Governance of India

Prof Dr M Azizur Rahman :
The government objective is to follow and implement the policy guideline of the electoral body. The electoral body includes the elected minister and the lawmaker called the member of the parliament. The aims and objectives of the government are to strengthen the economic and social performance of the country. Every country is embodied with tradition, culture and the institution along the line of which the government tries to exercise its authority. This tradition defines how the government is selected or replaced. It also effectively formulates and implements the sound government policy guide and provides the public services. Good governance, human rights and minimising corruption are important for the sake of themselves all of which will provide the foundation for the faster economic growth and development.
Indo-Pak-Bangladesh subcontinent owes their system of governance from the British ruler. British left this South Asian regime including India leaving their system of governance unchanged with us. The new rulers in this region have been ruling the same way as it used to be in the British-Indian regime. What is new in it? Administrative system in India of today is the same as those during the period of British India. Only the new thing stated as the present administration of brown people as against those of the white in British regime. Or nothing new in it except the election became the proof and symbol of the Indian democracy. As is presently done in the Indo-Pak-Bangladesh sub-continent, bureaucrats perform the governmental administration sometimes by themselves and sometimes by colluding with the businessmen, military, polices or the other class of oligarchy in their joint or independent effort to implement the government policy guide. In case of collusion, bureaucrats do not do it free of interest. To implement the policy-guide and to perform the government administration, they collude with the one or more than one of societal oligarchy. In each case, they share their interest for their own gain. Higher is their gain, higher is the corruption or higher is the social loss, for which the common people have been suffering a lot since the independence from British. We really do not know how to resolve. We are, however, going with the existing negative culture of administrative problems with administrative corruption.
World Wide Governance Indicator (WGI) under the World Bank provides a comprehensive picture of the good governance or the quality of governance in individual country. The indicator provided by the WGI reflects a very good overview of the country’s political stability, quality of governance and the rule of law. Some organizations are making use of this overview by WGI. Financial institutions such as Goldman Sachs use these as a guiding tool for them in their investment decision on the developing countries. The country like USA and Netherlands decide aid to developing countries depending on the picture provided by the WGI indicator. A lot of NGOs including some risk rating agencies also use the WGI indicator. However, the World Bank itself does not use the WGI indicator to allocate fund development. According to a recent research, the industrial countries with a lot of corruption also have higher budget deficit. According to the evidence, we are suggested that the quality of governance has a major impact on a country’s development.
According to Worldwide Governance Indicator (WGI), countries usually evaluated with respect to six dimensions of good governance.
Voice and accountability – The extent to which the general public is able to participate in selecting the government, degrees of freedom of expression and association, and the extent of media freedom.
Political stability and absence of violence – likelihood that the government will be destabilized or overthrown by unconstitutional or violent means, including political violence or terrorism.
Government effectiveness – the quality of public services, the quality of the civil service and the degree of its independence from political pressures, the quality of policy formulation and implementation, and the credibility of the government’s commitment to such policies.
Regulatory quality – ability of the government to formulate and implement sound policies and regulations that permits and promotes private sector development.
Rule of law – the extent to which people have confidence in and abide by the rules of society, and in particular the quality of contract enforcement, the police, and the courts, as well as the likelihood of crime and violence.
Control of corruption – the extent to which public power is exercised for private gain, including both petty and grand forms of corruption, as well as “capture” of the state by elites and private interests.
The aggregate indicators combine the views of a large number of enterprise, citizen and expert survey respondents in industrial and developing countries. The data comes from a diverse variety of survey institutes, think tanks, NGOs, and international organizations. The WGI covers 213 countries and territories. The Nordic countries along with New Zealand have been the perennial chart-toppers in the WGI, but rich countries are by no means always better governed than emerging or developing economics. In fact, over 30 developing and emerging economics, including Slovenia, Chile, Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Rwanda and Costa Rica have higher governance scores than industrialized countries such as Italy (ranked 87 in Corruption Control) or Greece (ranked82). (See:http:// info.worldbank.org/ governance/wgi/ index.aspx# country Reports)
In terms of WGI, India ranked at about 46th percentile in 2009, implying that more than half of the 210 countries studied score better on governance. India is particularly weak on political stability and regularity quality. If the control of corruption indicator is compared for top ten economics of the world, India gets third rank from the bottom-only better than Russia and China. Therefore, India has a long way to go in improving its system of governance to inspire confidence not only its own people but also in the global community. With reference to www.wakeupcall.org, growth in terms of GDP in India alone is neither sufficient to provide a better quality of life to majority of its citizens nor for eradicating poverty – government recognized that 407 million or 34 per cent Indians live below the latest defined poverty line. Needless to say this number is grossly underestimated- other measures such as the multi-dimensional poverty index put this number at 665 million or 55 per cent people.
