Private infrastructure developers with highly leveraged balance sheets have no room for fresh equity investments, so there have been few bids for new highway projects using the public-private partnership or PPP model over the past two years. The ministry has, therefore, been keen on starting these projects through the more traditional model where the government simply pays a private firm for executing the project.
But the Planning Commission, which wielded enormous influence during the UPA reign, would have none of it, stating that bids must first be invited on PPP basis and alternatives should be considered only if the firms do not evince any interest in this model.
This approach, top officials told the new road transport and shipping minister Nitin Gadkari, would entail a further delay of six months before construction could begin.
When Prime Minister Narendra Modi learnt about this turf war, he asked Gadkari to immediately bring them to the Cabinet and cleared them to be implemented through public funding.
For the ministry officials, used to painfully slow policy reactions to the sector's growing worries under former prime minister Manmohan Singh (an exit policy to ease stressed road project developers lot was okayed after nearly two years of deliberations, and was still completely ineffective), such decisive action was unchartered territory.
"In the previous government, our ministry had many fathers, the Planning Commission, some consultant, someone who made agreements, someone else gave directions," lamented Gadkari about the state of drift in the road building sector in recent years that has accumulated non-performing assets of Rs 2.4 lakh crore by his reckoning.
Gadkari's ministry, which has held hectic parleys since he took charge with bankers, developers and state governments to resolve problems of many of the ongoing highway projects worth Rs 1.9 lakh crore that were held up, is a good barometer of the energy infused into governance by the new regime.
Seeking to deliver on its minimum government, maximum governance promise, the NDA government has not only scrapped the instruments that UPA ended up deferring decisions with — groups of ministers, empowered and otherwise — but also done away with a handful of cabinet committees that rarely met to discuss issues such as prices, the World Trade Organisation, natural calamities and the Unique Identification Authority of India or UIDAI.
While the PM has cleaned up the multiple red tape levels at the top — redirecting policy traffic straight to the Cabinet instead of secretarial or ministerial panels that yielded few outcomes under the UPA — Cabinet secretary Ajit Seth has separately urged all ministries to restrict approval processes to no more than four layers.
"What happened in the UPA's decade-long rule — a dozen cabinet committees and over 100 groups of ministers to take decisions — was unprecedented," said former Cabinet secretary Naresh Chandra.
"From Jawaharlal Nehru's time, there were just four or five cabinet committees dealing with security, economic affairs, political affairs and routine things like appointments and accommodation," added Chandra, who was the cabinet secretary the last time a state chief minister ascended to the country's top job in 1991, when former Andhra Pradesh chief minister PV Narasimha Rao became the prime minister.
More committees spell inordinate delays, according to Gadkari. "The more the committees, the more the delays, the more the problems," the minister said."If everyone has to come together to work, it often means no one will work."
In a statement on the eve of taking charge on May 26, Modi had said he was eventually "aiming at smart governance where the top layers of government will be downsized and there would be expansion at grassroots level" and he would try to build convergence in ministries' work by using a cluster approach in the ministerial council.
So while fewer layers have smoothed and expedited decisions on the one hand, Modi has pre-empted the inter-ministerial sniping that often dogged the UPA and made consensus elusive, by giving ministers joint charge of portfolios prone to sparring.
That Jaitley handles finance, defence and corporate affairs in tandem with junior minister Nirmala Sitharaman, who is entrusted with commerce and industry while Piyush Goyal is in charge of coal and power, has reduced the friction between these departments that was a permanent feature under the UPA.
"Structures are important and this council of ministers should work with greater cohesion and speed for effective governance," said Chandra, whose views are backed by serving officials who believe this government should be far nimbler than its predecessor that had multiple power centres and ended up confusing and, in the end, paralysing the bureaucracy.
Officials consider Modi's personal meeting with all the secretaries on June 4, the first such interaction since 2006, as a cathartic event as the prime minister empathised with their inability to perform to their best potential in an environment of distrust and investigative witch-hunts.
Refraining from a major bureaucratic reshuffle in his first three months in power, Modi has sent another subtle message to officers that this government won't work like the ones in the past.
As for the vacancies that are arising over the next six months, the Prime Minister's Office is undertaking an extensive HR management exercise to ensure that the right persons are picked for the right jobs for the next three to five years.
Amid these efforts to mend India's distorted systems, including the steel frame of bureaucracy, the prime minsiter has made it clear that 'business as usual' will simply not be enough under his watch.
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