating taxes to government services,
so that people are more prepared to pay? There is a certain lack of ideas in
this crucial areas.
So far I have talked about what I miss in Naidu’s book.
Let me now come to two of his passions that it is impossible to miss –
information technology, and foreign investment. Naidu describes with
justifiable pride how he has applied IT to government and thereby cut out
sleaze and delay. He has also built a supermodern complex in Hyderabad and used
it to attract software companies from all over the world. All this is just
right. But I, perhaps wrongly, suspect a fallacy that is common to the chief
minister of Andhra, the Prime Minister of India, and Pramod Mahajan. They all are
determined that Andhra and India should not miss on the IT revolution. For one
thing, the countries that will benefit most from IT are not those that produce
most of it, but those that consume most of it. It is far more important to find
economic uses of IT than to attract
IT firms. And in the future as in the past, people’s welfare will not depend so
much on how much IT they consume, but on what they eat, what houses they live
in, how they travel to work, and so on. There are more effective ways of making
a visible difference to the way the people of Andhra live: introduce
international standards of grading for its tobacco, rice and cotton, so that
they get a better price for these commodities; use ICRISAT to disseminate
agricultural technology into Andhra’s drylands; or use DTH to impart all
education.
Finally, the colour of the investor does not matter;
investment is investment, whether it comes from an American or a Punjabi. And
it is attracted, not by high-profile suitors, but by ground conditions – land,
power, water, government, cities. Gujarat got rich not so much on foreign
investment but by luring away industrialists from West Bengal; and all it had
to offer was hassle-free government. But managers do not like Gujarat because
they cannot drink there and their children cannot learn English. Andhra today
has a comparative advantage over Gujarat and Maharashtra in its quality of
government; it could industrialize much faster if it lured away their industry.
Maybe there are easier ways of achieving what the Chief Minister is trying to
do with so much high-profile exertion.