Perhaps the most basic issue facing the Indian democracy is reflected by the first indicator – voice and accountability. Freedom of expression and media freedom is pretty good, but Indian democracy is certainly not very participatory. There is a wide separation between the ruling political class and the masses they claim to represent. In collusion with the highly callous bureaucracy, they have mastered the art of evading accountability. Highly opaque political financing leaves them defending interests of the rich and the powerful who provide money and power at the time of election. Therefore, on paper legislations are created supposedly for the people, but careful reading between the lines and the manner of implementation gives a lot of manoeuvring space to the rich and the powerful at the cost of the common people.
In the light of the reforms that India undertook since the last decade (2010), it was considered the rate of growth from 6 to 8 per cent as the new rate of growth of the economy. Compared to many other developing countries, the rate of growth in India has been falling behind due to a number of structural lacking. India is too large and is of heterogeneous characteristics. India is, however, needed or needs to grow at 10 to 14 per cent per year to meet the demand for well-being and aspiration of its large number of people of 120 core (1.2 billion). The goal of higher rate of economic growth and development, well-being and national welfare, income distribution and poverty alleviation as well as the overall development can be achieved with and only with good governance and their effective administration. The expenditure on governance in India is incurred by the 790 politician at the centre and 4120 in the 35 states and union territories. About the 18.7 million employees of the central and state government use about Rs 2200 crore per day or Rs 7,60,000 crore per year both on capital and revenue account. About 1.87 per cent or less than 2% Indians govern the 109 crore people or 1090 million people. These come to about $147 billion or 25% of India’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) (See: http://www.wakeupcall.org). Are Indian citizen getting their money worth? If you ask any Indian he or she will say the cost of governance in India is much more than what they can expect. More of these budgets have been going waste instead of doing good things for Indians. Problems remain with weak law and order and judiciary system and the lack of accountability. The study of www.lokstta.org indicates that the people of India desire and deserve much better governance and administration. It also means that Indians are not getting good governance in proportion to their public expenditure on it. It also means that corruption in India may be found substantial.
It is generally assumed that India is a large country with a large government. Big country and big government mean that economy is full of loss and inefficiency. More things belong to the government and less is with the private sector. India is a big country of big government. Incentives in private sector are relatively low. The India is simply a country of low productivity. More with government and less with private sector means a real lacking of ownership, which in turn means an environment of full corruption that may be a good reason for more budget and less than good governance or the less is the achievement in the name of good governance.
In the world of globalisation and the competitive environment, Indians have to change their mindset. People of India will take a much large interest for their own country by participating in the governance of India. Good governance must be considered as the key requisite for the second-generation reforms in India. We can see or we would like to see an upward movement of the GDP growth rate with good governance and the effective administration. The politicians and bureaucrats and their related institutions all are primarily responsible to provide the country with good governance and better administration. Good governance and effective administration are their primary and the only duty. The key objectives of the elected politician in power or the member in the parliament and the appointed employees with the central and state government will mainly furnish the following two things: (1) to administer and govern and (2) to serve and benefit the citizens and the country of India in the best possible ways and means. About the advantages of the good governance and effective administration and how it will influence the economy, a continuous and day-to-day advice is required from a number of people and social institutions. These are the members of the major political parties, think tanks and leaders in govt., teaching, media, business and the youth about the advantage, effectiveness and the effective administration. These people and the several institutions will know it very well what they would like to have from the govt. are its good governance and effective administration. Such a productive or conducive cooperation between the community and the government can be effectively able to influence the economy. The purpose of a government is to make it easy for the people to do good if it is really good. The government will make it difficult for the people to do what is not really good.
Good governance is not something to do for the own consumption of the government. Government will do it good for the benefit of the general mass. It may be mentioned that rivers do not drink their water themselves, nor do trees eat their fruit, nor do the clouds eat the grains reared by them. Government will provide the good governance for the sake of comfort of the people and in their day-to-day life and living. Once again, government does not consume the fruits of their own efforts. They are paid for doing the good things for the others, as if, the wealth of noble is used solely for the benefit of the other. Any government including those of India must understand that they are paid for the benefit for Indians. According to Plato “Nation first and then the individual”. Nation is a priority, which comes first, and the particular individual comes latter.