At the governing council meeting of NITI Aayog earlier this year, Prime Minister Narendra Modi called for district-level GDP estimates to shift economic measurement from top-down national aggregates to decentralised, grassroots assessments. Aggregates are neat headline numbers, but they often hide the messy details underneath. The core objective of measuring economic performance across individual districts seems to make visible regional disparities and lay the route for economic prosperity down to the last mile. The moot question is who should drive execution and how.
District administration has traditionally focused on managing law and order, collecting revenue, implementing welfare schemes, managing disasters and coordinating government departments. Although these functions remain essential, people’s economic aspirations have not been a focus. If, as Adam Smith observed, “the real problem of poverty is not a problem of distribution but of production,” then the administration as it is obtained today has nothing to do with this “real problem”. Consequently, some districts continue to drive large-scale outmigration in search of a livelihood without the district administration being held to account for this.
It is time the district administration’s focus shifts to economic development and prosperity-building through strategic planning, resource mobilisation and effective resource allocation, productivity enhancement, competitiveness, skill-building, employment generation and ensuring the security of life and property. This is wider than the wide remit already on the district plate, and it calls for an overhaul of how the district-level administration is organised. Indeed, this will have to be no less than a radical reengineering of the district organisational design, a shifting of priorities and a responsibility and accountability framework. The governing philosophy must be to create and manage the environment in which citizens can build prosperity in sync with local sensibilities, priorities and aspirations.
The transformation journey should begin with the nomenclature itself. The district administration should be renamed as the ‘District Economic Management’, and district collectors should become economic managers. The designation should clearly reflect what the office represents. The district head should be assisted by a council comprising department heads, local area representatives and citizens across the socio-politico spectrum to bring in diversity, democracy and local aspirations into the decision-making framework, stopping it from becoming a bureaucratic powerhouse and working instead as a dynamic force for growth.
The organisation redesign must carry multiple departments, the first of which should be planning, resource mobilisation and allocation. Imagined as a data-driven and technology-oriented approach to economic development, the department becomes the internal think tank that builds on suggestions from political representatives of the district, along with economists and social scientists, etc., to develop an economic transformation plan for the local area. Such a council must also take it upon itself to review the department’s quarterly report, which must include feedback from the society at large on the actual performance of all departments and ensure coordination.
The district must have a department of agriculture, animal husbandry and fisheries, another for business and industry to promote business and commerce and drive the growth of industries, including large, medium and small-scale industries. And for education, this department will build and strengthen education, training and skill-building. The work will involve reviewing the existing structure of institutions and their curriculum against the laid-down standards and outcomes, and, if inadequate, strengthening both, hard and soft infrastructure. In effect, Human Resources Management.
The district also will need focused areas for health, covering local area infrastructure of dispensaries and hospitals. Districts also need a dedicated infrastructure department, with two parts: one to build and maintain social infrastructure like sanitation, including cleanliness, water and housing. This is to build an environment of good living and efficacious civic management. The second part of the department will build, manage and maintain physical infrastructure like roads, railways and aviation.
A distributive justice department must manage and coordinate the section of all welfare schemes and ensure effective delivery and grievance redressal. With smaller tweaks, the law-and-order area headed by the district police chief will continue to be responsible for maintaining law and order and ensuring peace whereas the judiciary must be held accountable for speedy justice delivery, at least at the level of districts. “Justice delayed is denied,” as the saying goes.
This reengineering must ensure that the design does not fall prey to bureaucratese or become a maze that citizens must learn to ace, the trap government departments tend to become. The antidote to that is performance metrics – all performance should be judged by outcomes compared with expectations. A framework of responsibility and accountability will ensure that department heads and those below them are geared toward building the district’s economic prosperity. If they do not deliver, heads must roll quickly.
The re-engineered district administration should be a facilitator, coordinator, catalyst and problem solver. In effect, it must equip the district with entrepreneurial vision and execution.
The nation is well past the period when top-down development is seen as a viable way to drive sustainable growth. If India has to become developed in the true sense, and drive sustainable growth, then it must increasingly focus on the quality of the local economic ecosystem. In the words of Kautilya, in the ‘Arthashastra’, a flourishing state must possess “a productive economy, with a wide variety of commodities”. The “wide variety” is almost a call sign – it must alert us to the need for diversity, inclusivity, bottom-up solutions that work for ordinary people in districts far away from headquarters – all teeming with expectations, promise and the capacity to grow and become India’s engine of growth.
The Billion Press
(G N Bajpai is a former chairman of SEBI and LIC, an author and a noted columnist. Views are personal)
