By Pradeep S Mehta
The Centre, States and local governments need to work in tandem for Make in India to be successful
Today, the Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, will confer with an eminent group of economists on the possible agenda for the brand new National Institution for Transforming India Aayog (Niti) Aayog. On January 16, at a recent global business summit the Prime Minister said that development has to become a people’s movement.
Indeed, this will be an imperative because trust has to be gained of the people at large, which can be reached by good and dispassionate civil society groups.
Therefore, some social activists could also have been invited to bring in their valuable experiences from the trenches.
Be that as it may, over time the Aayog will surely consult a wider set of stakeholders. Added to this, the governing council comprising of all chief ministers, too, will have its own say.
Thus, the Aayog may have to do some tight rope walking between aspirations and possibilities.
The government has already set in motion a large transformational agenda comprising Digital India, Make in India, Swachh Bharat and so on.
It also introduced laws to usher in faster reforms. Each of them can be a game changer in transforming India, but many structural issues are yet to be addressed.
Structural issues
Some of these have been brilliantly argued by Yashwant Sinha in one of his recent articles with the key message that we need to ‘make India’ through various social and economic reforms before we can ‘make in India’.
I too have been arguing about structural issues relating mainly to economic governance.
However, a vision too is needed. On January 8, in this column, I had argued that we can be a $10 trillion economy by 2030 if we address structural impediments.
The PM has doubled the aspiration to $20 trillion in his address at a global business summit. That is music to our ears.
The Make in India ‘lion’ is a good template to address the issues of inter-connectedness and policy coherence. We still work in silos and with a remarkable lack of accountability.
The PM has characterised it well that we hope to achieve salvation by visiting the four dhams , while a file has to traverse over 36 dhams and yet not achieve moksha and that babus ask what is in it for them to do something and if not, then why should s/he be bothered. Read More>>
The writer is the secretary general of CUTS International
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