Pivatisation

A Sunday morning is one of the best times to put your mind to work at things which r not selfish. The idea of this blog actually triggered back on one the weekdays, but could only manage to reach here on a Sunday.

I could very well start this blog by “Googling” figures on how India is doing vis a vis Rest Of World in terms of poverty, health care, education, no. of female child foetus getting killed, blah blah blah….but then immediately the right side of the brain would come up with things like growing GDP, increase of mobile density, how well we managed recession and similar blah blah blah…And so today, I thought I will not talk about things that are already known.

What triggered this thought is the sight of men cleaning “man holes”, actually “dangerous man holes” containing toxic chemicals and waste, bare handed, with trousers rolled up to their thighs which makes the lower torso fully exposed to this hazardous waste and not to forget that they go completely inside and breathe “poison” which is not even suitable to exhale. Are we as a “state” (read country) so poor, that we cannot provide this people with suitable body suits and masks??? We are not.

So why don’t we do that?? The answer is we don’t care. So why don’t we care?? Because if that person dies doing that job, we have 15 or may be another 150 waiting in line to do the same job. Also because if that person dies, his family cannot sue the govt for putting his life to potential death risk; forget suing, they will have to spend rest of their lives outside govt offices waiting for the paltry sum of Rs 10,000 or 15,000 which is the “human life value” of the man hole cleaner.

So what should we do?? I came up with this idea...Can we privatise the govt?? I know it may sound ridiculous at the first thought but lemme give it a try...

Ok, so the first job is to create an organizational hierarchy. Instead of the president we will have the”Chairman” and the PM will be the “Group CEO”.

All cabinet ministers will be “Vertical Heads” for their separate verticals like Home Ministry, External Affairs, Rural development, Defence etc.

All chief ministers will be “CEO” for their own state. The ministers in his cabinet for difference portfolios will have a direct reporting into the CM with a dotted line to the Vertical Head, for e.g. the Finance Minister of Gujarat Mr. Vajubhai Vala ( I think, pl excuse me) will report into Mr. Narendra Modi with a dotted line reporting to Mr. Pranab Mukherjee)

Each state will be a cost centre and a revenue centre and funds will be allocated centrally basis performance only. Also free cash flows (net profit) every month will have to be transferred to the central account with P&L and balance sheet at the end of the month.

So and so forth...we will create an organizational hierarchy.

So, once the structure is in place let’s talk about the work.

Every CEO of the state will be completely responsible for all the affairs at his state. He will have his KRA (Key Responsibility Area) on which he will be reviewed every quarter by the group CEO. Some of them could be:

1) How secure do the people feel in the state (there will be an index called CSI – citizen satisfaction index which will have questions pertaining to all the things affecting him and scores will be taken from there)

2) % literacy vis a vis last quarter with sub topics like % female literacy, primary education, secondary education, no of schools built, no of teacher per school, etc

3) % people BPL & % of people getting 2 meals a day

4) % employment

5) % of deaths happening in the state with a pie chart of reasons and justification

6) Condition of public healthcare (can be measured by no of hospitals per thousand people, no of doctors per hospital, etc)

7) Incremental FDI brought to the state and the effect on employment

8) % increase in per capita income of its residents.

9) Accounting every rupee inflow and every rupee outflow

These are just some of them and the list can be revised and discussed upon.

In a similar way, the CM will conduct a review of its ministers to get a fair idea of what is happening.

At the end of the year there should be an appraisal system and the results will be made public.

All cabinet reshuffles will be done basis performance only.

Also, the P&L of the state and the centre should be published once in a month in all major newspapers so that the public can know of the workings of the state.

In a nutshell, unless and until we bring professionalism in running a state (read country), we will not be able to ably distribute the fruits of high growth rate that our country is achieving to the needy and unless and until the condition of the “bottom of the pyramid” improves we will not be able to celebrate this growth, our conscience will not allow us!!

Jai hind.