Need to privatise public administration stressed

DH News Service BANGALORE, March 6 2003

Public administration is in a shambles in India and privatisation, barring a few core sectors like defence, law and order, infrastructure and judiciary, is the need of the hour, said Founder Trustee of the Centre for Civil Society, Mr Sauvik Chakraverti, in his presentation on “New public management” at an interactive session organised by the Bangalore Agenda Task Force (BATF) in City today.

Mr Chakraverti, a former IPS officer-turned-journalist, who now heads the Centre for Civil Society, said privatisation is the only way ahead. The Centre, which propagates new ideas in public management, administration and governance, will open its South India Chapter in Mangalore during June where it will try and implement some ideas of new public management (NMP) on a pilot basis, he said.

A decentralised rule, greater empowerment of local communities and City municipalities, deregulation, allowing a system of market prices for services instead of collecting taxes (which have not given tax-payers any benefit), extending competition and choice to market players and customers, cleaning out all subsidies and viewing citizens as customers are some of the ways in which an economy like India could progress, he noted.

Among the problems he listed out in the present set-up were: the large number of over-paid and under-worked Class III and Class IV employees whose burden is borne by tax-payers, the centralised system in which the State takes the burden of everything from infrastructure to health, law and order to defence, partiality in public administration, lack of expertise whether in construction activity or traffic management, multiplicity of political authority and lack of task criticism of municipality by citizens.

Among other ideas for improving the system, he suggested the government issue vouchers to poor students for admission into private schools of their choice, which could be redeemed by the institution and food stamps to the poor, which could be exchanged at any retail outlet and redeemed by the retailer later.

Earlier, Mr Chakraverti traced the history of evolution of NPM from the days of the East India Company, which expanded its empire by finding new markets, to the days of liberal administration by those in the Indian Civil Services and the early 1970s when ‘stagflation’ (when monetary stagnation and increased inflation happen at the same time) took place.