Aakar Patel| Good Governance Gets Much Harder: Are Optics Enough To Satisfy Indians?

Governance itself is quite hard and good governance, meaning efficient and effective governance, is much harder. Optics is a poor substitute for outcomes, but when outcomes are hard to come by through governance, then optics can be relied upon rather than admitting failure.

When the airline business grinds to a halt and airports across the country are an angry mess, the solution is to circulate photographs of an airline CEO folding his hands in supplication before the minister. Problem solved. When dozens die in a fire in a structure that shouldn’t have existed in the first place, the solution is to bulldoze the remains of the structure. Of course, thousands of such structures remain.

Another satisfactory solution is renaming. In New India, MNREGA will now be called Pujya Bapu Rural Employment Guarantee Act and expanded. Ten years ago, a few months after taking office, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said in the Lok Sabha that MNREGA would be continued only because it would show how poorly Manmohan Singh’s government had performed: “My political instincts tell me that MGNREGA should not be discontinued,” he said, mocking the Opposition benches, “because it is a living memorial to your failures. After so many years in power, all you were able to deliver is for a poor man to dig ditches a few days a month”.

Mr Modi would instead let the scheme die naturally as his government would create better jobs and MNREGA would not be required. After the government had taken office, Nitin Gadkari indicated that MNREGA would be limited to less than one third of India’s districts and that wages would be lowered and delayed for beneficiaries to make the scheme unattractive.

The assumption was that job creation under Prime Minister Modi would make the scheme redundant. By December 2014, except for five states, all others had received significantly lower funds from the Union government in 2014, compared to 2013. As India’s economy began to weaken and unemployment rose, Mr Modi began to invest more and more in the scheme he had called a failure. In 2014-15, MNREGA got Rs 32,000 crores; in 2015-16, Rs 37,000 crores; in 2016-17, 48,000 crores; in 2017-18, Rs 55,000 crores; in 2018-19, Rs 61,000 crores; in 2019-20, Rs 71,000 crores and in 2020-21, Rs 111,000 crores. The memorial under Narendra Modi was almost three times the size it had been under Manmohan Singh.

Since then, a sleight of hand, including keeping the MNREGA budget opaque and denying states access to funding, has ensured that there is no transparency on demand. The renamed scheme now will solve all of this, no doubt.

That has been our history of good governance: Things that were difficult to do and required planning and implementation were first taken up and then abandoned. This was true even when the project was as hallowed as the Namami Gange, taken up in June 2014 immediately after the election victory. It was given an outlay of Rs 20,000 crores “to accomplish the twin objectives of effective abatement of pollution, conservation and rejuvenation of National River Ganga”. The Ganga required not so much cleaning — because it flowed continually into the sea — as ensuring that further pollutants did not enter it. This was a granular problem that had to do with hundreds of places where effluent was being discharged into the river. Once it was learned that cleaning up required substantial effort, enthusiasm for the project waned.

In February 2017, the National Green Tribunal observed that “not a single drop of river Ganga has been cleaned so far”, and that government efforts were “only wasting public money”. The next year, the 86-year-old environmentalist G.D. Agarwal, who had been on a fast unto death for 111 days, died, having given up even water. A professor at the Indian Institute of Technology in Kanpur who had served on the Central Pollution Control Board, Mr Agarwal had been demanding a law to protect the Ganga. A day before Mr Agarwal died, Nitin Gadkari (who was Union minister for water resources, river development and Ganga rejuvenation) said almost all of Mr Agarwal’s demands had been met.

Allocations to Namami Gange fell from Rs 2,500 crores in 2016-17 to Rs 2,300 crores in 2017-18 and then to Rs 687 crores in 2018-19. In 2019-20, about Rs 375 crores was spent. That year, the project was folded into a larger one now called Jal Shakti. When the lockdown in March 2020 led to the temporary shutting down of polluting units, the Narendra Modi government claimed that the Ganga had been cleaned. The government website for the “National Mission for Clean Ganga” lists the minutes of the meeting of the council running it. Just two meetings were held over 10 years, it seems, one on December 14, 2019 and the second on December 30, 2022.

After 10 years and a thick stream of publicity, is the Ganga clean? The Opposition says no. “Why has the Ganga river got dirtier despite spending Rs 20,000 crores: Congress asks PM Modi” is a headline from the Press Trust of India from May 14, 2024.

That is the problem of talking about good governance after being in office for over two terms. The record is before us, and continues to unfold daily. How many Indians are still convinced by optics? Most likely it is those people who want to be convinced that good governance abounds in New India.

The writer is the chair of Amnesty International India. Twitter: @aakar_patel